The folks over at n+1 have a review of Inderjeet Parmar’s new book, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power, an intriguing history of how the Rockefeller World Empire came to use America to rule the world as the foundations came to create and dominate "policy" in the 1930s and 1940s:

The trustees of the large foundations comprised a cozy group of men – well-heeled, white, and Protestant – who were raised in the same milieu, attended the same colleges (over half graduated from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale), and belonged to the same social clubs. Such men could not help but share a worldview, and for most of 20th century there was no one in the room to argue the other side. Internally united and externally unimpeded, they acted with a speed and resolve that was impossible for elected politicians. While government officials mired themselves in political debates, foundation leaders acted: they commissioned research, trained students, launched pilot projects, cultivated allies among foreign governments, and built networks of experts. By the time the government overcame its inertia on an issue, it found a smooth and well-marked trail stretching ahead through the wilderness.

It is easy to overlook this quiet trailblazing because the big foundations rarely pushed extreme agendas, at least not at home. Unlike the think tanks of today, the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations were, and continue to be, studiously nonpartisan. They sought above all technocratic order: a strong federal government, a class of experts ready to guide it, and a docile public eager to follow. Abroad, they combined their faith in the rule of experts with the belief that the ideas and institutions best suited to the poorer countries of the world were those of the United States.

Central to this new ability to control was the creation of area studies programs in the post-WWII United States:

Along with the State Department, the foundations channeled millions of dollars to US universities to establish area studies programs, with the understanding that such programs would generate men who could then advise or serve the US foreign policymaking establishment. Area studies was wide-ranging by design, encompassing language instruction, economic and political assessments of fledgling countries, ethnographic research, and graduate training. The particular endeavors that received funding, however, inevitably concerned the areas and topics that were of the greatest strategic importance to the United States.

The creation of area studies programs were part of the American imperial project, and always have been. Even today, with Middle East and Islamic studies programs and departments under fire for being insufficiently pro-American or pro-Israel (because very people who actually hate a subject actually study that subject in any great depth to master culture and language), they are still integral to producing people who can function as "experts" for the state. One of the reasons I have done nothing of "value" with my Master of Arts in Arab Studies from Georgetown is there is so little that can actually be done with that degree that doesn’t somehow involve serving state power or objectifying the very people I studied. (And yet the Georgetown program still doesn’t meet with Bernard Lewis’ and Frank Gaffney’s approval!) I decided early on I wasn’t going to help anyone draw red circles on targeting maps or make "loans" for fraudulent development projects. (Oh, wait, that’s right, the whole notion of economic development is fraudulent…)

Area studies, in the case of the Middle East and Islam, broke the long relationship that linked the study of Islam with the study of Hebrew, and the study of the Qur’an with biblical knowledge. Once upon a time, most Old Testament scholars in the West had to be at least familiar with Arabic (before the discovery of Ugaritic, Arabic was the go-to language when problems arose in interpreting the meaning of biblical Hebrew), and most scholars of the Qur’an knew their Bible. Not to refute the Qur’an (most 19th century intellectuals were not so crass), but to be able to place the Qur’an as literature and scripture in time and place. Now, Old Testament scholars need never study Arabic, and most Islam scholars in the west are ensconced in history and area studies departments, and have little knowledge of Christian scripture, belief and practice.

And all because knowledge was used to dominate. And not enlighten.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an anarchist, seminarian, songwriter, sometime essayist and Jennifer's ever-loving husband. He blogs here and here.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone

I’ve noticed some heartburn in the West from the New Year’s message delivered by the Korean Central News Agency (there’s no permalink, click on the article “Joint New Year Editorial):

We must develop our single-minded unity without interruption into the solidest one which is carried forward generation after generation. Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of our Party and our people, is the banner of victory and glory of Songun Korea and the eternal centre of its unity. The dear respected Kim Jong Un is precisely the great Kim Jong Il. The whole Party, the entire army and all the people should possess a firm conviction that they will become human bulwarks and human shields in defending Kim Jong Un unto death, and follow the great Party for ever. [Emphasis added - CHF] We must become true persons who keep pace with their leader and his true comrades who work untiringly to creditably realize his intentions however hard the times are.

I’m not entirely sure what the heartburn is about. Isn’t this what all governments, more or less, demand of the people they govern? That they become “human bulwarks and human shields” defending the state and its leadership, which never puts itself or its members at risk?

I mean, I know we live in an era in which this kind of sacrifice for the state is pass. Which is why in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, George W. Bush asked not for sacrifice, or commitment, but rather told Americans to “go shopping,” visit Disney World and “enjoy life.” Clearly, the sacrifice was for a small group of others to make. The war would not even get paid for by raising taxes (which is, to be honest, what governments ought to do in wartime to cover expenses, if for no other reason then to show people that war is burden to bear and ought not to be a permanent condition). Clearly, Bush would not openly ask Americans to be a bulwark and a shield for his leadership. No Western leader in our consumerist age would. Or could.

Americans are very lucky, right now. The United States can wage war almost with impunity. There is little cost and little risk. Our capital-intensive form of war needs fewer and fewer bodies (the age of the mass armies has passed as has the age of the mass factory and the mass office and even the mass media), and thus does not need to conscript anyone. Those we attack are weak and far away, and possess no ability to retaliate in an effective manner. And so no American leader need demand that Americans be “human bulwarks and human shields” against some enemy, real or imagined.

But aren’t we anyway? I can imagine that American leaders would, if the need arose, toss away the lives of the people they govern without any thought. A day will come – I believe this fully – when American planes will bomb a people who can and will fight back. Effectively. We have for so long fought that weak that we have no idea what it is to fight the strong and the resolved. I do not know when that day will come, or who those people will be, but between our decaying power and our righteous (but terribly misguided) certainty that we are history’s meaning and direction, I believe it will come.

And then you watch. The demand will be made that we be bulwarks and shields. It will come.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an anarchist, seminarian, songwriter, sometime essayist and Jennifer's ever-loving husband. He blogs here and here.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone

I’ve long believed that the legitimacy of the state – that is, the state as seen and judged by those it governs – has been declining. But I’ve come to conclude that decline is not the right word, as we are not heading to an anti-state moment. Rather, the ability of the state to act and justify its actions is getting narrower. People are demanding as much of the state but becoming much harsher in their judgement of the state. And the state can no longer assume that because it acts, it can justify its actions merely because it’s the state. ("It’s the right thing to do because we say so. Nyaaah!")

Allow me to try and explain.

The modern state – the state birthed in the Protestant Enlightenment – possesses two very important monopolies. The first is on the moral and lawful use of violence and coercion. The state alone can compel human action and punish human beings for actions against the law or for failing to act. This is "moral" because many (perhaps most) human beings through time have viewed state violence (violence done by those who have been appointed agents of the state) as having a moral legitimacy that mere individual violence does not have. And this is a trait of the state for as long as human beings have lived together. This is not new, and it will not go away. This monopoly on lawful and moral violence is what makes the state the state.

The other monopoly the state possesses is that of meaning. The state alone, especially from early 19th century through to about the middle of the 20th, took to itself the sole or primary right to construct the narrative through which human life within (and often outside) the state would be valued and given purpose. The state would author the story and create the ideas that would determine the purpose and meaning of individual and collective human life, what human beings would live for, contribute for, sacrifice for and die for. The state would accept no alternative narratives, no different meanings – all were considered threats to the creation of a state-centered society (society being that community contiguous with the nation-state). The state was the sole creator and sustainer of human purpose, and would accept absolutely no dissent.

This is why even liberal states were, 100 years ago, incredibly intolerant, persecuting and prosecuting those holding alternative narratives.

In the West, this is largely an artifact of the Protestant Reformation, in which the church was effectively made subsidiary to the state while at the same time made contiguous with the state. Protestants, especially Germans and Scandinavians (but also the English to an extent), tend to confuse church, society and state because they all historically had the same boundaries.

All of this, particularly the monopoly on meaning, was necessary for the creation of mass societies, in which there were only individuals standing alone but also collectively as a mass of citizens before the state. The only subsidiary institutions and identities the state could allow in mass society were those that accepted the state as the center of society. Liberal Christianity, fraternal and professional organizations, trade unions, nationalistic and patriotic groups, all accepted not just the moral legitimacy of the state but also if its narrative, and its central place in human organization. They accepted the monopoly. There were degrees of liberal tolerance for non-conformity, but such tolerance was based on the state’s ability to be magnanimous about the "threat" non-conformity posed (or didn’t) to the state.

It was a time when the state could act, claim its justification for acting as "there is a state interest," and make that claim stick.

But nothing can last forever. The high water mark of this monopoly on meaning was the First World War, in which states – liberal and those less-than-liberal – were able to thoroughly organize societies and mobilize resources to fight the war. In doing so, states had to make promises about why the war was being fought, as mass war requires mass participation (if nowhere else, in the minds of the state’s citizens, which really is the most important real estate a state controls), and had to create narratives in which the state fighting was ever-virtuous and the states being fought were utter evil. There is no way the sacrifice demanded of Europe’s "citizens" (and also of Americans for the two years the United States was mobilized) could ever be justified given what the outcome of the war was to be – death, suffering, destruction and utter defeat for someone.

In a way, Europeans slowly (but only slowly) began to recoil against the reality of state-centered society and state-imposed meaning. Yes, the nation may be united in purpose, but if that purpose could only be realized in mass death and mass destruction and mass suffering, what was the point of it? Where was the promise of a better world? But I say only slowly, as Fascism and Communism sought to give meaning to the suffering, to find a noble a virtuous purpose in the suffering and destruction. A new world out of the old for the masses of humanity.

The Second World War came without the cheering crowds that greeting declarations of war in July and August of 1914. It was the necessary sequel to the first, because the first hadn’t really settled anything. And even though the state was able to mobilize, it did so without the utter brutality and totality the state mobilized for the First World War (save for the Soviet Union). And although the planners in the West had hoped to create a mass global community in and through the UN, the people of the world had other ideas.

Slowly in the West (and eventually elsewhere), people become consumers. This is much derided, mostly on the Left in the United States, who lament the loss of proper politics. After all, a consumer is nothing but a passive actor, taking in what is easily at hand. But consider it this way for a moment – a citizen can be conscripted, mobilized, propagandized, made demands of, forced to sacrifice, so on. But consumers really cannot be. Consumption is a one-way deal – you provide, I consume. My consumption is necessary to your survival, but you live and prosper not by making demands of me or compelling me to sacrifice but by providing me with what I want or what you have convinced me I want. This may have been an accident, the result of post-WWII American industry seeking markets for products, but people became consumers not just of goods and services but also of government. With the same expectation that the state would be a provider of services, and not the active organizer of humanity.

