The man is right.

Kevin, a post of Professor Karl Rove's ruminations of politics is definitely on order. Especially his statement that American voters are not stupid, which matches in audacity with Hustler founde saying that Americans don't like porn or with Pamela Andersaon proclaiming that men don't like big boobs.

So (a) America should economically engage, rather than isolate, countries like Iran and North Korea,

Face it - nobody can stand up to the one-two punch of McDonald's and Disney. Nobody! Bwa ha ha!

Bob Wright is a good guy. In a sane world we'd call this boring and obvious, but in the Bush world just making sense is too rare.

So (a) America should economically engage, rather than isolate, countries like Iran and North Korea, and (b) more generally, economic engagement offers a path to peacefully fostering the free-market democracy that neocons are inclined to implant via invasion.

Kevin, this is a good reason why "progressive realism" is a failure. The Clinton Administration tried progressive realism and look what happened. Clinton engaged the North Koreans and they fired the Taepo-dong 2 missle. Clinton engaged the Iranians and now they're soon going to have nuclear missles. Clinton engaged Hezbollah by telling Israel to pull out of Lebanon and now Hezbollah's firing missles at Israel.

The problem with progressive realism is it assumes the enemy is rational and wants to be part of the civilized world. But they don't. The terrorists like Iran, North Korea, and Hezbollah are controlled by mad men. Hezbollah and Iran would be willing to be destroyed as long as Israel is destroyed. Progressive realism just puts a lid on the problems but they do not address the underlying root cause. It creates the appearance of calm and masks the underlying instability. What 9/11 showed was the anger and resentment underneath.

The current Bush foreign policy is the true realism because it lifts the lid on the instability and violence and allows America to address the root cause of terrorism. By liberating the Arab and Muslim world through freedom and democracy we can achieve a lasting peace and not the temporary peace of progressive liberalism.

Kevin,
A free-market economy is not going to promote democracy if by free you mean the neo-con version which basically means that a country's economic capital is free to be bought up by western fat-cats and exploited returning nothing to the society of that country. When they're paying employees in that country barely enough to ensure enough of them survive to provide a stable labor supply they are giving back less than nothing.

Al's a frriggin' idiot, as almost everyone here well knows. Every single example cited can be used as evidence of superior foreign policy, except where his hands were tied by Republican isolationists.

It can't be said too often, apparently: when Clinton went after Bin Laden, the Al crowd literally laughed at him for changing the subject from Monica Lewinsky, and he was derided for Kosovo. Bill's biggest failure was in Rwanda, on which the right-to-lifers were utterly mute. Bush baby campaigned on the no-nation-building platform. These people have the memory banks of retarded anteaters.

Unfortunately for them, the rest of us actually remember things that happened in our own lifetimes and don't have to check in with the current Pravda points to see how we should feel about them.

The one thing I'd say about this off the top of my head is that we don't really know what will make these people stop wanting to kill us. One theory is that if we show a lot of strength, they won't want to try (and conversely, if we don't show strength, they will be emboldened because their actions will seem not to have violent consequences).

Another theory is, if we are nice to the world and reach out to the countries that harbor terrorists and try to integrate them into the world and all that, then they'll eventually lose their hatred.

Hatred is a very volatile, unpredictable thing, and I don't see that we have strong evidence one way or another to say what works at combatting it.

What if it's both? (This would seem to make sense, in a sort of carrot/stick or good cop/bad cop way). I.e., what if we really need to both engage in merciless tit-for-tat and give a lot of aid to democracy/transparency/free speech/etc.?

The thinking being, with the contrast in your behavior you are telling them 1) defy me and get killed, 2) If you do the right stuff I'll give you aid and help you be good rather than bad. To send both messages at once would seem intuitively to be a pretty strong motivator towards getting on your good side and becoming good global citizens, not terrorists.

So that's intuitive, but is it actually right? Who knows? It's likely an empirical question, one which we are way too much in the stone ages to know the answer to yet. So intuition is all we got, and people have differing intuitions. Well, crap.

None of this means Robert Wright's wrong, just that all this is a little tough to tell. We're all entitled to our opinions, but I don't think the actual issues are very cut and dry. (I.e. principles are fine, but we should be willing to revise them as we go)

The best promoter of democracy isn't open unrestricted economic competition (might makes right) but a nearly flat income distribution. The greater the disparity the more authoritarian the government has to be to maintain civil order. The problem of terrorism is in part due to this problem extending beyond national borders.
The world's most peaceful societies are those in which the differences in wealth within the society span a single order of magnitude.

mk makes a pretty good case for the combined approach, but I think there is a flaw in the idea that it is "hatred" that puts us at risk of terrorism. I think terrorist leaders are largely motivated by a desire for power, which in turn, is why I think the strength response is more effective than the play nice response.

Wright is a well meaing fellow whose "progressive realism" is pretty much standard liberal stuff reworked to try to make it sound more profound and focused on terrorism. But it is hopelessly theoretical and long term, with virtually no factual support to believe it would actually work.

If you want to realize how weak Wright's thinking is, ponder this statement by him:

"Killing terrorists is nice when you can do it cleanly (i.e., when the value of killing them outweighs the blowback)."

Wright apparently believes the process of killing terrorists lends itself to a committee meeting where a facilitator can lay out on a flip chart the value of the kill and the weight of the "blowback" so the group can come to a consensus on whether it is a "clean" kill -- presumably with the anti-terrorist commandos waiting on hold while the committee convenes, debates, and reaches consensus. I know Wright is well meaning, but this statement by him helps to clearly demonstrate how liberals, even when they try to act tough, are not very credible or at least not very realistic.

brian, you're a parody, right?

I get extremely edgy when I read things like this: "Progressive realists (unlike neocons) believe that economic liberty strongly encourages political liberty." I put it to you that this sort of 'belief' is just about as problematic as some neocon beliefs in the broad swath of the world where democratic socialism is a powerful if not governing force. Living in such a place I venture to suggest that economic liberty, in that it is at least potentially corrosive of the most highly valued community institutions such as universal national healthcare, state food production and marketing boards and insurance schemes, public pension systems and humane employment standards, is not to be recommended as a panacea. Good government is much more important in my view and frankly I don't think Americans have much to teach the world in this respect.

Just another reactionary American idea system on the make? Seems a possibility. In any case, it won't fly in my world. Perhaps you could try fixing your part of the world first before taking the dog and pony show on the road.

So that's intuitive, but is it actually right? Who knows? It's likely an empirical question, one which we are way too much in the stone ages to know the answer to yet. So intuition is all we got, and people have differing intuitions. Well, crap.
Posted by: mk

we have more than intuition ... we have the experience of the past 40 yrs which tells us which actions on our part consistently, if not invariably, result in unfavorable unintended consequences.

deposition of an unworkable dictator with a compliant friendly "democracy" has been attempted by us before ... when exactly has it worked as the war criminals in charge told us it would?

Speaking as an Australian deeply skeptical of the value our alliance with the US, might I suggest that the most effective way to reduce the 'level of hatred' felt by the rest of the world towards the U.S might be to encourage democracy in the U.S. It seems to me and many of my friends that the US version of free market democracy is a sham that delivers neither free markets nor democracy to it's own people let alone the rest of the world.

Your country is hamstrung by endemic corruption at every level of government. Voting rights are restricted arbitrarily, elections are rigged. Your streets are full of potholes, your infrastructure is collapsing because your governments prefer the profits of big business to a just tax system. Not to mention the absence of healthcare, the influence of religion on the education system and the appalling ignorance of American people in general about the rest of the world.

Australians I know who have worked in America always complain about the effect of the unrelenting propaganda of patriotism in your schools, arenas and daily life on their children. It's this patriotism that makes this discussion possible and at the same time impossible.