This was a slow change. It did not happen immediately. But the excesses of the state, particularly the monopoly of meaning, were taken to heart by many (though not all) liberals in the West. The total state had never set well with the liberal mindset, always seeming something of a betrayal of liberal ideals of individual freedom and autonomy. This isn’t to say liberalism always wins – it didn’t in the Gettysburg Address, and it didn’t with Woodrow Wilson – but the ideas of liberalism are powerful and compelling.

In the West, in particular, the state began to surrender, slowly, its claims to a monopoly of meaning. And this gave room for new, non-state meanings to arise. Let me be clear what happened and is happening here. People are not opting for new meanings that reject or sideline the state, nor are they creating alternate structures of governance. Rather, they are saying to the state:

The good life, the meaningful life, is not a life of sacrifice for the state, it is not building grand and great monuments for the state, it is not marching together to a bright new future planned and promised by the state, it is having families and loving children and doing satisfying work and worshiping God (or not) in a community of people who have come to care about each other, a community which on some level includes the nation. We will sacrifice for the defense of our homes if we have to, and at times come to the aid of others, but our lives have value outside what someone in a uniform or who leads a political party or who manages a state program tells us they have. And that value we ourselves give our lives comes first.

In Europe, the state became a provider of services to consumers. Monopoly provision of services, yes, but a long way from Bismark’s notion that the state provides welfare as part of its deal in which citizens sacrifice for the state. The state in the West, and increasingly all over the world, can no longer justify its actions by saying "we are the state." Not in a world of consumerism, liberalism and human rights. The state has to work much harder to do less than it could 100 years ago. At times and in places it is still very illiberal, especially the United States, where the powers the President is accumulating lie more potential than kinetic (mostly at home; it’s plenty kinetic for denizens of non-American nations) but would still make a Caesar blush. But the state is morally accountable to people in ways no one could have imagined in the midst of the First World War. And states, increasingly, cannot hide from that accountability. No matter how hard they try.

The state, in this, is still expected to protect people, and it is still expected that the state will educate, provide health care and a basic level of economic security for the society’s most vulnerable people. The welfare state is the ideal for much of the world. But it is a consumer welfare state, not a citizen welfare state. Welfare exists in order to allow people to define their own lives most successfully, rather than orienting their lives in service to and sacrifice for the state. (Whether this works is another matter.) The state is expected to provide its goods and services professionally, efficiently and at a cost people can afford. Meaning is less and less one of those services.

The Arab revolt of the last few months has been, I think, an interesting example of this. Most Arab states were formed in anti-colonial movements, and were expressions of national unity and greatness as a way of resisting outside domination. Long ago, however, these states failed to be able to deliver any meaningful services to the people they governed, and the meaning they created became anachronistic. The idea of the liberal consumer welfare state (that’s a mouthful) is powerful, and along with dignity and government accountability it was what was being fought for on the streets of Tunis and the streets of Cairo. And possibly even in Tripoli and Banghazi. It is what the Shia of Bahrain are fighting for. That value we ourselves give our lives comes first.

But these revolts also offer a preview of the crisis to come in government in the Western world too. Liberal governance promises accountability, but this is often a difficult promise to keep – what does it mean for government to be accountable? And accountable to consumers? Because you cannot dictate to consumers the terms under which they consume. We no longer live in the world of Phillip Dru: Administrator. The European Union and the United States will face the fact that the elites who rule are not properly accountable to much of anyone, and certainly not in elections. The same ideas that government exists to empower people which were used to topple Hosni Mubarak are also the same ideas animating the Tea Party and the protestors who occupied the Wisconsin state capitol. There is less coherence in the United States, is part because the Left and the Right have constructed ideas of citizenship and consumerism that are utterly at odds with each other. But also because America is a country held together by a confession of credal documents that founded and empower government – without the state, you don’t have a United States of America. (You would still have France without a French state, or Egypt without an Egyptian state.) We don’t share enough culture to be held together by anything other than our ideas of government. And when we don’t share those, we share nothing. You don’t have a United States without the United States government.

However, I’m going to leave this discussion for another time.

We don’t live in a libertarian moment. Or even an anti-state moment. People are protesting to make the state work better, to work for them. But it is an interesting moment, and one that is generally positive for liberty. Consider: no state could fight the First World War today. People would not accept it. Even in the last two states to mass mobilize, Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, such a war would be impossible. I do not believe Iranians and Iraqis would countenance mass mobilization. But the downside is states no longer need to mass mobilize for war or even ensure the loyalty of all citizens. Professional armies and mercenaries (from Qaddafiy’s West Africans to Xe) are significantly more loyal to the state than masses could be at this point. The state still retains that monopoly on force, the willingness to use it, and the ability to justify it.

But we do live in a time in which the state’s authority is growing narrower. It is easier, thanks to technology, for those of us who question the moral legitimacy of the state to speak and be heard. There are more ways for people to listen. There is no longer one overarching narrative of power and meaning in most of the world’s nation-states. States and governments are no longer believed to so embody the ideals they claim to represent. They are now more accountable to those ideals – including freedom – than ever before. And when they fall short, people will challenge them. It will not always be good or easy. And elites who rule will frequently continue to do so with little regard for the people they rule. All of these things are true, always have been and always will be. But it is a good day to believe in freedom.

And it is a good day to say "no" to the state.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an anarchist, seminarian, songwriter, sometime essayist and Jennifer's ever-loving husband. He blogs here [http://thefeatherblog.blogspot.com] and here.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone

We live in an interesting historical moment.

Several things impress me about the uprising in Libya in particular. The first was the early realization that an uprising there would not simply oust Brother Leader Muammar Qaddafiy, and would not do so easily. In fact, in order for Libyans to remove their brutal and corrupt leader, they were going to have to break the state he created in the process. And it seems they are doing just that, even as huge elements of Qaddafiy’s state defect.

The greatest risk of this was a lack of institutions or structures to govern Libya once Qaddafiy was gone. A friend and I noted in a conversation a decade ago that Libya was the Arab state most like Mohammad Siad Barre’s Somalia – a nation-state in which the dictator had either destroyed or co-opted all social structures and institutions with the state. There was no alternative to Siad Barre’s Somalia (so several well-educated Somali refugees described to me) except the clan structure, so when Somalis rose up and ousted Siad Barre, they by necessity had to destroy his state. No alternative structures quickly arose, and Somalia has been officially "stateless" for the last 20 years. (For any number of reasons, which I won’t go into here.)

The risk, then, of Libyans ousting Qaddafiy (or his dying, because we didn’t see an actual rebellion as a possibility then) was the risk that in breaking the Libyan state, there would be nothing left except the clan structure of Libya, and the kind of perpetual struggle for control of the nation among the clans would arise. Libya would become a failed state. It seemed a remote risk, however, as Qaddafiy seemed fairly permanent. (Again, I’m often forgetting what is for me the great lesson of 1989 – no state or governing arrangement is ever permanent.)

But I don’t think this likely in Libya because of the exiles, who have done an amazing job at coordinating and probably planning much of the uprising. They will likely prevent Libya from becoming a Somalia-style failed state.

There is a substantial (substantial for a country of 6 million people) Libyan exile community in the United States and the United Kingdom (and probably Switzerland, Italy and Dubai). They may be small, but they are economically and socially influential and, dare I say, powerful. I’ve known a few. Not many, but a few. I’m guessing (and I have no direct evidence of this) that the exiles have been central to coordinating the rebellion in Libya. No, I’m not saying that they were fomenting revolution – Libyans were likely ready for revolution, given the nature of their government and the success of the uprisings against Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. But things in Libya appeared to work very quickly. From the time Mubarak resigned to the beginning of the Revolution of February 17 was six days. I think this was probably the planning window, because I don’t think the Libyan uprising would have started without Mubarak’s resignation – the Libyans had to have some hope that once the rebellion started, it could oust Qaddafiy one way or the other. Anything else would be a repeat of the failed uprising of 1996.

In was in these few days I suspect the exiles worked connections inside the country, polled Libya’s diplomats, registered websites (www.libyafeb17.com was registered in the UK on February 16), arranged for ways to get cell-phone video out of the country, and printed all those flags. There was probably some long-existent planning for an uprising, and even some work once events in Tunisia proved successful. But without Mubarak’s resignation, I doubt very much the Benghazi uprising would have gone off when it did and the way it did. I’m guessing the revolution in Libya was quickly – but not hastily – planned.

More importantly, I think all involved in and out of Libya decided, with the inspiration of Tunisia and Egypt, that this would be it. There would be no turning back, and that breaking Qaddafiy’s state was a necessary element of ending Qaddafiy’s rule if that’s what it took to oust Qaddafiy.

The exiles will have to be careful how they proceed. It is important that while many Libyan exiles have had lots of al-Jazeera face time, the coverage has shown us a leaderless uprising in Libya itself. There is no Libyan Khomeini (from a revolutionary standpoint) publicly sitting underneath a tree in Paris and communicating his wishes via cassette tape to the protesting masses in Tehran. While their leadership is going to be essential in making sure Libya does not become a failed state, the exiles will also have to be very aware that they are not the people shedding blood and taking the real risks in the face of Qaddafiy’s violence. The exiles cannot simply assume leadership or demand property and privilege back. That will alienate too many Libyans who did the actual fighting.

I’m guessing Libya’s clan structure means that exiles are still pretty well connected to Libyans and Libya itself, and that clan structure will give their participation in ruling the country the legitimacy it might not otherwise have. It also helps, I think, that many of the exiles fled during Qaddafiy’s regime, and many were even part of it initially.

The next great decision the Libyans have to deal with is the desire by some in the West to "help." I am suspicious of American desires to help. In part because I’m not sure how needed it is, but also because I believe in autonomy and dignity – in the end, the only people who can truly liberate Libyans are Libyans themselves. In rising up and ridding themselves of Qaddafiy, they will have done the impossible, and that proves they are mighty. There is always a whiff of elitism or Fabianism to the "humanitarianism" of the powerful in the West, and I suspect in some quarters, there is absolutely nothing more frightening than people freeing themselves and ruling themselves. The whole point of Fabian socialism – and I suspect all of elite Progressivism (which uses populist Progressivism) – is to do for people so they will not do for themselves. That Libyans would topple a dictator, even one with little (but some) cachet in the West, is probably a serious threat to some. Intervention would be one way, I think, to keep the Libyans in line. People power is okay, so long as it actually doesn’t threaten any real change. If it does, it must be beaten down. Perhaps that is what Hillary Clinton was threatening when she made her ridiculous statement about Libya’s choices being "democracy" or chaos – pick the "right" leaders, ones acceptable to us, or we’ll make sure you’ll live with chaos.

I am, of course, inalterably opposed to any unilateral action on the part of the United States or its allies in Libya. The Libyan rebels appear to be handling this well by saying they don’t want or need Western action right now, but they reserve the right to ask for it under the auspices of the UN if they feel the need. That would make it "legal," though the motives of Washington would always be in question. Will the Libyans use or will they be used? So, I hope and pray they don’t ask for "help."