Your country is politically hamstrung by the puerility of the political debate about big versus small government as if size of the budget is the only thing that matters and performance not at all. ( It's that macho thing i guess) This is fueled by the history of violence your country has displayed towards people preaching socialist and communist ideals, to the point where social democracy might mean a great deal in Germany or Australia or Thailand but it's a meaningless concept in your country.

If you want the rest of the world to stop hating you it's not a matter of picking winners amongst other countries, it's a matter of cleaning up your own nest.

> Progressive realists (unlike neocons) believe that economic liberty strongly encourages political liberty. So (a) America should economically engage, rather than isolate, countries like Iran and North Korea, and (b) more generally, economic engagement offers a path to peacefully fostering the free-market democracy that neocons are inclined to implant via invasion.

I'm a little unclear on how this is really suppose to work. How does one do this and avoid the implication that America rewards bad behavior with economic incentives? Who's to say that an emerging middle class in Iran or N. Korea would be any less anti-American? Would free elections in Iran really produce a liberal democracy, or would the Iranians just re-elect the mullas? As craigie points out, do we really think that opening McDonalds and showing The Little Mermaid to the Iranians will really solve our problems, even in the long term. In fact, some well-meaning liberals think that this might be part of the problem rather than the solution, see "Why Do People Hate America" by Z. Sardar and M. W. Davies

I'm also a little apprehensive about Wright's "global governance" line. Too many people will read that as "the UN is usurping sovereignty". Thats probably not the best way to get people in red states on board with an engagement policy.

I like your post!!

If only America would embrace socialism, and the incorruptible U.N. was running the world, everything would be wonderful, and everyone would love you.

Yawn

I agree with Mr. Wright that minimizing hatred of America is a key component of drying up support for terrorism.

With missiles flying over Haifa and Beirut it's easy to lose focus on the simple fact that human security is more than a tactic -- it's a way of life, or more accurately ways of life.

We need to learn and promote the conditions of peace, which is impossible to do when we are hunkered down behind jersey barriers and razor wire.

If only America would embrace socialism, and the incorruptible U.N. was running the world, everything would be wonderful, and everyone would love you.
Posted by: kofi

ignorance and snark aside, this is somewhat akin to saying that smaller countries don't deserve any representation, and that decisions affecting billions should be handled by the existing superpower(s).

I'm sure that isn't what you meant ... because to even suggest that it is somehow america's burden to decide things for the entire world, as opposed to improved worldwide representation, is moronic. ... and a little racist.

Further, America's security will best be served if all nations are by then free-market democracies, because (a) such nations have considerable "natural" transparency (regarding biotech facilities with munitions potential, for example) and (b) the entanglement of such nations in the global economy strengthens their incentive to preserve world order and their inclination toward international cooperation — including, crucially, highly intrusive arms control.

One quibble, from a Far Eastie. Two countries which are definitely not going to present any threat of anti-American terrorist activity are China and Vietnam. Neither society is "transparent", but both have extremely thorough systems of political control and powerful central governments which make virtually any autonomous political activity, let alone armed political activity, impossible. (Another country which presents no threat of terrorist activity is North Korea. If NK strikes, it will strike as a state - not because of wild cards inside the state. Hence, it can be deterred.)

I believe that the Chinese model of political organization may present a credible challenge to liberal democracy over the coming century. And, incidentally, there is another country which resembles the Chinese model: an all-powerful political class with strong grassroots-level political penetration, exercising ideological control, permitting limited forms of popular participation within a controlled ideological framework, and with parallel structures of the ideological system (holding real power) and the government (holding limited or shadow power). That country is Iran. We should be taking a very serious look at whether detente with Iran might allow us to partially neutralize the Islamic terrorist threat.

Kofi poser,

Question: if an electorate votes a populist or Socialist candidate into office in a free and fair election, isn't this democracy?

Does America's foreign policy promote a process or a specific result?

Republicans repeat ad nauseum that the ability of George Bush to win re-election validates his authority and claim to national leadership. So why doesn't the same principle apply to Bachelet, Chavez, Da Silva, Kirchner, Morales?

Mr. Wright doesn't so much advocate exporting capitalism (how could we do that anyway?) as suggest that refusing to trade with certain countries is counter-productive. We shouldn't deny ourselves access to their markets nor them ours.Having a bigger stake in each other's lives probably won't solve many problems immediately, but it may make doing so more likely in the future.

The larger point is that the road to peace involves making everyone's lives better, or at least ceasing to do things that make them worse.

Much of this reasoning is built on unsupported suppostions. Where is the empirical evidence that supports each assertion in the inference chain?

Look at what similar unsupported suppostions playing out in foreign policy have wrought. Why should we expect that progressive realism will be any more correct, or supportive of US goals, than the Neocon vision?

kyangadac, if brutally, puts a finger on it. Half the problem in this debate is that a number of US citizens, including at the top, have swallowed the propaganda that the US is the best, the most complete, the one, the only nation in the world who can lead the way and show people how they should live. Present behavior smacks of the height of British colonial jingoism of the nineteenth century.

This is not an intuitive problem. There are so many examples and experiences of the last 150 years (or more) to draw from.

Firstly, the US is not thinking clearly. The terrorists, freedom fighters, revolutionaries, etc. are diverse separate groupings around the world with different priorities and objectives. Few directly threaten the US. By making them see a common threat, us, we are giving them every reason to unite both for common defence and common attack. We are the uniting stimulus. The fact that we conflate countries that harbor direct threats to us with regimes we don't like, conflate insurgency with that same terrorism, and pursue a war for a new world order under the smokescreen of the "war on terror" doesn't exactly help us in starting from a coherent view.

Secondly, extra-governmental organizations may be helped to survive by outside support, but their life-blood is the communnity in which they are immersed. If that support is enforced by fear and threat, they may be able to continue the intimidation for some time, but eventually they will implode. Equally, the offence, the "facts", that empowers the organization doesn't have to be true -- remember, there's propaganda on both sides -- only to be believed.

So, we have done what al-Qaeda wanted. By taking the fight to the Middle East and not only making it look anti-Islamic but also fully international, rather than confining violence to narrow, defined targets. We have at least temporarily empowered all those organizations close to the violence within their communities and more broadly by proving to be the cynical, disrespectful, callous monster we were predicted to be.

Since the experience is out there to show what would be more productive actions, you have to wonder why both the US and Israel are pursuing such a contradictory policy to their claimed aims.

Yes, you have to wonder.

Here's some advice for our fearful leaders, GW, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al:

"Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas."
-- they conveniently missed out on that one, mostly. Might explain them though.

"Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning."

"Sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, and brains saves both."

"Courage which goes against military expediency is stupidity, or, if it is insisted upon by a commander, irresponsibility."

But they haven't learned anything in three years and more. I don't expect them to start now.

"Progressive realism puts great emphasis on dealing with the threat of terrorism, whether or not my NYT piece successfully conveyed this."

Yup. And as a reality based liberal, I tried to get a better understanding of the danger from Hizbullah rockets. Is it so high that it justifies to start a war against Lebanon, killing hundreds of Lebanese, ruining that country’s infrastructure, turning more than 700000 people into refugees and destabilizing the fragile democracy of the neighboring country?

This may sound cynical, but I wanted to put the ‘danger’ from Quassam rockets into relation. So I first checked the number of casualties so far. On day 19 of this war, 19 Israeli civilians lost their lives by terrorist missile attacks.
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/15162381.htm

This is just one civilian casualty/day. Every single case is a tragedy, but the risk of being killed by a Hizbullah rocket doesn’t seem to be very high. How does this compare to other risks you face daily? I looked for numbers on car accident fatilities. The most recent data I found is from 2004. During that year, 480 people died on streets withing the green line.
http://bd.mot.gov.il/RoadSafety/English/Statistics.htm#casualties

This amounts to 1.3 people every day killed by Israeli traffic. So, the risk to be killed on the road is actually higher than that by terrorist rocket attacks. And I guess that’s the reason why Olmert hasn’t called for an evacuation of the north yet. This begs the question, if this isn’t an essential risk for Israel in any way, is it justified for the IAF to deliberately target Lebanese infrastructure and buildings when there is little to no evidence that there are really terrorists or weapons in them? What good are laser guided precision bombs for poinpoint attacks if you randomly use them against buildings when you simply guess a target could be in them? Doesn’t the disregard for ‘collateral damage’, more than 500 Lebanese civilians killed so far, make Olmert and Halutz worse terrorists than Nasrallah?