Now, on to the lessons we can learn from the Revolution of February 17. First, no state is safe. It turns out states are fairly brittle institutions, and when their legitimacy rests largely on force and coercion – as opposed to widespread consent and assent – then once people screw up their courage to face the state down, it breaks fairly quickly.

I don’t want to predict where the next revolutions can or will take place, but thinking about Libya with its exile community, a couple of examples come to mind. This revolution is probably the uprising the Cuban exiles would love to stage, but I suspect they can’t because the Cuban exiles likely do not have the connections or the moral legitimacy with enough Cubans to be able to coordinate an uprising. This is what happens when your anti-government fervor is based largely on a demand for restored property and privilege. I would hope that when the dust clears in Tripoli, Burmese exiles have a long sit down with some prominent Libyans and see what they can learn from this. I suspect Iranian exiles will be mobilized again, though like the Cubans, I suspect many of them lack moral legitimacy inside their former home countries. And the number of Iraqis living outside Iraq could also, at this point, help their suffering countrymen, who never got to liberate themselves from Saddam Hussein’s rule in the first place.

Finally, and maybe this is sheer fantasy on my part, but as the number of exiles and defectors from North Korea grows, this model presents one possibility for outside coordination reliant largely on internal networks to coordinate an uprising against a regime. I do not know if North Korean exiles are well placed, and any uprising in North Korea would likely have to start as a military mutiny.

The conditions in Libya are fairly unique, and so what has happened there over the last two weeks will likely not be repeated anywhere else. But we are not done with the Arab Revolutions of 2011. I do not know who the next Arab autocrat to fall will be – my early guess is President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, but this is only a guess. I do not know where the pressure on Gulf monarchs will go. As long as the uprising in Bahrain is primarily a Shia-Sunni dispute, the ruling Sunni minority have no reason to give any ground (and plenty of support from the Saudis to hold it). But apparently, the Bahraini Shia have suggested allowing foreigners living in Bahrain to be part of the political arrangement. If that gets the country’s Indians, Pakistanis and Filipinos out onto the streets, that would be very interesting. (I doubt it will, but who knows…) I can think of a few creaking dictators outside the Middle East who need toppling (Robert Mugabe comes to mind), but I’m not sure the "Libyan model" is applicable there either.

Not much to do but watch. And wonder. And be amazed by it all.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an anarchist, seminarian, songwriter, sometime essayist and Jennifer's ever-loving husband. He blogs here [http://thefeatherblog.blogspot.com] and here.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone

The BBC World Service interviewed the always-insightful Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday afternoon about events in Egypt. It's a good thing I don't scream at stupidity on the radio in the same way I scream at stupidity on teevee.

Gelb's line was simple: the Egyptian protestors cannot be supported because they may be under the direct control of Islamic radicals or, at best, the unwilling catspaws of the same Islamists (who may still be at work trying to subvert Tunisia too!). Thus, the United States government must support Hosni Mubarak, because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate. Push Mubarak to reform, but still support him.

This is not just the consensus establishment position. Linda Chavez on NPR, taking David Brook’s place during the weekly tte–tte with E. J. Dionne, could not stop talking about Islamists and the threat of the Ikhwan al Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood) taking advantage of the unrest to seize power and turn Egypt into a central part of the Caliphate. Dionne, a liberal, did not contest this understanding.

I understand this view – Mubarak or the Awful Green Menace — has, over the last few days, become a fairly uniform view held by those on the right. And it’s why it’s good to be opposed to "democracy" in the Arab world today, as opposed to a few years ago when George W. Bush was invading Iraq to liberate it and let 1,000 Arab flowers bloom. And anyone who was opposed was not properly humanitarian or worse, a racist who did not believe in Arab democracy. Which is, after all, God's gift to humanity through his chosen people, the United States of America.

Now, of course, all goodthinkers take Bibi Netanyahu’s line that Arabs are not yet ready for democracy. To paraphrase John McCain, we are all sclerotic Middle East autocrats now.

(As regards Iran, it is interesting to note that when Ahmadinejad steals one election, it’s out he should go for the DC crowd, but when Hosni Mubarak steals half-a-dozen, well, he should in good faith reform how he does business, and hold a freer election.)

I can’t speak for how the Republicans and conservatives misunderstand the world, but Gelb spoke at length about the Iranian revolution. And Gelb is about as good a spokesman for the establishment position, the view of the American elite, as we are going to get. It's clear from what he says that he completely misunderstands the Iranian Revolution. I’m guessing just about everyone who matters in Washington misunderstands it too.

For Gelb, the Iranian Revolution of 1978 was a mass popular uprising that was hijacked by Khomeini and his merry band of clerics. That’s why, for Gelb, even if the protestors are themselves not Islamists, the very fact they could be unwittingly used by banned Muslim Brotherhood means they should repressed. This was a view I first heard articulated by communists and socialists in the San Francisco Bay Area who had close associations with the Tudeh (Iran’s communist party) and the Mujahedin e Khalq (which in the late 1980s had supporters in Berkeley, including the owner of a Middle Eastern grocery store I frequently shopped at). Iran’s uprising was generally a secular affair (or communist one, if the leftists were to be believed) that was usurped by the clerics, who then imposed religion on the revolution. (I am told by a friend this is more or less what we were taught at Georgetown, too. Why don't I remember that?)

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Iranian Revolution was, from start to finish, a religious endeavor. Khomeini had been theorizing and writing about what Shia government should look like in the absence of the 12th Imam since the mid-1940s. By the early 1960s, he was the last Shia cleric effectively standing against Mohammed Reza Shah. That Khomeini began his religious career as a Sufi, far outside the Shia establishment, helped. (He was never really taken seriously by Iran's Shia establishment until it was too late.) But he was steadfastly unwilling to be co-opted by the imperial Iranian state or its patron, Washington — something many clerics were susceptible to. For that, Khomeini was exiled, first to Turkey, then Iraq, and then after Iraq expelled him (as part of the 1975 agreement finalizing the border between Iran and Iraq) to France. It is in France where Khomeini, and a number of followers and fellow travelers, orchestrated the revolution in Iran. Primarily by cassette tape. Once the police started killing protestors, the Shia cycle of mourning ensured that protests could be kept up on a daily basis. Whatever promises Khomeini made at the time (to retire to a seminary, to have democracy), it was clear he and he alone was the single true leader of the revolution and his 30-year-vision of an Islamic state would prevail. Anyone else who participated was either used or went along for the ride. Not the other way around.

The silence of the Sunni Islamist revolutionaries to events in Tunisia and Egypt, however, has been deafening. (Iran's government has been self-serving, but what else is to be expected?) But more to the point, there is no equivalent of Khomeini sitting underneath a tree in Paris directing events in Tunis or Cairo. (We would know, because people would be flocking to that person, or those people, as would reporters.) Revolutionary Islam has not been a potent force of protest in the Sunni world for the last 15 years or so. Had the Islamists of Egypt been able to mobilize a mass of people, they would have done so in October, 1981, when they killed Anwar Sadat, and toppled the government then. It didn’t happen, and it won’t happen now. The Islamists quickly resorted to terror, and the Egyptian government responded in kind. But as brutal as the Egyptian government was, the violence of the state had a moral legitimacy against the violence of the Islamists. Egyptians never wanted an Islamic state, not in the way Iranians aspired to some kind (though maybe not Khomeini’s kind) of Islamic state in 1978.

None of the forces in play in 1978 are in play here. Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Thawahiri are in no position to direct a revolution, wherever they may be (Northwest Frontier Province? Karachi? Dubai?). And there isn’t anyone who would listen to them anyway. The Brotherhood may be involved on some level, but I rather doubt it – Islamists wear their identities on their sleeves, they do not hide them. These protests are the protests of middle-class and lower-middle class young and educated people, the Egyptians most likely to believe the promises of secular democracy — of the Enlightenment — and then demand them.

Instead, we have an America with an un-adulterated Cold War outlook – fully support the friendly dictator (but don’t call him one; friends are never dictators) and push the dictator to reform his political system. I can think of some places where it worked – South Korea, Taiwan, maybe Chile – but I can also think of a whole bunch of places where it didn’t or isn’t – South Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan.

And the American elite have apparently decided that stakes are far higher now than they ever were during the Cold War. Losing a state in the Cold War meant only that it went over to the Soviet side. A terrible fate, as far as they were concerned, but not really the end of the world. But the existential fear about terrorism has made it imperative, from Washington's point of view, that Islamists be prevented by any means necessary from getting anywhere close to power. I have no doubt that the president of the United States (and this includes Barack Hussein Obama) would sanction genocide in a place like Egypt or Pakistan if it was believed to be necessary to ensure the survival of a state friendly to Washington and prevent even the possibility that Islamists would even breath state air. (After all, isn't this what happened in Al-Anbar province is Iraq in 2004 and 2005?)

Washington may mean what it says about Mubarak and reform, but at the end of the day, the Egyptian state has Washington over a barrel — Hosni can tell Hillary Clinton or President Obama as they sanctimoniously call for reform, "It's either me or the deep blue sea. Which do you choose?"

That choice will be clear. Because Washington is happy to be over that barrel. Washington's pronouncements in public on this matter, then, have little meaning. I suspect the Obama regime is saying something much different in private to Mubarak and his cronies, but I have absolutely no proof of that.

So the likely outcome of events in Egypt this week is that Mubarak will continue to hold on to power. He may even strengthen his grip, as Egypt's elites and governing institutions know from the example of Tunisia that merely sending the president and his family packing will not completely placate the protestors. Hang together, or hang one-by-one. (Whether his son succeeds is another matter entirely.) That said, if the Army has to choose between preserving itself and Mubarak's rule (if that ever becomes the choice), it will save itself.

But Washington has bought itself no friends. Not real ones. There are always friends to be had for cash. There may come a day — more than likely it will come sooner or later — when dictators like Mubarak (oh, sorry u2018bout that Mr. Biden, non-dictators like Mubarak) will not be able to rely on American power or American money. At some point, this regime in Egypt will pay for this (just as Iran's will pay for what happened last summer). And protestors next time will know that America does not mean what it says about democracy. That they are on their own. If America isn't going to be on your side even when you aren't anti-American, you might as well be anti-American in all the right ways, right? If the Islamists are smart, this failed revolt could work to their long-term advantage. We have been lucky so far that they have been a lot more violent than smart.

But that day, if and when it comes, is going to be a very interesting day.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an anarchist, seminarian, songwriter, sometime essayist and Jennifer's ever-loving husband. He blogs here [http://thefeatherblog.blogspot.com] and here.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone

I have been a long-time listener to the BBC World Service, since I was maybe 12 or 13, and sent my first letter to them when I was 15. Got it read on the air, too. It was a stupid letter, one that betrayed my complete and absolute ignorance of the inspiration for Gustav Holst’s Suite of the Planets. That’s what happens when you’re young, self-assured and publicly educated. So it goes. I am 30 years older, and significantly wiser. Most of the time.