In this more distilled version, I think I can agree with Mr. Wright. If I understand his thesis clearly, it boils down to, "Let's engage them economically, so we don't have to engage them militarily." To which I can agree.

Although selling the Iranians on their own version of American Idol (Persian Idol??), may be more insidious and base than cluster bombing them (just kidding....).

Gray, that is the risk of being killed by a Qassam rocket when the entire population of the northern sector of the country is spending most of every day in air raid shelters. The cost includes not just the deaths, but the steps which must be taken to avoid more deaths.

I don't agree with what the Israelis are doing to Lebanon. But to be fair, their response isn't based on what's actually happened. It's based on an assessment of what is likely to happen if they don't do anything. The kidnapping of 2 soldiers and killing of 6 others wasn't, in itself, a great horror. But it stood for a threat of permanent low-grade warfare on their northern border, which they refuse to accept. Their 'asymmetric' response is a version of a zero tolerance campaign. They feel allowing this to slide with only a minor response is like leaving broken windows unfixed: it invites ever more violence.

Unfortunately, blowing the living bejeezus out of people's houses, wives, kids, and goldfish invites ever more violence, too.

The underlying assumption is that the peoples of the world, in general, are predisposed to democratic rule. I've seen enough evidence that this is not true. In Russia, the population welcomes the "stability" that Putin offers. Much of the Islamic world seems to embrace Sharia law. The Chinese people seem content with trading some freedoms for economic prosperity. They are an extremely proud and nationalistic people.

The American and European model is an anomoly. We need to realize that our unique societal strucure works for us but is not necessarily exportable. I say work with other like minded states and those who do not threaten us. Distance ourselves from those who do.

The underlying assumption is that the peoples of the world, in general, are predisposed to democratic rule. I've seen enough evidence that this is not true.

A good example is the US, where few feel worked up about the fact that over 30% of the vote can no longer be verified and results have merely to be taken on trust or where few feel annoyed by the fact they have the least competitive elections in the democratic world, indeed simply refuse to recognize how tattered and tawdry their democracy has become.

(look to the mote in your own eye; frankly it's getting tiring to hear Americans talk of democracy as though they were somehow exemplars; see kyangadac's post at 3.39)

Overall, not a bad position. However, the man has far too much faith in so-called "free markets."

Pericles was macho, so was Alcibiades. The difference between them was only one of them was an idiot. Not claiming that John McCain is any Pericles
but only way to solve current crisis in American governance is this: Cheney resigns; McCain becomes VP; Bush resigns; McCain becomes president. I'm only half joking.

On what basis do you believe that John McCain is less likely than George W. Bush to want to blow the living stuffing out of every place you can think of?

That political freedom follows economic freedom was once dogma on the right. (Something Burke and Marx agreed on.) Why on earth would a nutjob like Al side with transparent Trotskyites like the neocons to quarrel with such a transparent notion? (Wait. I'll tell you.) Vanity. People like Al backed the present regime. It would wound their vanity to backdown.

We date our tradition of liberty from the Magna Carta. The 10 centuries of expansion of political freedom which followed rebut any of the neocon gibberish.

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Making free-market democracy pervasive is only crucial to America's interest in the long run,

Making America (the US) a free market economy would have to come first. We are a Regulated Market economy, despite the labels we like to put on treaties and other regulatory documents.

I reject a "premise common in Democratic policy circles lately: that the key to a winning foreign policy is to recalibrate the party’s manhood — just take boilerplate liberal foreign policy and add a testosterone patch.

This seems to me more of a statement about rhetoric than strategy. Or at least, it could be. The Democratic party, and Democratic candidates, need to show their fighting spirit. It's not the policy that's missing, it's the spirit that will carry it out despite opposition and tests that is.

Fighting spirit is not enough. One must have a good strategy. So the rhetoric used, "Killing terrorists is nice enough when you can do it cleanly" isn't correct, even though the strategy there is more or less in the right place.

What if we said instead that we needed to focus our energies on finding and wreaking justice upon exactly those people who are perpetrating and masterminding acts of violence, while extending friendship, security, self-determination and economic development to those who are not. Act so as to divide the enemy, not unite them.

If you shoot exactly the guy shooting at you, people get it. People may try to cloud the issue. They may do acts that are unspeakably evil, for the purpose of angering us. But if we get so angry and we lose control and start killing innocents and waving our hands at collateral damage, then we will have lost.

We must screw up our courage to the sticking point, and prepare ourselves to endure much and persevere much. But we can prevail.

Never mind terrorism. It's a civil liberties death trap. -Hitler's card at the onset of his 'tenure'. Talk about Intelligent Progressive... see the latest piece by Stan Hoffman in NYRB.

There are certainly things we can do to reduce America-hatred. But I think the core of it is not about America but about fear of the future. Our own right-wing Taliban have the same problem, and hate America as it actually is too. (See for example Falwell's knee-jerk comments on our own culpability for 9/11.) China and India may be the future but America is the symbol of the future and that's not going to change. People who fear and hate the future will fear and hate us for no other reason. Again, I don't mean to say that we're better than other peoples in this respect. McVeigh is a symptom of the same dynamic inside our own society.

What we CAN do is stop alienating our actual allies through bullying and lack of consultation and consensus-building, and start (re-)building the international structures that help to promote stability, development, and a sense of working together.

I've always admired Robert Wright. His first book, "The Moral Animal", is one of the most enlightening reads I ever encountered. His thesis I think boils down to the fact that if you engage the other guy and search for areas of accomodation and commonality you have a better chance of a peaceful relationship. He goes into the arena of evolutionary psychology and examines motives for human behaviour. I think Wright assumes that most people are, by nature, peace-loving and responsive to respectful interaction. The contrary (world) view would suggest that no person or group is to be trusted and thus the imperative to always be armed and willing to use force to win concessions in a relationship. In his second book, "Non-Zero", Wright basically suggesst there is a win-win possibility in all kinds of relationships.

I know this flies in the face of much common wisdom, ie, that there are many in this world who cannot be trusted, or that are intrinsically evil. This mindset puts a premium on weapons and a willingness to use force in relationships. It believes in big armies at the national level and believes in keeping guns for protection at a personal level. Some people are trusting by nature while others are suspicious. In the long run I'll take my chances with the first group.

This is an oversimplification but you get the idea.

BTW, there was an interesting study a few years ago comparing the ownership of guns in Seattle and in neighboring Vancouver, B.C. It was astonishing.

What I am trying to get at is what I see as a fundamental difference in thinking between liberals and conservatives, whether it be individuals or cultures. Robert Wright is one of the most eloqent of authors to expound on this conundrum.

Good post!!

Robert Wright is in cloud cuckoo land.

"Terrorists" are people with extraordinary problems, forced to deal with them by extraordinary means.

The major source of terrorism in the world today is the unresolved Palestinian issue. Seems to me that Israel is now in the process of hysterically backing itself into another "Masada moment," with ghastly consequences for all.

The Israelis & Lebanese need to SIT DOWN & NEGOTIATE. Israelis & Palestinians: NEGOTIATE. Now. While there's still time. And not the shuttle crap. Face to face, on neutral ground. As equals.

There used to be Algerian terrorists & Belgian Congolese terrorists & Viet Cong terrorists. Why did these groups fade?

Pretty much because their problems got solved by diplomatic/political means. Not military ones. The two sides SAT DOWN and NEGOTIATED.

We've nearly got IRA terrorists under control, and the Brits didn't have to bomb Boston to do it. Having tried everything else, the English & the Irish SAT DOWN and NEGOTIATED.

So let's solve Palestine & then see what's left. Kashmir? Squabbles in the Philippines? Unhappy people in southern Mexico? Kurds? If that's what we're facing, then it seems to me that none of these rise to a level of international concern.

Just for the sake of argument, what would a "progressive realist" say about the Clinton administration's foreign policy?

I have a pretty good idea what he would say it did right. What did it do wrong? It's an important question substantively, and also politically. There isn't any question that the terrorism problem grew much worse on Bill Clinton's watch. Recognizing this doesn't imply endorsement of Clinton's successor or his policies, but a foreign policy approach that amounts to no more than returning to what Clinton's people did will A) not work, based on the record and B) not be accepted by the American electorate.

So the question recurs: from Wright's point of view, what did Clinton do wrong? Did he make errors only on the margins, or was some important part of his approach to foreign policy fatally inconsistent with "progressive realism"?

China and India may be the future but America is the symbol of the future and that's not going to change. People who fear and hate the future will fear and hate us for no other reason

I have to disagree. Amittedly, I'm writing from the perspective of a non-American and that of one anything but steeped in the cult of American exceptionalism but increasingly at least for those of us in the rich world, America is more an anti-model than a model. I mean, in what way is it that you see America as a symbol of the future? Its politics? Its social systems? Its gadgets? Its media? Perhaps its military hardware? (on the last I'd have to acquiesce.) Or perhaps as a model of indirectly applied corporate control? But this is more dystopian and is not what I think you're getting at. I think your premise was largely true in the past. But not only is it not not going to change, it has changed and is changing.

I would also have to disagree with your assertion that terrorist acts against the US as due to an amorphous perception of America as a symbol of modernity. The case is much stronger that they are rooted in what particular terrorists perceive rightly or wrongly as US policy antagonist to the interests of their particular group.

I think Tom Friedman's optimism argument is a stronger one. He argues - and I agree - that the US was a symbol of optimism (and an awful lot of us foreigners however we might have derided US naivety, bought into this) but now this is gone.

I complete agree with your conclusion, however.

To Al
Ok what is the root cause of terrorism? Mad Men? I don't think so. They've got a cause. They do what they do because it captures headlines and it scares the hell out of people. People have voices which translates into Changes in policy. Unfortunately it doesn't always work. Bushes solution is on track if the country and law makers were all for complete inialation of the terrorist's, and we had the force in numbers to pull it off. Figure the odds of that. anything short of that is a failed policy. and with that, call it flawed and impractical. I suspect that if the US was invaded by say China, and our military broken apart and spread to the wind. We would have a militia that would probably be indistinguishable between what we today call terrorists. What would are root cause be?

RWH, the trust factor is anteresting point to bring up. One of the articles in the book Culture Matters (I think Samuel Huntington was the editor) had a comparative study of trust in different cultures. IIRC, the Scandanavian countries fared best in this, followed by Canada, Japan, Singapore and perhaps surprisingly, China. Mediterranean Europe was quite a bit less trusting. Less trusting was the States, then countries like Mexico and the Philippines. Faring worst were countries that had fallen into chaos (note: this is from memory so...)

It's often argued that trust is the basis of a civil society (anyway, having lived in high-trust societies, there's no way I'd want to live - for long anyone - in any other sort.

(BTW, also really enjoyed The Moral Animal when it came out)

Globalization is imperialism without empires or at least it exists for the same reason the old empires existed- free-trade markets and access to resources, including labor, beyond national borders. There was also the added export of European populations. The Second World War killed off the great imperial competition, which had anyway become too expensive. Nationalistic movements in the colonies (like the insurgents) coupled with unwinable wars between great powers (thanks to nuclear weapons) rendered the old nation-state-based economic policies untenable. Cooperation became the only choice and international organizations were created to facilitate integration.

Unfortunately American conservatives did not get the memo and thought that America was natural master of this system. Sadly they are now taking the United States down the old road of the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, German and Russian empires. For the record, the Israelis (and the Iranians) are using the US via their silly but fiendish friends, the neocons, to kick their enemies. This is not a new world order.

Ironically American nationalism’s biggest export – the cult of free trade- has hollowed out America’s industrial core (the US now exports less than Germany and has about 3 times the population) and it has made the US a nation dependent on imports of goods and money to buy those goods. In essence all the Americans offer the world is a big military, paid for with credit, that cannot manage to subdue a tiny, poor country like Iraq.

What kyangadac points out is vital. It is not 1950. The US is not regarded by the rest of the world as the paragon of liberty and justice (Guantanamo and abu Ghraib aside, the Senate is the most undemocratic institution among the old democracies, gerrymandering is, well, undemocratic etc.) nor does it have the most desirable social life- it is nearly dead last in every indicator of social well being when compared to other developed countries.

John Robb's latest:

A concise summary might be - with respect to organizations like Hezbollah, if you can't beat them, join them.

JOURNAL: Legitimacy, Long Tail markets, and Violence/Security
DNI: Bill Lind artfully notes the inversion of legitimacy in the Middle East:

A Hezbollah success against the hated Israelis will give governments throughout the Islamic world a stark choice. They can either snuggle up as close to Hezbollah and other Islamic 4GW entities as they can get, hoping to catch some reflected legitimacy, or they can become Vichy to their own peoples. Since the first rule of politics is to survive, I think we can look forward to a great deal of the former.

Hezbollah's success demonstrates that legitimacy (which translates into funding, recruits, safe-havens, etc.) is increasingly gained through victory on the battlefield (and to a lesser extent, good works and stability). It will get worse. Here's why. If you look at this through the lens of global guerrillas, you will see Hezbollah's success serves as both a catalyst and validation for the emerging marketplace (bazaar) for violence and security. As we have seen in Iraq and other global locales, this marketplace has a long ("fat") tail of demand and supply. As global chaos heats up, the diversity and intensity of demand/supply will grow to challenge (in aggregate) that of provided by nation-states. Hezbollah, within this context, is an entrepreneurial success story. It is being paid in legitimacy.

NOTE: William Gibson (the futurist and writer) has a post on his blog that explains the conceptual barriers of paradigm shifts (and in particular, how they relate to 4GW).

Part of my potential disagreement depend on what Mr. Wright means by free-market capitalism. If he means to include all the regimes in which there's some measure of independent economic activity, that's one thing. But it seems quite clear that the world simply has less to fear from, say, Sweden, France, or Germany than it does from the US, and that very likely this would be true even if those countries were as large in people and economic activity as the US. Our flavor of economics is broken, and it reinforces (and is reinforced by) the brokenness of our politics.

In any event, I continue to think that our challenges in the post-Bush/Cheney era will mostly be dealing with our own massive economic collapse and trying to convince anyone else in the world that we're no longer monstrous threats to everyone else.

I did not see anything addressing America's hatred of the world or anything about America's coveting of other's natural resources as the legitimate source of their 'hatred' of us.

It is precisely because the Exxons and Chevrons do not want to have economic engagement with the Iranians, Iraqis, Congolese, etc. that we have rightly earned the enmity of the oil slaves.

Mr. Rich is a paid Pollyana of the wealthy. He ignores the religious/ideological and racial sources of America's hatred of the world and the use of American military power to secure monopoly profits for its corporations. A typical liberal omission of the sources of US international problems.

"BTW, there was an interesting study a few years ago comparing the ownership of guns in Seattle and in neighboring Vancouver, B.C. It was astonishing."

Can you elaborate, RWH? (I'm an American who has lived in BC for almost 20 years.)

Pissed off and mentally deranged people are the major cause of terrorism. Failed states and lawless provinces whipsawed by occupying forces and insufficient internal security are where they build their numbers, moral, weapons, training, and experience.

In a sane world, terrorism would be priority #5. To get there we would need to maintain sane policies for 50 years or so.