As an aside, the BBC World Service is not what it used to be either. Not as serious. Not as newsy. Maybe as a callow youth in my teens and 20′s I was too impressed with tidbits from far away places. But while World Service isn’t as constantly dumb as CNN, it isn’t anywhere near as smart as it used to be. Radio Netherlands and Radio France International — in English — still manage smart, but the BBC has stuffed itself with irrelevant news, call-in shows (international call-in shows? Really, do we need those?) and fluff. At least the announcers don’t play dumb like the FoxNews and CNN crews.

Or maybe they really are dumb. Who knows?

At any rate, I was listening to a World Service podcast earlier this week and came across what has to be one of the most frightening interviews I’ve ever heard: a phone conversation with Alaina Podmorow, a 13-year-old Canadian "human rights activist" who has been raising money and "helping" educate women and girls in Afghanistan since she was nine-years-old.

Oh, they grow the annoying ones young in Canada.

It seems Podmorow, listening with her mother to a lecture about the condition of women in what is now NATO-occupied Afghanistan, felt both guilty and responsible. Guilty that she has privileges, and responsible that the plight of the women of Afghanistan be helped. Be educated. No, not educated. Schooled. (Because, as John Taylor Gatto points out, they are not the same thing.) Because, you see, Podmorow actually really likes school, and views it as a privilege everyone should have. A human right. One that crosses boundaries, cultures, continents and languages.

She even started a charity to fund schools in Afghanistan — Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan.

In the interview, her young voice was sharp with certainty. She has never had any doubts about this mission, this calling of hers, and mostly likely she never will. She has probably only had encouragement from family, friends and community. My guess is she has never questioned, never been questioned, never even faced, the possibility that this desire to educated Afghan women (a desire she says the women of Afghanistan also have, and no doubt many do) has come bundled with an imperialistic war, and is only possible because of that war. Only possible because Westerners are busily killing Afghans — including women and children. You know, all those wedding parties Americans and others have bombed, all those families shot up at checkpoints? All those villages shelled?

Melanie Butler, in a master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia, took Canadian women’s groups to task in 2008 for the efforts in Afghanistan, noting (from the abstract) that in "Canada as in the United States, government agencies have justified the military invasion of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which narratives of East versus West are performed." (I’ve had no luck brining up the thesis itself.) Podmorow quotes a bit of Butler’s thesis in a response:

At the heart of the relationship between feminism and imperialism is an Orientalist logic that posits Western women as exemplary and emancipated in relation to "Other" (Afro-Asian/colonized) women, thereby charging the former with the responsibility of saving the latter from their backwards (i.e. Muslim), uncivilized cultures.

Podmorow, who hasn’t had the benefit of a university education steeped in Frankfurt School theory and post-modernist lingo, and thus doesn’t entirely understand Butler’s rhetoric, at least grasps enough post-modernism to say she wants to "speak my truth" about the matter. And her truth is:

I have just turned 13 and I know there is a lot for me to learn but I am sure of this one thing. Education=peace. To me that means that once everybody is educated, peace will follow. In Afghanistan, girls don’t have the chance for that. Less than 10% of girls in Afghanistan are able to attend school and 11,000,000 Afghans are illiterate. The schools that are operating don’t have running water or bathroom facilities. There is a very low number of qualified teachers so people are not getting educated and when people aren’t educated, they fear the unknown, they are unable to support their families and they become desperate. I believe this creates violence and war, and supports beliefs that violate all human rights. I believe that education is the most powerful tool we have to move towards peace.

All this after nearly ten years of US and allied efforts in Afghanistan. How long, then, must soldiers stay, and continue bombing and killing, to ensure that the children of Afghanistan are "educated?"

And aren’t all those soldiers educated? This "education=peace" is a really nice idea that’s not grounded in any kind of reality. (What cute little corner of Canada did she grow up in to acquire this ridiculous notion?) Lots of really well-educated people fight, maim, kill and destroy. Indeed, it takes a very serious, quality education to engage in serious warmongering. Warmongering on a mass scale. Unless, of course, Podmorow is speaking of a magical, theoretical education with a particular ideological content that everyone should — no, must — have, in order to ensure peace. (I have lots of schooling, but I’m guessing I don’t have that.) And what, exactly, will Podmorow do with those who do not wish to be educated? Well, I’m guessing because she’s 13, she won’t even understand why anyone would ever not want what she sees as such a clear and present good for them. Not properly educated, she’ll probably conclude, and they’ll need to be forced to get that education. At gunpoint.

After all, isn’t that what soldiers and police officers are for? To make people go to school? And shoot them if they don’t?

Of course, none of the violence done by Western armies in Afghanistan matters. What matters is the local culture. Podmorow writes:

No one will ever tell me that Muslim women or any women think it’s ok to not be allowed to get educated or to have their daughters sold off at 8 years old or traded off at 4 years old because of cultural beliefs. No one will tell me that women in Afghanistan think it is ok for their daughters to have acid thrown in their faces. It makes me ill to think a 4-year-old girl must sleep in a barn and get raped daily by old men. It’s sick and wrong and I don’t care who calls me an Orientalist or whatever …

She notes, quoting a heroine of hers, Sally Armstrong, that "There are no Western rights or Eastern Rights, there are only human rights."

This is a nice sentiment, and look good on paper and proclaimed at conferences. But like all universals, it is a womb that births imperialism. And with it war, devastation, suffering and domination.

I am all for helping and assisting people who want help. I would not have spent six months in Saudi Arabia helping to train journalists (including this young lady, of whom I am inordinately proud) were that not the case. But my efforts followed neither flag nor army. And I did not assume that what I wanted for someone was what they wanted or should want for themselves.

Podmorow will probably live a long and relatively happy life, never wanting for work (there will always be foundation and tax-payer dollars to support whatever activism she is up to) and never considering the truly gruesome effects of what she agitates for. Thank God she’s a Canadian, and lives in a country where imperialism (outside of its UN garb) is simply not an option. It means that most of her efforts, outside Afghanistan, will have to rely more on something resembling cooperation, as opposed to coercion.

But she could grow up to be a very influential liberal warmonger, fawned over and listened to across the Western world, one who aches so much to make the world a better place that she doesn’t care what it costs — or who gets killed — in the process. She could end up with a great deal of blood on her hands.

While it probably seems unfair that I’m devoting a column to beating up on a very idealistic 13-year-old, consider that her excuse for doing what she is doing — improving the lives of the people of Afghanistan — is no different than the Bush regime’s excuse for invading Iraq. She will have decades to continue perpetrating this evil.

Personally, I see no good for others that involves sticking guns in people’s faces, threatening their lives, invading their countries, or bombing their cities. There is no help that stems from the barrel of a gun. Podmorow, and other liberal and left-wing warmongers throughout the West, seem to believe differently. (And their view seems to be a majority view, too.) It is how the center-left is selling the war in Afghanistan to Americans these days — a war to aid women and children. For them, it is possible to kill and destroy in order to aid and assist. Or they just don’t think about it, and keep their minds solely on the good the war allows them to do. This is the worst kind of war — self-righteous war to aid others. To support such war is to ignore the violence their very own governments are waging, the death their very own nations are dealing, because somehow it’s much less reprehensible for our governments to invade and occupy countries at a whim, to drop bombs on villages or kill families at checkpoints, than it is for some Pashtu man to throw acid in a 15-year-old’s face.

And that is an ethic I simply don’t understand.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian, essayist and songwriter currently living in Chicago.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone

The whole point, after all, of the philosophical and political developments since the Enlightenment is to create people incapable of killing other people in the name of God.

Ironically, since the Enlightenment’s triumphs, people no longer kill in the name of God but in the names of nation-states. Indeed, I think it can be suggested that the political achievement of the Enlightenment has been to create people who believe it necessary to kill others in the interest of something called "the nation," which is allegedly protecting and ensuring their freedom as individuals. (p.33)

Probably no religious thinker has so shaped my thinking on the state — and reflected my natural anarchism — as has Hauerwas. In fact, I’d love to spend some time here at some point outlining Hauerwas’ thoughts on the church and the state. They are worth reviewing and considering, especially for LRC readers. But that will not be today.

This quote from Hauerwas points out something interesting, something I hadn’t really grasped (but had noticed) prior to reading it: in the "enlightened" West, there is an almost instinctive revulsion among most "civilized" westerners to killing in the name of God (though we are not as civilized and enlightened as we, or Hauerwas, claim). As I remember the days, weeks and years following the September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on New York and northern Virginia, it was as much the fact that the United States was attacked in the name of someone’s God that was so bothersome as it was the very attacks themselves.

There was something so, well, medieval about a great big modern nation-state being at war with a band of cave-based, scripture-quoting religious warriors. While the General Boykins of America were busy telling soldiers and their sycophants that this was all about whose deity was "the biggest," most war supporters on the right and the left (such as Tom Friedman) saw the struggle as one between the modern world and the ancient, between isolated tribe and integrated nation, between a connected world living in relative peace and harmony under civilized rules versus a war-torn world ruled by intolerant, irreconcilable camps of devout believers.

A war in which there was a unique problem with Islam and Muslims, a unique rejection of modernity and all it entailed, that could be fixed through the Islamic world’s forcible inclusion in this peaceful, integrated great global market. A simple matter of firm but effective human resource management through bombing, invading and state buildings (or do I repeat myself using those terms?).

This is why I find Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda such a useful book. Juergensmeyer, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has apparently written widely on the subject of religious identity and resistance to the secular nation-state. He doesn’t just focus on Islam, but rather considers all religious opposition to secular nationalism — Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Sikh and Buddhist — both relatively peaceful and extremely violent (and yes, there has been Buddhist violence). And he sees in all of this one phenomenon, one that is on hand very modern and, on the other hand, very anti-modernist.

By nation-state, Juergensmeyer begins with a very traditional definition — that entity which has a monopoly on lawful violence within a given geographic area. He goes on, however, to evaluate the nation-state as a way of imposing meaning upon a group of people:

In such an organization [as the modern European and American nation-state], individuals are linked to a centralized all-embracing, democratic political system that is unaffected by other affiliations, be they ethnic, cultural, or religious. That linkage is sealed by an emotional sense of identification with a geographical area and a loyalty to a particular people, an identity that is part of the feeling of nationalism. (p.13)

Nationalism as defined here is the product of a time and place — England and North America in the 18th century. While Juergensmeyer never go so far as to call secular nationalism a religion (though he quotes Tocqueville on the matter), it clearly is. It makes universal truth claims and allows for no alternative truth claims to organize themselves. In fact, I am convinced that the nation-state is the successor of the church in the Enlightenment world, in that it is the place where salvation is defined (as earthly) and where salvation is worked out (with not so much fear and trembling).