Or we could support policies that piss off people and cause them mental anguish and spend billions of dollars trying to keep them from acquiring pointy sticks with the unintended consequence of increasing their numbers, moral, weapons, training, and experience.

Most of us want to just be friendly and nice to our neighbors and try to have a good life. But, there's always that feisty twerp with ego issues in your group who loves to rile everybody up, insult somebody, strut around the bar with an attitude, piss off some burly dudes near the pool table, and get you all into a giant scrape. And, somehow, the twerp never gets scratched. It's always YOUR teeth left lying on the bar room floor.

Mentally unhealthy people should not be allowed to run countries.

mhr: No country gives more aid to poor countries than the US nor taken in more poor immigrants.

"The absolute figures are less significant than the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP, or national wealth) that a country devotes to foreign aid. On that league table, the US ranks twenty-second of the 22 most developed nations... Denmark is top of the table, giving 1.01% of GDP, while the US manages just 0.1%.... Apart from being the least generous nation, the US is highly selective in who receives its aid. Over 50% of its aid budget is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East, with Israel being the recipient of the largest single share"
(http://www.vexen.co.uk/USA/foreign_aid.html)

And I'm not going to chase it down but the last figures I saw had the US as something like number 10 in its percentage of foreign-born. Australia and Canada take in way more immigrants for their size.

"It is precisely because the Exxons and Chevrons do not want to have economic engagement with the Iranians, Iraqis, Congolese, etc. that we have rightly earned the enmity of the oil slaves."

But we don't forcibly take oil from Iran. We don't even buy oil from Iran, so how are they oil slaves again?

We turned Iran into a slave oil producer until the people threw out the American Kapo, whom we called the Shah. Correctly, the Iranians know the US is a kleptocracy who will use its military might to steal its natural resources.

"The absolute figures are less significant than the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP, or national wealth) that a country devotes to foreign aid. On that league table, the US ranks twenty-second of the 22 most developed nations... Denmark is top of the table, giving 1.01% of GDP, while the US manages just 0.1%...."

So if you are a waiter at a restaurant and gets a $5 from some guy and $20 from another guy who happen to be 10x wealthier than the first guy for the same meal. You are telling me you'd be much happier with the $5 tip?

"Apart from being the least generous nation, the US is highly selective in who receives its aid. Over 50% of its aid budget is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East, with Israel being the recipient of the largest single share"

So, the US shouldn't have a say in to whom they can give?

The US played a leading role in ridding the world of the scourges of Naziism and Communism.

Last I knew, there were 1.4 billion people living under communist rule. Standing up to these totalitarian states would actually be a decent beginning to winning the hearts and minds.

We did, in fact, come to "comprehend" their perspectives but to conclude that any civilized country should ever "accomodate" those perspectives is simply foolish.

Ever hear of the Shanghai Communiqué, "Engagement policy", US support of China's WTO entry post 9/11, the Paris Peace accords, and the bilateral trade agreement between US and Vietnam signed in May of this year?

Progressive realists, by all accounts, study very little history, if any. As Santayana said, "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

OK, but you need to replace "Progressive realists" with the letter i.

"And I'm not going to chase it down but the last figures I saw had the US as something like number 10 in its percentage of foreign-born. Australia and Canada take in way more immigrants for their size."

You can always buy your way into Canada (not sure about Australia) if you got money. But the original statement was about poor immigrants.

The current situation in Lebanon and in Afghanistan makes the point. It is unlikely that we can influence Hezbollah or the Taliban but being nice to them. Who can we engage that will make a difference? Well, how about Lebanon? If we became an important support for the government of Lebanon, would it be more inclined to grasp the nettle and try to disarm Hezbolah? The Syrians want to talk to us about Lebanon. Is there a point to our steadfast refusal to talk to them? At least in the short term, there isn't much point in trying to engage the Taliban. Is there a point to further engagement with Pakistan? For Pakistan, rooting the Taliban out of its mountains is politically and militarily difficult. Can we make it worth their while?

If we did not have a government headed up by the Red Queen, most of this, IMHO, would be obvious. As it is, it is a needed breath of fresh air.

"I suspect that if the US was invaded by say China, and our military broken apart and spread to the wind. We would have a militia that would probably be indistinguishable between what we today call terrorists. What would are root cause be?"

Root cause for which? American militia blowing up the PLA or American militias blowing up malls, theatres, pizza parlors, where other Americans shop and spend their leisure time?

If you look at recent conflicts a pattern emerges, invasions no longer work. The best an invader can hope for is a prolonged stalemate. The cost of occupation are greater than the imagined return.

Winning battles has next to no impact on the outcome of the war. What is remembered is not who won the battle but who committed what attrocities to whom. These will be remembered and paraded decades, even centuries after the fact.

This is why Turkey takes such elaborate pains to confuse the history of the Turkish genocide of 1 million Armenians in WWI by introducing spurious claims that the Armenians massacred Turks.

The Iraq war was lost the day that the pictures came out of Abu Graihb. Any hope of beneficial political change in Cuba is blocked by the knowledge of the torture taking place at the Guantanamo Gulag. And it makes no difference whether the Administration denials are true, what is believed is what will determine history.

The administration pretends to be realist but lives in its own invented reality. Calling it reactionary realism would be inappropriate. You can't have realism without reality. Reactionary Idealism?

"We turned Iran into a slave oil producer until the people threw out the American Kapo, whom we called the Shah. Correctly, the Iranians know the US is a kleptocracy who will use its military might to steal its natural resources."

So if you paid for something you bought, it's considered stealing? Does that mean Iran's oil are still being stolen today when they sell to other countries?

"The Iraq war was lost the day that the pictures came out of Abu Graihb."

So who won in actuality? Saddam? Zarqawi? Bin Laden? The media?

In real wars it is possible for everyone to lose.

Root cause for which? American militia blowing up the PLA or American militias blowing up malls, theatres, pizza parlors, where other Americans shop and spend their leisure time?

I take it that your point is. There's no method to the madness, and their just killing people aimlessly. They just blow things up to make some sort of political statement. They're Mad-men

I would argue that anyone supporting or otherwise allowing without resistance, the invasion, movement, cause or ideology would be considered the other side. This could mean in our case regious or political affiliation, financial status, or simply geographic location, etc, etc, etc. It's not aimless. Look at the assassinations of Sunni's assassinations on the the buses in IRAQ. It was their name that spelled out their fate. Targeted or Aimless?

fighter of freedomSo if you are a waiter at a restaurant and gets a $5 from some guy and $20 from another guy who happen to be 10x wealthier than the first guy for the same meal. You are telling me you'd be much happier with the $5 tip?

I'd be much happier with the collective $70 bucks I get from the EU table than the $20 from the table of Yanks (same number of people at both tables).

fighter of freedomSo, the US shouldn't have a say in to whom they can give?

To throw something back in your face, the original claim was about giving to poor countries, not middle-income countries hence the pertinence of giving to this group.

And if you want to talk about immigration of the poorest of the poor, check out the intake of refugees. The US is again way behind the comparably-sized EU.

P.S. It'd be great if you could show some genuine wit. This juvenile scoffing schtick is getting really old.

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freedom fighter - i guess, if you're confining yourself to picking away at the less realistic people on here, it's because you don't have a coherent disagreement with Kevin's piece itself?

uh gee, glasnost, thanks for the uh, boost.

kenji,
I remember reading a study comparing homicide rates in Seattle and Vancouver in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was in 1988. As I recall it was a call for more stringent gun control laws.

I can't find the article now but found a reference and critique about it here: http://teapot.usask.ca/cdn-firearms/Suter/med-lit/seattle.html

Turns out the homicide rate was much higher in Seattle but the authors failed to take into account ethnic and other demographic differences between the 2 populations. Still, the gun ownership rates were wildly different in the two cities.

mrh,

Per capita, per gdp or per simple population count the US is not very generous in aid to poor countries. Further, all to often what we ask in return makes the aid given a plus only just barely not at all in the eyes of many recipients.