Juergensmeyer begins by examining the moral legitimacy of the nation-state in the decolonizing, post-WWII world:

Not only Western academics but also a good number of new leaders — especially those in the emerging nations created out of former colonial empires — were swept up by the vision of a world of free and equal secular nations. The concept of secular nationalism gave them an ideological justification for being, and the electorate that subscribed to it provided them power bases from which they could vault into positions of leadership ahead of traditional ethnic and religious figures. But secularism was more than just a political issue; it was also a matter of personal identity. A new kind of person had come into existence — the "Indian nationalist" or "Ceylonese nationalist" who had an abiding faith in a secular nationalism identified with his of her homeland. (p.11)

The high water mark of this is the mid-1950s, the time of Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and Tito, when the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia bubbled with enthusiasm and Western observers wrote approvingly of development and progress. Ethnic minorities in particular embraced secular nationalism tightly to "ensure that the public life of the country would not be dominated completely by the majority religious community" (p.11).

But several things undid it all. First, according to Juergensmeyer, the nation-state in much of the world never took hold outside the minds and hearts of urban elites — it never became a sacred notion or a sacred narrative for enough people to matter. Religious, tribal and local identities persisted, often in opposition to secular nationalism (and often derided as "communalism" or "confessionalism" when condemned by ruling elites).

Related to this first issue is a second, that secular identities were never particularly satisfying and were never able to answer deeper questions of cosmic meaning, especially in the midst of struggle. "Who are we?" usually begs a better, deeper and more fulfilling answer than "citizens of …". Religion can answer that question in a way secularism cannot. (And when secularism tries to, it careens madly out of control.)

Finally, Juergensmeyer notes that secular nationalism is the product of a long evolution in Europe and North America, the result of very particular historical forces at work that grant it a great deal of legitimacy in that context. What arose in Christian Europe, makes sense and works in (post-)Christian Europe, has proven to be a fundamental disappointment at delivering promised freedom (both individual and national), economic development, and anything remotely resembling a just social order. Secular-nationalism in much of the world (and not just outside the West) makes promises it simply cannot keep.

However, Juergensmeyer is quick to note that while many of the political movements he profiles in the book are challenging the secular nation-state, it is only secularism they are at war with, and not the nation-state itself:

This means that they are less concerned about the political structure of the nation-state than they are about the political ideology that underlies it. The focus on the rationale for having a state, the moral basis for politics, and the reasons why a state should elicit loyalty. They often reject the European and American notion that nationalism can be defined solely as a matter of secular contract. At the same time, however, many of them see no contradiction in affirming certain forms of political organization that have developed in the West, such as the democratic procedures of the nation-state, as long as they are legitimized not be the secular idea of a social contract by traditional principles of religion. Other religious activist [sic] reject the idea of the modern nation altogether and advocate a kind of religious transnationalism. But there is no inherent bias against the nation-state by religious activists in general. (p.6—7)

Juergensmeyer then begins examining religious movements region by region, beginning with the Middle East. I won’t do a blow-by-blow here, but I will hit some high points. I’ve been studying Islamic movements of this kind for close to 20 years, and I found no glaring errors in Juergensmeyer’s chapter on the Middle East. I also found this the least interesting chapter. His section on Israel focuses almost exclusively on Kach and Kahane Chai while ignoring the mystic messianic nationalism of Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), which has its roots in Chasidic mysticism. In fact, given the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s beginnings in a branch of Shia sufism, Juergensmeyer could have at least pondered why supposedly peaceful and harmless mysticism can contribute so significantly to violent religious nationalism (also in Hindu and Buddhist nationalism). But that’s quibbling, and probably outside the scope of his book.

Most interesting was his focus on the Indian subcontinent, which in the last 30 years has seen Hindu and Sikh nationalism erupt violently in India (beginning in the 1970s, when a successor of Mohandas Ghandi declared "total war" on the state, prompting then Prime Minister Indira Ghandi to declare an "emergency" and suspend the constitution for several years) and a brutal ethno-religious civil war in Sri Lanka (that was sometimes three way, as Buddhists attempted to press the Sri Lankan government in a more Buddhist direction, often violently) that only recently ended. It would have been nice, for example, for Juergensmeyer to have described the unrest in India in the 1970s in more than two sentences, and it would have been especially nice had he cited a source when describing how Christian Tamils were involved in creating suicide bombing as a technique of war. Also, given his insistence on calling Hindu nationalism a "global" phenomena, it would have been nice to, however briefly, ask whether Hindu identity plays any significant political role in countries with large Indian populations, such as Fiji or Trinidad, and how overtly Hindu politicians organize and campaign among Indians in the very Muslim states of the Arabian Gulf.

In dealing with the Americas, Juergensmeyer reviews what might be called "the usual suspects" — white supremacists who call themselves (but are only tangentially) Christian, law-obsessed Reconstructionists, and a handful of other rightists who cannot separate God from country or government. He seems to group all of these folks together into something he calls "the Christian militia," tough he never bothers explaining his use of the term.

However, he also adds to the understanding of religious rebellion the liberation theologians of North and Latin America, seeing as its high water mark the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 and the Sandinista regime of the 1980s:

One of the leaders of the Sandinista movement declared that she was in the revolution because of her Christian faith, explaining that it helped her to "live the gospel better." (p.166)

However, Juergensmeyer also notes the unique circumstances of Nicaragua:

Nicaraguan nationalism is characteristic of both the church’s conservative leadership and its rebels. For this reason, a genuine Nicaraguan nationalist revolution, one advertised as by and for the people, as the Sandinistas claimed theirs to be, had to be in some sense linked with the church. Thus, in Nicaragua the socialist revolution was also a religious revolution. (p.166—167)

Still, this is the first time I’ve ever seen liberation theology linked to religious resistance/rebellion/violence in general. It ought to be, as anyone who believes and preaches "the Revolution and the Kingdom of God are the same thing," clearly espouses violence (p.166). I study at a seminary in thrall to liberation theology, and there is virtually no difference between the language of Sayyed Qutb and Maulana Maududi — the intellectual architects of the Revolutionary Islam of the Ikhwan al Muslimin as well as al Qaeda — or the neoconservatives of the departed Bush regime and that of a typical liberation theologian. (Gustavo Gutierrez would have made a fantastic speechwriter for George W. Bush.) Liberation theology is soaked in the language of righteous violence. It may have little actual violence to its name, but only because the appeal of liberation theology and "just revolution" (as opposed to "just war") in and out of Latin America is very limited.

(As one professor at my seminary noted, the theologians of Latin America offered their parishioners liberation, and many of those worshipers opted for the Holy Spirit in the form of Pentecostalism.)

Juergensmeyer’s book is a study, and so he comes to few conclusions. He states that religion is almost never a primary cause of conflict — material conditions, such as the promises effectively made and unfulfilled by modernity, or foreign occupation, almost always begin conflicts. However, religion contributes to conflict because it provides a framework to see a limited conflict as cosmic and all-embracing, and religion can justify violence in the way only the state can:

When antimodernism, anti-Americanism, and antiglobalization are expressed in the drama of religious struggle, religion brings in a whole new set of elements. For one thing religion personalizes the conflict. It provides personal rewards — religious merit, redemption, the promise of heavenly luxuries — to those who struggle in conflicts that otherwise have only social benefits. It also provides vehicles of social mobilization that embrace vast numbers of supporters who otherwise would not be mobilized around social or political issues. In many cases, it provides an organizational network of local churches, mosques, temples, and religious associations from which patterns of leadership and support may be tapped. It gives the legitimacy of moral righteousness in political encounter. …

… When the template of spiritual battle is implanted onto a worldly conflict, it dramatically changes how those engaged in it perceive that conflict. It absolutizes the conflict into extreme opposing positions and demonizes opponents by imagining them to be satanic powers. This absolutism makes compromise difficult to achieve and holds out the promise of total victory through divine intervention. A sacred war that is waged in a godly span of time need not be won immediately, however. The time line of sacred struggle is vast, perhaps even eternal. (p.255)

But in the end, Juergensmeyer is a supporter of the secular nation-state, and believes that religious communities and identities have no choice but to accept the supremacy of secular nationalism and, to one extent or another, surrender to it. His ideal settlement between competing religious nationalisms is the Good Friday Accords, the agreement that ended — for now — the conflict between Catholics, Protestants and the British government in Northern Ireland.

This may be true, especially given that most religious nationalisms don’t want to abolish the nation-state, but merely capture it and rule it. Juergensmeyer notes that after several decades of religious violence against the state, only in Iran have religious revolutionaries succeeded in doing just that — seizing the state. Religious activists have grasped at alternatives to the collapsing moral legitimacy of the state, but they are unable at this point to construct a meaningful and effective alternative. Or, as with the Hindu nationalist BJP, they have proven little different than the secular parties they have supplanted.

So if one is looking for an alternative to the state, religious rebellion — at least that Juergensmeyer describes in this study — is not the place to start. The book is full of examples of religious leaders and followers from every faith examined demanding and claiming the privilege to write and administer laws, shape culture, identify and defeat evil. That is the way of violence. Most religions have a way of non-violence, of surrendering claims to privilege and power (indeed, that is what Hauerwas says Christ’s church ought to do), but that surrender demands more discipline and a great deal more faith than does becoming a mere interest group in a democratic polity. Or a revolutionary group.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian who lives in Chicago, where he loves and cares for his wife, Jennifer, and spends too much time thinking about the state, power and the gathering of God’s people called “the church.”

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone

It’s what motivated the Bush regime’s invasion of Iraq, the hope that "liberating" Iraqis, ending the tyranny of the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein, would free Iraqis, changing their conditions to allow them — and through their example, the whole region — to flourish. (The invasion of Iraq would have very likely happened and failed, for all the same reasons, had Al Gore been president after September 11, 2001.) It’s what motivated Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, and continues to motivate liberal/progressive, conservative/neocon and nationalist/internationalist approaches to the region. We Americans have progress and civilization on our side, the region is plagued by cruel government, the situation demands action, and we Americans possess the wisdom and intelligence to act.

None of this is new, of course, nor is any of this limited to the Middle East. The world has been a playground of sorts for American moralists and planners for more than 100 years, and our worst impulses to meddle abroad derive from the presidency of that great racist Woodrow Wilson. As the pinnacle of Western (and thus world) civilization, the United States is uniquely endowed with the ability to save the world from its sin and evil. After all, if everyone can come here and become an American, doesn’t it make sense that one could equally export Americanism to the entire world?

Anyway, this infatuation with the Middle East, with wiping out corrupt power and freeing the region’s people is not new. I recently came across an ancient example of such thinking in the form of a crumbling old book The Eastern Question in Prophecy: Six Lectures on the Rise and Decline of Mahometanism, and the Events to Follow, as Presented in the Prophesies of St. John by Rev. Samuel J. Niccolls, pastor at the Second Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri, published in 1877. By the "Prophesies of St. John," Niccolls means Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. He is especially focused on chapters 9 (which he believes foretells the rise of Islam) and 16 (which then tells of the end of the Ottoman Empire, and thus the fall of Islam).