When I moved to Canada in 1981 (just after Reagan came in), the only country with more gun-related deaths in proportion to population than the US was El Fucking Salvador.

As I remmber, the US had something like 37,000 shooting deaths the year before, while England had maybe 70, Japan about 30, and Canada was 150 or so. And there are plenty of guns here, let me tell you.

It's a national disgrace that few Americans give a shit about, even though, after the ripples subside, it must effect a huge percentage of the citizenry. Of course, the Cheney gang has managed to outsource some of the violence since then. And El Salvador has been pacified, through force. A lot to look forward to, eh?

Wright is likely correct that increasing economic liberty usually leads to greater political liberty, but his assertion that generosity lessens the formentation of hatred is indicative of an ignorance of human nature, and a almost child-like naivete, that is all too common from people of Wright's political beliefs.

This seems like a sound basis to begin policy formulation. There is little doubt that the technological (lethality) genie is getting out of the bottle, and that we should respect this and not act like a bully or hegemon. We need to be a good citizen in the world, and base our relations and image on mutual respect and dignity, for all peoples and cultures. This is, after all, supposed to be our legacy. People should look to us for guidance, for leadership, and for help, not for revenge. We should do this for economic reasons too (see brand management).

As for regimes we dislike, are not democracies, or illiberal, we should definitely engage. Are we afraid to compete with these countries on an open playing field? I hope not. We can compete against anyone. We should have more faith in why we choose to support freedom and free markets, along the lines of Hayek, because these really are the most optimal and efficient conditions for economic success, as well as the most dignified. Sure we can't be dogmatic about it, as some social direction of markets is not only inevitable but successful and competitive (see Japan encouraging ecofriendly vehicles), and certainly some social intervention to ensure domestic security and tranquility will also always be on the agenda.

Around the world, tensions need to be tamped down. These tensions are mainly born from a cycle of violence and grievances that must no longer be fed. We should never forget that the thirst for justice is far more compelling, especially emotionally, than the varying confused conceptions of freedom. Justice is the basis of equal rights and dignity, springing from basic notions of reciprocity, and the world must be based upon it. Our laws, and equal protection and treatment under them, are designed to ensure this elemental justice and dignity. International law protecting equal rights and dignity must be our highest duty. As we engage, we can push these ideas, beginning from a most elemental enforceable level noone will want to deny. If they do, then economic and political isolation ought ensue. But we can't put the bar too high, right away, and we certainly can't raise any bar until we change our approach here at home, and how we treat other peoples, cultures, and countries, so that we are truly noteworthy leaders and not easily criticized hypocrites.

Reconciliation ought be the initial international goal right now. We need to have a grand convention, and try to reach a grand bargain, in order to try and reconcile our past grievances with each other so we can begin semi-fresh again. Emerging from this should be solid commitments from all serious and responsible parties to be vigilant in respecting justice and mutual respect and dignity from here on out, while also laying the foundation and laws by which we can interact and compete with one another. It's not going to be a lovefest - the idea is to end/lessen the hate.

Economic liberty is fine, in abstract, but the reality of the situation is alleviating the desperate conditions of the poor, at least initially. The terrible disparities of wealth and horrible conditions of the most poor and indigent should be met my moral people with an outpouring of compassion and generosity. If we can put a dent in these most desperate of situations, and put communities and nations back on a track of self-reliance in terms of survival goods and services (food, water, basic, energy where possible), but mutual interdependence on the goods and services of "the good life" through trade, then we can credibly push for economic liberty in a meaningful way (and that will actually be effective).

For, do we really believe that the way we organize and respect ourselves, and allow for free economic activity and political activity, that we would be outcompeted by repressive regimes?

I just don't see that, and see no reason to fear Iran. If they choose to remain the same, so be it, they'll have a decent income from their natural resource accounts, but they will not approach our success politically and economically in the world. If they decide to change, to become more of a successful force and influence in the world, then we will see Iran changing to a more free and liberal orientation (though still obviously with their Islamic traditions likely intact and embedded).

The idea is to find the level of reciprocity, of mutual respect and dignity, of commitment to justice and rights, that all responsible peoples and nations can agree to, and enshrine that in enforceable international laws, conventions, treaties, and sanctions that all members solemnly swear to defend in a timely manner. As time goes forward, this circle can likely be expanded, should it survive and thrive by vigilance and action, rather than wilt and die due to inaction, in the face of defection.

RWH, Kenji, and others:

Here is the full citation to the article which RWH mentions.

Handgun regulations, crime, assaults, and homicide. A tale of two cities. Sloan, J H. Kellermann, A L. Reay, D T. Ferris, J A. Koepsell, T. Rivara, F P. Rice, C. Gray, L. LoGerfo, J. New England Journal of Medicine. 319(19):1256-62, 1988 Nov 10.

I had hoped to be able to read the fulltext of the article online, but the University of Arizona's subscription for fulltext only goes back to 1993.

But here is the abstract, in case that helps:

"To investigate the associations among handgun regulations, assault and other crimes, and homicide, we studied robberies, burglaries, assaults, and homicides in Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, from 1980 through 1986. Although similar to Seattle in many ways, Vancouver has adopted a more restrictive approach to the regulation of handguns. During the study period, both cities had similar rates of burglary and robbery. In Seattle, the annual rate of assault was modestly higher than that in Vancouver (simple assault: relative risk, 1.18; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.15 to 1.20; aggravated assault: relative risk, 1.16; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.12 to 1.19). However, the rate of assaults involving firearms was seven times higher in Seattle than in Vancouver. Despite similar overall rates of criminal activity and assault, the relative risk of death from homicide, adjusted for age and sex, was significantly higher in Seattle than in Vancouver (relative risk, 1.63; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.28 to 2.08). Virtually all of this excess risk was explained by a 4.8-fold higher risk of being murdered with a handgun in Seattle as compared with Vancouver. Rates of homicide by means other than guns were not substantially different in the two study communities. We conclude that restricting access to handguns may reduce the rate of homicide in a community."

Here's the cite and abstract of another article by some of the same authors in NEJM, 1990. This article compares suicide rates in King County (Seattle) and Vancouver, B.C.

Firearm regulations and rates of suicide. A comparison of two metropolitan areas. Sloan, J H. Rivara, F P. Reay, D T. Ferris, J A. Kellermann, A L. New England Journal of Medicine. 322(6):369-73, 1990 Feb 8.

"To investigate a possible association between firearm regulations and suicide, we compared the incidence of suicide from 1985 through 1987 in King County, Washington, with that in the Vancouver metropolitan area, British Columbia, where firearm regulations are more restrictive. The risk of death from suicide was not found to differ significantly between King County and the Vancouver area (relative risk, 0.97; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.87 to 1.09). The rate of suicide by firearms, however, was higher in King County (relative risk, 2.34; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.90 to 2.88), because the rate of suicide by handguns was 5.7 times higher there. The difference in the rates of suicide by firearms was offset by a 1.5-fold higher rate of suicide by other means in the Vancouver area. Persons 15 to 24 years old had a higher suicide rate in King County than in the Vancouver area (relative risk, 1.38; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.02 to 1.86). Virtually all the difference was due to an almost 10-fold higher rate of suicide by handguns in King County. We conclude that restricting access to handguns might be expected to reduce the suicide rate in persons 15 to 24 years old, but that it probably would not reduce the overall suicide rate."

Thanks, Wolfdaughter. Communication via the internet is just incredible. Now my real question is why some people feel guns are indispensable and others feel they are a scourge. A subject for another thread I guess.

RWHNow my real question is why some people feel guns are indispensable and others feel they are a scourge. A subject for another thread I guess.