These sermons were not just an intellectual exercise, they were timely for 1877 — that was the year that Russia responded to Ottoman massacres in Bulgaria (themselves a response to the Bulgarian uprising of the previous year) by attacking the Ottoman Empire on two fronts — through the Balkans and in the Caucasus Mountains. Russian would win that war fairly easily, and in the following year, imposed a fairly humiliating peace on Turkey that stripped it of most of its Balkan territories. (That peace was quickly redone by the Congress of Berlin.) So, Niccolls has what are for him current events in mind as he considers "biblical prophesy."

About the rise of Islam, consider the images of Revelation 9 — a great pit belching smoke and locusts "like horses prepared for battle" (v.7, ESV) that roam the earth; the "mounted troops" (v.16, ESV) released by the four angels bound at the "great river Euphrates" (v.14, ESV) through which "a third of mankind was killed, by the fire and smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths" (v.18, ESV). So, with Edward Gibbon as his primary source, Niccolls preached the following:

He [the Prophet Muhammad] stands forth pre-eminently as the false prophet of the Christian centuries; and still, after the lapse of twelve hundred years, he is revered by millions as the apostle of God. The Koran, a strange mixture of imposture and fanaticism, of Arabian and Jewish traditions, and truths taken from the Scriptures, in a comparatively brief space of time became the accepted revelation of God, to at least the third part of the then known world. Like "smoke" filling the air, it darkened the minds of men and shut out the true light of the Divine Word. It was indeed a revelation from the pit of darkness, a representation of the living God, and of the truth necessary for salvation that well might have been conceived in hell, in order to destroy the souls of men. If the historian of the present, were to search for an emblem to describe the mental and spiritual condition of those who accept the Koran, he could find nothing more appropriate than to say "that they are covered with a cloud of smoke that shuts out all true light."

Under the teachings and inspiration of this new faith, grew up those formidable bands of armed fanatics, who came from Arabia to spread themselves like swarms of locusts over the Eastern World. Gibbon describes those who flocked to the banner of the false prophet, allured by the prospect of conquest and plunder, of compelled by the sword, as "myriads." These hosts of bearded and turbaned horsemen, known as the Saracens, passing rapidly to and fro, as though carried on wings, were irresistible in the power. (p.20—21)

The emergence of Islam, described in the first 11 verses of chapter 9, culminates in the rise of the Ottoman Turkish state in the remaining verses. But it is a corrupt, violent and quickly expiring power. And he ties it directly to scripture. After all, Niccolls asks, haven’t the Turks, in massacring Bulgarians and other Christian Slavs (and non-Slavic Christians) within their empire killed "a third of mankind?" Turkey’s power is declining, and will soon end, largely because of the empire’s barbarism, decadence and corruption:

Read the accounts of Turkish barbarities, of their robberies and oppressions, practiced upon their own subjects in these later days, and you may have some faint conception of what their rule has been for ages; and you may understand, also, why under long centuries of oppression, the populace of Turkey has decreased and become abject and base. (p.53—54)

The fanaticism of Islam (it is not real religion, according to Niccolls), the lack of civil law, the legal inequality of Christians within the Ottoman lands, and polygamy, which destroys the family, have all contributed to the degeneracy of Ottoman government and society. These wouldn’t be matters for biblical prophesy, but Niccolls is convinced that Revelation 16, particularly v.12 describes the coming end of the Ottoman regime:

The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare the way for the kings from the east. (Rev.16:12, ESV)

Like many preachers trying to explain prophesy on the basis of current events, Niccolls ignores the context of v.12, what comes before and after. Indeed, like many of his ilk, he completely ignores Revelation as a narrative and story, and instead fixates on specific verses that seem pertinent given the events in the Balkans that he, and his congregation, are reading about in the newspapers.

The next act in the great drama, is the "preparation of the way." Something is to transpire, which shall not only remove the curse of Mahometan rule from the Euphrates to the Nile, but it will also open up the way for another glorious event — a new rule, a new kingdom — that of the "Kings of the East." (p.56—57)

European diplomacy can forestall the fulfillment of prophesy, but cannot prevent it. He has some harsh words for Britain, France and Austria — states that have, in the past, acted to preserve the Ottoman Empire against Russian encroachment (such as in the Crimean War). But he is, at the same time, dismissive. Ottoman power is doomed, so he can speculate on what the future will look like:

But, the Mahometan power removed, what next? What power will take its place? What is the nature of that strife which makes it necessary for Turkish rule to be out of the way? … If the crescent and the cross meet, who can doubt the issue? But it is not by the sword, that the true gospel triumphs. Sword and battle may prepare the way; they are God’s pioneers to remove barriers, aad [sic] take away hindrances, but the gospel is something essentially different in its workings.

Imagine the oppression of Turkish rule taken off the region that it now occupies, the crescent supplanted by the cross, on the dome of St. Sophia, and the Mosque of Omar — what wonderful and beneficent changes must follow? A land, by nature one of the richest and most fertile on earth, a land which draws its pilgrims from every quarter of the earth, to visit the ruins of its former greatness, would soon be redeemed and made to bloom like a garden. "The Kings of the East," the new power that is to take the place of the old, who are they? This is the question the future is to answer. Prophesy gives us hints concerning it, which we will consider on a future occasion. I can only say now, it is not Russia. The latter may be God’s chosen pioneer to open the way for the "Kings of the East," but it is not the power destined to rule over the land of promise. (p.58—60)

The "land of promise." Niccolls celebrates the increased Jewish presence in the Middle East, but this is more than 20 years before the Zionist Congress, and that Jewish presence is not central to his theology. There is no whiff of Darbyism here, no rapture or great war and tribulation. He is more post-millenialist than pre — the progress and power of the West are evidence enough that the time of Jesus coming back is drawing nigh. There are also elements here that are typical of both religious and secular ideas of liberation: people captive to corrupt and evil power, living in a land of potential wealth who, if simply freed from that evil by outsiders noble and well-intentioned, could be the people God intends them to be.

As an aside for those Lutherans among you, if Niccolls, a 19th century progressive Presbyterian, sounds like he’s preaching a theology of glory — and was there any other theology in the 19th century? — this ought to confirm it:

The power of Christ is daily becoming more manifest in the world, and his enemies are more bitter and outspoken. The hour also seems to be at hand, when He shall make a still more glorious revelation of his power. Who among you can rejoice in the triumph of his cross, and look with eager hope for the day of his appearing. (p.60)

I will grant Niccolls some sense of humility. He makes no predictions as to who the "kings of the east" are. He places some, but not many, of his hopes in Russia. But like many 19th Western Christians (and his brethren in the 20th and 21st), Niccolls tends to confuse gospel, civilization and progress into One Great and Wonderful Thing that reason, and reason alone, can and ought to grasp.

These old kingdoms and dynasties, so long cursed with oppression, ignorance, and superstition, would feel the power of a new life among them, consequent upon the introduction of Christian civilization. The removal of Turkish power would prepare the way for the evangelization of the kingdoms of the East.

All this is undoubtedly true. The Turkish rule, the embodiment of Islamism, has been a curse to Asia as well as a plague to Europe. It has spread like a flood over the great highway of the world’s trade and commerce, and for 800 years made it impassable. Europe had to seek Asia by the Cape of Good Hope. The social life and the government established by the Mahometans have been a "hindrance" to the nations of the East; Mahometanism more than heathenism, has been an obstacle to the spread of the Gospel. It is death for any of its adherents to embrace Christianity. All of the essential conditions of its rule are hostile to the Gospel, for the latter does not thrive in an atmosphere of tyranny and immorality. Unquestionably, the removal of the Turkish rule would be a blessing to civilization, to humanity and to religion. It would open the old channel of trade and commerce to the heart of Asia, so long blocked up, and along this highway would go the influences that would renew the lands of the East. The manhood of oppressed Christians would be developed, the blessings of a just rule and stable laws be brought to them, education would displace ignorance and superstition, and thus, all working together, would prepare the way for the triumph of Christianity. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the utter downfall of the Turkish Empire would mark the beginning of new and better days for Asia. (p.63—64)

We have the fortune of living 140 years after Niccolls preached (as I recall, he died about a century ago). He never lived to see the end of the Ottoman Empire, and whether he would have seen the League of Nations mandate system for the Arab states of the Ottoman Empire, as well as Ataturk’s militant secularism and the founding of the nation-state of Israel, as "Christian civilization," is a question that can never be answered.

Niccolls saw the sweeping away of the Ottoman Empire, something that would take a simple exercise of power, as opening the world to all sorts of new and wonderful possibilities. His image of the Middle East is that of the blank slate, the people oppressed who once freed of their oppression can become what the holder of the slate (and the chalk) wants them to become. They are mere objects in Niccolls’ drama, not subjects creating their own future. They are not really free, because they cannot be anything more than Niccolls wants them to be (indeed, I suspect he thought them incapable). I am willing to bet his notion of the "Kings of the East" did not include Hashemites, Aal Sauds, Baa’athists, Naserists, Palestinian revolutionaries or the Ikhwan al-Muslimin. There is no messiness, no struggle, no self-definition, just wonderful potential waiting to be unlocked by an act of will undertaken by a properly motivated outsider. Raise your hand if any of this sounds familiar.

And by failing to appreciate Islam on its own terms, he can see it as nothing that anyone could honestly embrace, believe and live. Thus, ending corrupt "Mahometan" state power ends Islam, because no honest and decent human being could truly believe in it unless they were compelled in the first place. He would have been utterly befuddled, and perhaps apoplectic, about the "persistence" of Islam in much the same way Antonio Gramsci was about the "persistence" of capitalism.

Or the way I am sometimes aggravated by the persistence of this kind of wishful thinking.

Because the thinking Niccolls exemplifies is still with us, present in liberal democracy advocates and conservative nationalists who celebrate "colored" revolutions, who believe that Iranians ache to bid rid of their state, if only Americans would act. One push, the evil is done for and people can be free to flourish. It doesn’t work that way, of course. Such thinking, which animated Niccolls and later Woodrow Wilson, who saw in German militarism a similar evil (is there something about late 19th century Presbyterians?), leaves no room for unintended consequences and the limits of human power and abilities. And yet those limits and those consequences are very, very real. Thus, one act of meddling begets another act of meddling in order to secure the desired outcome, and for nearly 100 years, the West has been trying fruitlessly to secure this better future for the Middle East that Niccolls dreamed of.

I suspect few would agree with Niccolls these days when he preached: "Unquestionably, the removal of the Turkish rule would be a blessing to civilization, to humanity and to religion." Which ought to give anyone pause the next time anyone speaks such words about any people in any part of the world.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian who lives in Chicago, where he loves and cares for his wife, Jennifer, and spends too much time thinking about the state, power and the gathering of God’s people called “the church.”

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The news stories say it all, I think.

Antiwar.com quotes Arab members of the Israeli parliament as being warned by Israel’s intelligence agencies, "There is a limit to democracy." Opposition to Israel’s current Gaza onslaught by Israel’s own Arab citizens will not be allowed, and that senior Arab political and religious leaders in Israel will be held responsible for all unrest they may encourage or provoke. Any who stoke unrest risk their positions and possibly even their liberty and lives.

And here, for years, we’ve been told by apologists — umm, sorry, spokespeople and defenders — for Israel that "their Arabs" have the same right as all Israeli citizens. When the Israeli state starts threatening Jewish Israelis this way (and maybe it is, who knows?) then we’ll see some real equality.

On the BBC World Service Thursday, former prime minister of Israel Shimon Perez told the interviewer that public opinion would not determine when the "war" against Gaza would end. The Israeli state has a duty, first and foremost, to protect its citizens, and that duty could never be made subservient to "public opinion." Only the state itself would determine when that duty was carried out properly, when its murderous military operations would end.

In these two pieces, you have the logic of the state and of state power — and of all states — neatly folded into one exquisite little lethal origami animal.

First, the state makes the determination of who belongs to the state, and of what constitutes belonging. In Israel, Arabs may be "citizens," but they are hardly equal citizens. And yet, excluded as they are, they are still subject to the state. Loyalty is still demanded of them, obedience to it laws and edicts and principles is still required, and allegiance is still expected. The lesson is clear — the state has the right to reject some "citizens," to use disproportionate state power to keep them "in line," but they, in turn, cannot reject the state. The only response they are allowed it to appeal to the state’s own founding principles or noblest ideals using the official organs of the state. Or approved non-state means ("We shall overcome someday!").

But secession is simply not allowed. Non-participation is not allowed. Rejection is not allowed. There is no saying "no" to the state that says "no" to you.

Of course, the "progressive" answer to forceful exclusion by the state is forceful inclusion, the expectation being that those deliberately and purposefully excluded from full rights and privileges of "citizenship" really ache to have them. And maybe some do. But maybe some don’t. Maybe many don’t. Their opinions, however, do not matter. The principle of the progressive here is the same statist principle — there is no saying "no" to the state. All must be subject equally to state power, all must be allowed or encouraged (or possibly even compelled) to exercise their "rights, duties and responsibilities as citizens."

Second, for all those who harbor the illusion that the state exists to protect you, Perez’s statement makes it clear — the state gets to determine not only who gets protected, but what protection even means. You don’t get to choose to be protected, you don’t get to choose how you are protected, you don’t even get to choose whether or not you want state protection. You are "protected" when you don’t want it in ways you never wanted, and left "unprotected" in ways you don’t want. But you don’t get to choose. The state wages war either nearby or far away (with the same indiscriminately murderous results) and calls this protection and, voil, you are protected. You don’t get to object, to say "excuse me, but that’s not what I asked for or wanted." You don’t get to say, "well, I don’t feel safer" or "I don’t believe the deaths of hundreds or many thousands makes me any safer."

I say this as a first-hand witness and survivor of the carnage at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I don’t consider myself protected by anything American arms have done since that day. I wouldn’t have voted for the Afghanistan war as waged or the Iraq war at all. I do not approve of much that the Bush regime has done in my name since then, and I suspect I will approve of nothing the Obama regime will continue to do in my name.

(Indeed, I shudder at the prospect of renewed humanitarian militarism at the hands of a Barack Obama regime.)

But, of course, none of that matters — something Shimon Perez also makes quite clear. Public opinion is irrelevant when governments of democratic societies make war. It makes me wonder just why democracy, in this instance, is any better than aristocracy or dictatorship? Really, just how "accountable" are democratic governments anyway? The only people who feel truly represented are those most emotionally and ideologically tied to the ruler and the regime — Bush Republicans who viewed him as a "good Christian man" who had all the right values, the legion of sparkly-eyed Obama supporters who view him as something between a pastor to the nation and the messiah. Those are the only people who are truly represented, and then only because they can be expected to never say "no" to the leader or his regime anyway. Yes, this is truly democracy, the form of government the world has been waiting for.

The rest of us are Israeli Arabs, subjects of a state that, when it’s feeling self-righteous, heralds our rights and our freedoms while at the same time quietly and deliberately denying them. And warning us to behave ourselves upon pain of death when the state feels threatened.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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A hole must have been ripped in the space-time continuum lately, because the world in which I live doesn’t seem to make sense. Something seems amiss, as if the events of the last 30 years never happened, or didn’t happen the way I remember them. Or something.

Speaking to restauranteurs — you know, real foreign policy experts — in Chicago recently, Republican presidential candidate John McCain (I don’t have a nifty nickname for him like I do Bush Jong Il for the current occupant of the White House; maybe someone out there could help me with this) responded to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s call for talks with Iran, noting all throughout the Cold War, U.S. presidents spoke to Soviet leaders and the USSR was a far graver threat to both the United States and Israel.

(I don’t know if Obama added the Israel part. But he should have.)

At any rate, McCain claimed he understood this — this notion that Iran is most certainly not a superpower. But this is what he said on the subject:

Before I begin my prepared remarks, I want to respond briefly to a comment Senator Obama made yesterday about the threat posed to the United States by the Government of Iran. Senator Obama claimed that the threat Iran poses to our security is “tiny” compared to the threat once posed by the former Soviet Union. Obviously, Iran isn’t a superpower and doesn’t possess the military power the Soviet Union had. But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant.

On the contrary, right now Iran provides some of the deadliest explosive devices used in Iraq to kill our soldiers. They are the chief sponsor of Shia extremists in Iraq, and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. And their President, who has called Israel a “stinking corpse,” has repeatedly made clear his government’s commitment to Israel’s destruction.

This is interesting logic. First, it suggests the United States should never talk to governments that are providing weapons or equipment to groups (or countries, I suppose) that are "used … to kill our soldiers" or threaten the state of Israel. What about the summit meetings between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in New Jersey in June of 1967 in the wake of the Six Day War? Or the three meetings between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev between 1972 and 1974 (two of which were in Moscow), the first of which led to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty?

The U.S.S.R. was hardly a shrinking violet in regards to the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. The Soviets were not just "allegedly" providing the occasional rifle, box of bullets and improvised explosive device to the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam, but the U.S.S.R. was busy providing tanks, fighting vehicles, trucks, fighter jets and the very surface-to-air missiles that enabled John McCain to become a temporary resident of Hanoi. This wasn’t covert aid, it was very much overt, hauled in great big ships flying the yellow hammer and sickle on a blood red background (I watched several such ships transit the Panama Canal when I had the pleasure of protecting that decrepit muddy ditch during my time in the Army in the mid-1980s) steaming into the North Vietnamese port of Haiphong on a regular basis.

Using McCain’s logic (and the logic of all neoconservatives and militarist nationalists who cry "appeasement!" at the very prospect of diplomacy), U.S. leaders should not have even considered summit meetings with Soviet leaders, and should have instead threatened war with the U.S.S.R. as long as it continued to support North Vietnam.

So, should World War III have been waged in all its lethal glory in 1968 or 1969? Over South Vietnam?

But this isn’t all. Offending Israel and supporting terrorism is another excuse McCain gives for not speaking to governments. The U.S.S.R. was not bashful on that subject either. It was the main supporters of military equipment to the governments of Gemal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the permanent floating crap game that was the government of Syria (it changed a lot, and modern Syrian history never interested me enough to keep track of them) — tanks, fighter jets, infantry rifles, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, advisors and training, both before and after the 1967 war. Indeed, as I understand it, Soviet pilots flew "Egyptian" planes in the immediate months after June 1967 and Soviet missile crews manned surface-to-air missiles during the "War of Attrition" between Egypt and Israel over the Suez Canal from late 1968 through the summer of 1970.

In fact, the big Soviet-made World Atlas that I bought in San Francisco nearly 20 years ago, produced in 1967 to mark the 50th anniversary of the "Great October Socialist Revolution" (it’s a stunningly gorgeous book, even with the Lenin head on the frontispiece), marks the boundaries of the state of Israel as the 1948 UN partition line, and not the 1949 armistice lines (though they are there too). And yet, despite not even recognizing the "borders" of June 5 Israel, U.S. leaders still talked to Soviet leaders.

After the Israeli General Ariel Sharon led his forces across the Suez Canal and into Egypt proper, bottling the Egyptian Third Army on the east side of the canal, the U.S.S.R. threatened to intervene. Not by covertly giving the Egyptians roadside bombs or equipping "special groups," but by sending several Soviet airborne and airmobile divisions to Egypt to fight the Israelis. The Soviets mobilized their armed forces — the beginnings of the (short-lived) blue water navy they were building, hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of fighter jets, and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The United States did likewise, and the two nations came almost as close to World War III in October of 1973 as they did in October of 1962.

Diplomacy — talking — thankfully prevented it. Using his logic, John McCain would have waged that war. Without pity and without mercy.

The Soviet Union was also the nexus of a web of international terrorists organizations — remember the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the PLO and the Red Army Faction and dozens of other vaguely socialist groups enamored of violence and revolution? Links to the U.S.S.R. and the other states of the Warsaw Pact were both tactical and ideological — again, during my time in the Army in the mid-1980s, my Czech teacher at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey said that his job in the Czech army (before he defected with his family) was to train Palestinian terrorists in either the use of communications equipment or small arms, I don’t remember which. Yet this support for terrorism and terrorist groups (including those who hijacked U.S. civilian jetliners or kidnapped U.S. generals in NATO countries) did not prevent summit meetings between U.S. and Soviet leaders.

Indeed, it probably spurred them on because the stakes — the destruction of civilization — were so high. The U.S.S.R., for all its 1970s decrepitness, was still a military power, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the Palestinian terror group backed in the 1980s by the government of Saddam Hussein) or the Bader-Meinhoff Gang were simply not worth the swapping of nuclear missiles until no one was left.

McCain also complains that somehow shaking the hand of the U.S. president will convey upon the Iranian regime "international legitimacy" and bolster his domestic popularity. Is he kidding? Did such meetings between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, or Johnson and Kosygin, or Nixon and Brezhnev, or Carter and Brezhnev, or Reagan and Gorbachev, convey additional "international legitimacy" on the Soviet government or the Soviet state? Does "international legitimacy" even matter? Did these meetings boost the popularity of the Soviet government? (I have this silly vision, a Leningrad family gathered round the teevee seeing video or photos of Nixon embracing Brezhnev and saying to themselves, "now that America loves our government, we can too!" Does anyone think it really works that way?) Granted, the president of Iran is elected by a broad-based electorate while the Soviet premier (prime minister) was appointed, the president probably elected by the Supreme Soviet, and the head of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. by simply being the last octogenarian standing, so "popularity" was never much of an issue for the Soviet regime. But that just means the president of Iran can be tossed out of office by Iranian voters, a privilege no Soviet voter could ever claim.