To be sure for another thread but as an aside, recent trends in your country have given me an inkling of why citizens of a democratic nation might want to possess guns for reasons other than recreation. It's sure nice though here in Japan to have to neither worry about guns nor knives, heck even for the most part fists.

glasnost, I thnk the term 'picking away' gives far too much credence to Freedom Farter's (to steal a name from Kenji) ramblings. He's learned to scoff. Perhaps some day he'll learn to scoff intelligeably.

Economic liberty is fine, in abstract, but the reality of the situation is alleviating the desperate conditions of the poor, at least initially. The terrible disparities of wealth and horrible conditions of the most poor and indigent should be met my moral people with an outpouring of compassion and generosity.

Jimm, I agree completely but part of the problem here is lack of economic liberty and locked-in rules that favor the haves.

Other people don;t like us because we park our military all over the globe. How about bringing the military home, and we stop using our economy as a diplomatic tool to dominate other parts of the globe. That ought to do it. Let's trade with other nations on the basis of good economic decisions, and not State Dept political ideas.

This is pretty much why I firmly remain an independent. Both Dems and Reps can't wait to meddle in the affairs of others.Good goverance and charity begin at home. We really need a third party in this country.

recent trends in your country have given me an inkling of why citizens of a democratic nation might want to possess guns for reasons other than recreation.

Like because the Republicans all have them, and when the civil war comes, we better have some of our own...

I have supported gun control my entire life. But when you start to realize that it's not gonna happen, you start to think about protecting yourself and your family and community from the other assholes who have them. This, of course, was the beginning of the civil war in Bosnia: people started raiding the armories as they realized that fascists from the other ethnicity were taking over the local political system.

So whaddaya say? Shall we start a little armory of our own, for liberals to use in case the apocalypse comes? We could call it...oh, let's see..."Arsenal of Democracy"?

"Arsenal of Democracy"

You got it, brooksfoe. Worse yet and following much the same kind of 'reasoning' at a national level I start to have musings about Canada going nuclear - we were the first nation with nuclear technology to choose not to develop weapons.

You're right of course, the spiral away from trust is not the route to take but at some point "there can be no appeasement with ruthlessness."

(P.S. Enjoyed the prompt into FDR's speech)

The idea is to find the level of reciprocity, of mutual respect and dignity, of commitment to justice and rights, that all responsible peoples and nations can agree to, and enshrine that in enforceable international laws, conventions, treaties, and sanctions that all members solemnly swear to defend in a timely manner. As time goes forward, this circle can likely be expanded, should it survive and thrive by vigilance and action, rather than wilt and die due to inaction, in the face of defection.
Good idea!!

http://www.ggno.info/sitemap.htm

I have supported gun control my entire life. But when you start to realize that it's not gonna happen, you start to think http://www.ggar.info/sitemap.htm about protecting yourself and your family and community from the other assholes who have them.

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"There used to be Algerian terrorists & Belgian Congolese terrorists & Viet Cong terrorists. Why did these groups fade?

Pretty much because their problems got solved by diplomatic/political means. Not military ones. The two sides SAT DOWN and NEGOTIATED."

!!! What history book are you reading from? In all three of those examples, the country went through a horrible civil war with 100s of thousands to millions dead, not just "terrorism."

If I failed to detect sarcasm, I apologize. Otherwise ... wow.

Where you stand on the war-on-ijtihadis (arabic for attackers-of-non-combatants) comes down to how you analyze the threat to yourself/family.

From what I can see, none of this discussion realistically assess the threats we face nor our adversaries.

95% or so of muslims worldwide are reasonable, decent, sane and vaugely modern in mindset ... the 5% who are not are our real adversaries, fueled by (Sunni) Saudi Wahibbi oil-money and (Shia) Iranian Twelvers (believers in the imminent armageddon-ish return in the Mahdi, the vanished 12th-Imam from around the 9th century or so).

Being nice to ijtihadis in whatever form is perceived as weakness and is seen as Allah-destroying-the-Infidel's-will-to-fight. No matter how economically / diplomatically wonderfully you treat these groups, they will still want to convert/enslave(dhimmitude)/kill all of you infidels ... because Allah through Mohammad commanded it in the verses of the Koran / Suras that they happen to put their belief in.

Separately, these Koranic-originalists will never forgive us westerners for corrupting their culture and more importantly their daughters and wives with modernity ... music, clothing, makeup, voting, cars. jobs, free-contact-with-non-family-members, etc. For that alone they would gladly stab, shoot then incinerate both you and their corrupted daughters.

Saying you wish to engage-with (trade with) primitives like the Pashtun, the Twelvers, the Wahibbis, etc is like saying "we wish to sell music, makeup and western clothing to your wives and daughters" ... please realize, these people are not the Kurds or the hedonistic Levantines ... the ijtihadis among the originalists consider "moderate" muslims (like the Egyptians who don't even kill their bellydancers) to be corrupt and therefore nearly as hated as the Jews Mohammad commanded them to kill near the end of the Koran.

Saying you wish to sit down and negotiate means (to them) that you wish to negotiate the terms of your dhimmitude-surrender, the taxes you will pay, the laws you will live under and the restrictions they may place upon you until they decide to either mandate your forcible-conversion or death.

When they (HezboAllah for example) say they want a cease-fire, they mean a "Hudna" ... a truce lasting only while the forces of the Daar-al-Islam (House of the servants/slaves of Allah) rest, regroup, and re-arm to re-attack for forces of the Daar-al-Haarb (House of peoples to be made-war-on/conquered).

When they (specifically Shia) make any agreements, there is NO moral requirement that the terms be kept to or honored in any way if the agreement is with a non-muslim, nor is there any moral requirement to tell the truth (taqiyyah ... the _obligation_ to decieve your non-muslim interlocutor or adversary).

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Regarding the nature of the threat ... frankly it is already too late ... we have almost certainly already sealed our fate regarding the unavoidable spread of cancer-defeating biotech that can be dual-used to custom-create targetted viruses.

Much more to the point, biowarfare is a non-government-monopoly WMD paradigm ... as you can read below, individuals with internet-only resources and ebay can create what they need already ... any competant bio-grad-student should be able to spend a few weeks or months and assemble an ethnically-targetted supervirus NOW and within the next few years the tools to do this will be as easy to operate as a CAD-CAM rapid-prototyping-machine (currently-existing first generation "replicator" for you sci-fi types).

Bluntly, as long as there is ONE educated rich anti-westerner driven enough to act in extreme deadliness to protect his daughters' innocence or to take revenge on some future Danish Cartoonist, we in the Infidel Daar-al-Haarb are increasingly likely as time passes to be wiped out by a succession in increasingly deadly super-viruses.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

1: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya etc are/were working on WMDs
1a: Chem-weapons are annoying but not a critical danger.
1b: Nukes are locally more dangerous, but hard-to-make
1c: Bio-weapons are the threat to extinguish Homo Sapiens.

2: Iraq, Iran, and Syria are clearly known to have worked on weaponizing various *-pox germs ... this was broadly reported on in the late-1990s, specifically mentioning manipulating camel-pox's human transmissibility or practicing on camel-pox before working on smallpox.
Links+References:
* The Iraqi government did admit to U.N. inspectors back in 1995 that they were working on camelpox as a weapon against foreign troops.
Source:
islamonline.net
http://www.islamonline.net/English/Science/2002/05/article13.shtml

* They claimed they wanted to use it as a weapon to which Iraqis, who are used to camels, would be immune, while foreign troops would not.
The inspectors were dubious, as camelpox does not cause human disease. They feared that instead, Iraq might be using it as a safe substitute while testing a smallpox weapon.
source:
worldhealth.net
http://www.worldhealth.net/p/646,1686.html

Iraq acknowledges a certain level and that is that they were conducting research on three viruses - chemopox which is loosely related to cowpox, smallpox presumably, but is principally a disease of camels; human rotavirus which is a notorious cause of infant diarrhoea; and hemmolergic conjunctivitis which produces a hemorrhaging in the eye and blurred vision which will last 24 to 48 hours. The eyes bleed. -----
Presumably if you're working on camelpox you are working on smallpox. -----
Well camelpox is a very strange one. We were told at the time that the reason they were working on camelpox is that they believed that the local population, the indigenous population would be immune and outsiders coming in would be susceptible to it. ----- They have openly acknowledged three agents. The anthrax, botulinum toxin as well as clostridium perfringens spores. The latter one produces - it's a notorious cause of gangrene, particularly in penetrating wounds during war time. It's a rather horrible death and presumably that was what Iraq - that's what Iraq claim was their interest in it. source:
PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/unscom/experts/rebuild.html

* Another mystery is Iraqi statements about work on camelpox virus at the Daura ... Even the small chance that Iraq is running an Ebola lab is a chilling prospect. ...
google blurb of a for-pay Science article on Iraq, Camelpox and Ebola
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/297/5584/1110

From the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, the Iranian opposition group that revealed Iran "peaceful" nuclear program:
Iran has begun production of weaponized anthrax and is actively working with at least five other pathogens, including smallpox, in a drive to build an arsenal of biological weapons.
Source: smallpoxbiosecurity.org
http://www.smallpoxbiosecurity.org/news_detail.asp?ID=15

* Iran has started production of weaponised anthrax spores, and is investigating efforts in other pathogens, including smallpox for its bioweapons arsenal. It is of interest, that Kenneth Alibek supervised the development of weapons grade smallpox during his tenure as scientific chief at Biopreparat (The USSR's Biopreparat was what has been dubbed a “toxic archipelago.” Scientists toiled on 52 different agents that could be used as weapons, among them the organisms causing smallpox, anthrax, plague, Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fevers, yellow fever, tularemia, brucellosis, Q fever, botulinum toxin, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis. Genetic hybrids were whipped up from the most deadly ingredients.)
Sources:
Defense Update News Commentary
http://www.defense-update.com/2004/04/irans-national-deterrent-weapons-of.html
National Academies Press
http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309076382/html/249.html

3: These bio-WMD efforts pre-dated serious genetic manipulation or understanding of the outputs of the recominint genetics projects that have now published the genetic structure of humans, mice, and many minor animals plus _MANY_ deadly virii like the 1918 flu, smallpox, etc.

4: Western morality does not allow us to withhold medical machinery from Iran, et al.

5: Medical knowledge has raced ahead of most people's understanding of it due to the inherent exponential growth of biochem/genetic knowledge multiplied by the Moore's law exponential growth curve of computational proteinology (The computational power applied to biomed-research and genetic or protein structure doubles about every 12 months (computer power doubles every 18 months ... but these are added to (not replacing) the existing supercomputer infrastructure)).

6: We can (TODAY) create virii that are genetically tailored to a particular person's cancer (trials have been ongoing for some time now) to kill ONLY thse cells. The exact same technique can be applied to making a virus that targets a specific ethnic group (Jews for example since Amhadinijad seems to be especially chipper today about neutralizing the Israeli nuclear "Samson-Option"). Since so many Jews have particular distinctive genetic characteristics, they can be targetted with a tailored virus that theoretically kills only them.
6a: Can it be done:
A reporter with no biology experience since high school is walked through doing genetic manipulation with ebay-equipment in under a week
"Biowar for Dummies"
http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/stories/storyReader$1439
* 'Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two.'
* 'Brent guesses he would need a couple million dollars to whip up a batch of smallpox from scratch. No need for state sponsors or stolen top-secret germ samples. “An advanced grad student could do it,” Brent says.'
* Here's the genetic map for smallpox (and many other virii)
smallpox(variola)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=genome&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=Overview&list_uids=10477
* 'Three years ago, Eckard Wimmer headed a team of researchers at SUNY Stony Brook that made live polio virus from scratch, part of a Defense Department project to prove the threat of synthetic bioweapons.'
* DNA synthesis is following a kind of accelerated Moore’s law—the faster and easier it gets, the faster and easier it gets. Last year, a group of researchers synthesized DNA strands of more than 300,000 base pairs—longer than the smallpox genome—using a method that eliminates most of the shake-and-bake lab steps I’d spent weeks learning.
* 'Carlson designs custom proteins on a computer in his Seattle home. According to his calculations, if the current pace of biotech proceeds for another decade, cooking up a lethal bug will be as easy and cheap as building a Web site.'

7: The mousepox example ... they created a weapon while trying to create a mouse contraceptive:
BBC fatal engineered-mouse-pox article
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/highlights/010117_mousepox.shtml
Biological Warfare news-archive on AU mouse-pox
http://www.zkea.com/archives/archive05002.html
The researchers, based in Canberra, Australia, were hoping to genetically engineer the mousepox virus to produce a contraceptive vaccine to control mouse populations.
When the genetically engineered mousepox was put into mice the mice simply died. The supposedly benign mousepox virus was discovered to have become a killer. And not only a killer, but a super-killer: 100% of the mice died. The scientists thought they might learn something useful about mouse contraception, but instead they had learned how to create a universally fatal virus. And this killer virus had been created via a very simple genetic manipulation, accessible to every country with a few PhD microbiologists."
The result was widespread terror within the defense and medical community. If this technique could be used on a mouse virus, why not a human one? Smallpox and mousepox are very closely related. Would smallpox+IL-4 create a superpox? This is very likely. As one scientist said, "if some idiot put IL-4 into smallpox, they'd increase the lethality quite dramatically ... I wouldn't want to be the one to do this experiment."
He won't need to. Others have volunteered; no doubt this question is being answered right now in clandestine labs around the globe. The technology is easily accessible, the technique is published. All it takes now is intent and a modest lab. And, if this particular technique doesn't work, perhaps another one will do the trick ...
NOTE: Nature has an for-fee article on:
Common Cold Virus Combined With Polio
Nature: article on Polio+Common-Cold
http://www.nature.com/nsu/010524/010524-9.html

NOTE ... these articles aren't mentioning it, but I remember from the time: every mouse in the BUILDING died ... rapidly, despite containment and attempts to save their lives. The building was (AFAICR) incinerated to prevent further spread.

From an article on 2002's vaccination of US troops vs Iraqi upgraded-Smallpox:
Center for Defense Information article on Iraqi smallpox
http://web.archive.org/web/20040515015507/cdi.org/terrorism/smallpox_vaccine.cfm
"According to biologists, growing and maintaining the smallpox virus would not be difficult for Iraq, a country that admitted in 1995 to pursuing a clandestine biological weapons program. A year earlier, UN inspectors examining Iraqi medical facilities uncovered an industrial-sized freeze dryer, the type used by microbiologists to extend the life of germ samples. It was labeled in Arabic �smallpox machine.� Iraqi officials claimed the freeze dryer was meant for the smallpox vaccine, not the virus.
Nevertheless, many former UN biological weapons inspectors in Iraq, including Richard Butler, are seriously concerned about the likelihood that Iraq has smallpox, possibly in weaponized form. "

My conclusion: we cannot stop gene-manipulating medical hardware, information, and methods from reaching Iran, Syria, etc, therefore we must change the Middle-East armageddonist/Wahibbi/"Twelver" anti-Jew/EU mindset ASAP before they screw up and launch an anti-Jew version of ebola/smallpox that evolves/genetically shifts to be fatal to all of Homo Sapiens worldwide.

Last note: On Friday 7-21-2006 ... during what is arguably the apparent start of a region-wide mass war, the Persian restaurant where my wife professionally belly-dances had an impromptu pre-Armageddon-party. The persian owner of the restaurant did not expect this but had actually cancelled several dancers for that night expecting a low turnout. Previous recent confrontations between the US and Iran caused dramatic drops in attendance ... only Americans or a few Arabs or Indians showed but no Persians ... this time was completely different ... and the partiers explicitly said it was because of the fighting between Iran-proxy HezboAllah and Israel ... and that Ahmadinijad claimed to be able to neutralize the threat from Israeli nuclear weapons.