The lack of domestic legitimacy may, in fact, explain why the Soviet Union … um, how do I put this … went away some years ago. Of its own accord. Without so much as the issuing of missile launch orders or the deployment of bombers. I suppose it kinda sucked for so many champions of good in the United States that evil just simply went away, rather than meeting its final apocalyptic end at the hands of virtuous and always-righteous good.

In fact, I suspect that the real reason there is so much loud talk about Iran in Washington (and by Americans visiting Tel Aviv) is that Iran is so weak. There was no not talking to the U.S.S.R., even under the worst of conditions (in the early 1980s), especially after several years of military buildup beginning in the mid-1960s at the hands of Leonid Brezhnev. Even as a second-rate super-power, it was still a power to be reckoned with, what with all those nuclear missiles and warheads, those armored and mechanized and airborne divisions, bombers and fighter jets, and something resembling a global navy (more than 1,000 ships in 1982 according to The War Atlas).

What does Iran have that can even come close? A navy with global reach? An air force able to bolster allied governments far away (with the help of Cuban infantry)? Missiles and fighter jets and a near-permanent presence in low-earth orbit? The truth is, if the United States attacks Iran, it will do so because it can, because Iran lacks to the means to retaliate (and thus deter) such an attack. Because Iran is weak, and not a threat in any way, shape or form. To either Israel or the United States.

I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as the very definition of what a bully is. And what evil is too.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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Moises Naim is an idiot.

Being the editor of deliriously misnamed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s (sic) flagship publication, Foreign Policy, we expect Moises Naim to be an idiot. In fact, we expect him to be well nigh an exalted grand poobah of idiots, a knave among knaves, the peddler of interventionist nonsense so thick and syrupy it sticks to just about everything around it and makes walking, or even motion of any kind, impossible. As one of an intellectual (sic) cabal of chief justifiers of U.S. intervention, an aspiring world manager who sees himself as senior advisor to actual world managers, we expect nothing less but well-crafted and impressive idiocy from the likes of Moises Naim.

In a Wednesday piece in the Washington Post, "A Hunger for America," Moises Naim does not disappoint. He displays his idiocy, proudly and unashamedly, for all to see.

The world wants America back.

For the next several years, world politics will be reshaped by a strong yearning for American leadership. This trend will be as unexpected as it is inevitable: unexpected given the powerful anti-American sentiments around the globe, and inevitable given the vacuums that only the United States can fill.

This renewed international appetite for U.S. leadership will not merely result from the election of a new president, though having a new occupant in the White House will certainly help. Almost a decade of U.S. disengagement and distraction have allowed international and regional problems to swell. Often, the only nation that has the will and means to act effectively is the United States.

Oh my. It takes the breath away. "The world wants America back. … a strong yearning for American leadership." These are heady and mind-altering words. They make one dizzy like the kind of smoke one might breathe in an opium den in Guangzhou or the sweet fumes one might inhale from a paper sack while crouching behind a 7-11 in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

I have not been paying as close attention as perhaps I should to the news these last few months, what with my seminary studies, so I may have missed something. This yearning that Naim has apparently so carefully detected and diagnosed, how exactly has it expressed itself? Did the favelas of Sao Paulo, the slums and shantytowns of Mumbai, the impoverished farms of rural China, the villages and refugee camps of Africa and the Middle East, the salons and suburbs of Paris, Geneva and Rome and the trading floors of Frankfurt and London, did they somehow erupt with a deep and abiding love for the United States of America? A burning desire for boots on the ground? Did the poor and wretched of the world lock arms and march, chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" and demanding "Intervention Now!" and proclaiming "No Washington! No Justice!" Was Washington, D.C., recently proclaimed the world’s qibla, and did all right-thinking, God-fearing and faithful world citizens prostrate themselves and send their prayers of supplication to the wise men — high priests and prophets like Naim — of the U.S. capital who are ready to lay hands upon the world and cleanse it of its lepers and turn its water into wine?

No? Not even the littlest bit? I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t have missed such a momentous event. It must be Naim sitting there amidst the rubbish with the glaze-eyed look, clutching the paper bag and the tube of model airplane glue.

Naim’s assertions are, of course, self-serving twaddle. Foreign Policy is high-end pornography for American interventionists and practitioners of empire, akin to Anne-Marie Villefranche’s bawdy stories of Paris in the 1920s. Naim works at one of the premier international foreign policy think tanks in Washington, and he edits one of the world’s premier policy publications. He hopes to benefit from the yearning he supposedly sees in the world because his institute will hopefully get a say in just how the United States government responds to that yearning. Especially after the Bush Regime abandons town.

Whether a Democrat is elected president or not (and this must be Naim’s fondest hope — I’m betting Joe Biden is his man), Naim and those like him will advise anyway. They will fill the air with words and in-boxes with papers in hopes that someone will listen. Why The Washington Post considers this kind of thing serious politics, while calls for non-intervention are somehow not serious, is beyond me. It is one of the things I have never, and probably will never, understand.

At any rate, it’s not enough for the United States to simply act, according to Naim. It has to act properly, thoughtfully, carefully, forcefully, according to the processes of the "international community," in concert with others and considering the needs and wants of other governments. But Naim clearly believes the United States needs to lead the world as the world’s de facto government:

Of course, the America that the world wants back is not the one that preemptively invades potential enemies, bullies allies or disdains international law. The demand is for an America that rallies other nations prone to sitting on the fence while international crises are boiling out of control; for a superpower that comes up with innovative initiatives to tackle the great challenges of the day, such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and violent Islamist fundamentalism. The demand is for an America that enforces the rules that facilitate international commerce and works effectively to stabilize an accident-prone global economy. Naturally, the world also wants a superpower willing to foot the bill with a largess that no other nation can match.

Naturally. And as if to sugarcoat his idiocy, to drench it with a rich powdered sugar and butter frosting, Naim immediately follows this laundry list of ideal future U.S. leadership priorities with "These are not just naive expectations." But of course they are. Nothing could be more naïve than claiming the world is clamoring for U.S. leadership, demanding the U.S. lead, but then insisting that leadership be "just right" all the time! The truth that all interventionists should learn (and some do, but many, especially denizens of foreign policy institutes, do not) is that you intervene (or lead) with the United States that you have, not with the United States you’d like to have. Naim and his ilk would like to be the "brains" of the United States so that it can intervene properly, so that it’s leaders can lead most effectively, and they seem to think that all institutional and cultural problems that make global leadership (or intervention) ineffective or counterproductive can be overcome by something resembling effective and enlightened management. But in wanting exactly this, they have empowered the likes of the neoconservatives and the muscular nationalists of the Bush regime. You give a man a stick, he will likely beat people with it.

Only in Naim’s world of Washington think-tankery would two simultaneous foreign wars and threats of several third wars (Iran, Pakistan) as well as constant interference, lectures and speeches from administration officials about how other governments and nations ought to behave and govern themselves be emblematic of "a decade of U.S. disengagement and distraction." It makes one wonder what exactly Naim’s engagement would like — a dozen wars? Two dozen? Four-score and seven? How activist would a U.S. government need to get in order to have Naim’s heartfelt approval? How much more "global leadership" would I, as an American, be forced to pay for, leadership that right now provides me — and most other Americans — no clear benefits? When did the world’s problems suddenly become ours, and only ours, to solve anyway?

I wish there was a way to put the policy institutes out of business. I sometimes fantasize about burning them all down and sending their inmates to work picking lettuce or harvesting almonds in California, a kind-of Maoist re-education. But the think tanks are very well-endowed, they have become a kind-of fourth branch of our semi-constitutional government, and as long as men and women are paid outlandish salaries to concoct justifications and methods of intervention hither and yon, the giant budget of the United States government and the country’s sprawling and well-endowed armed forces will forever remain an attractive nuisance for those aspiring to global do-goodery and world control. A Ron Paul victory in November 2008 would go some way to putting these people out of business for at least a while, but I’m nowhere near as confident about that prospect as some others at this web site are.

Only national bankruptcy will put the likes of Moises Naim out of business. I hate to hope for this, but it’s coming nonetheless. By being such a wide-eyed interventionist, by demanding such an expansive and never-ending job for the United States government and the people it taxes, Moises Naim is making sure of that.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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On September 12, 2001, while the site of the once-upon-a-World Trade Center was still smoldering, French journalist Jean-Marie Columbani wrote the famous words "we are all Americans now." The attacks on the United States of the previous day had prompted one of "the gravest moments of our own history," and would completely changed the world:

[H]ow can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, [Columbani wrote] that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom, and therefore our solidarity? How can we not be struck at the same time by this observation: The new century has come a long way.

And it has come quite a bit farther since Columbani’s column was published that Wednesday morning in September. He predicted the marshaling of U.S. anger and military power, but failed to see how poorly that power would be guided and utilized. He predicted that Russia would become Washington’s greatest ally in this war, and that certainly has not happened. In focusing on the madness he believed present in the Arab and Islamic worlds, he was blind to the madness present among all "us" Americans.

It was a nice sentiment, I suppose, this "we are all Americans now." But it wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now.

An even greater gulf separates the United States of 2008 with the Prussia of the early 1860s — one that makes comparison difficult — but in reading historian Koppel Pinson’s Modern Germany: It’s History and Civilization, I think there is an intriguing parallel between Prussia and the rise to power of Otto von Bismarck and the United States of not just today, but the last few decades. One that is worth paying attention to.

According to Pinson, Prussian King Wilhelm made Bismarck chancellor after a lengthy dispute with the Prussian parliament over the expansion of the army. Wilhelm wanted to increase the power of the standing military at the expense of the militia, the Landwehr. However, the "progressive" reformers (many of whom had backed the failed attempt to create a unified German state in the Revolution of 1848) had long been supportive of the militia as an expression of both a "popular and liberal regime." It was parliament versus the crown, and thus much of the action of government was stalled.

Bismarck’s response to parliament’s inability to get anything done was simple. According to Pinson, he simply withdrew the proposed budget for 1862, the budget that the parliament could not agree upon, and decided "to carry on the financial business of the state" regardless.

The lower house passed a resolution declaring all such expenditures unconstitutional, but the resolution was rejected by the upper house. The diet was thereupon prorogued, and the liberal and Progressive deputies, returning to the constituencies, were received as heroes. Popular resentment against the government ran high … (p. 129)

None of this stopped Bismarck, who recalled the Prussian diet and justified his actions by stating that he was accountable to the king, not to parliament. Nothing in the Prussian constitution stated that the two houses of parliament had to agree with the crown, Pinson writes. He then goes on the quote Bismarck making the final and greatest justification a statist can make:

"For me the necessity that the state exists is enough. … Necessity alone is the determining factor" that calls for continued collection of taxes to finance all the expenditures for state activities. (p. 129)

Necessity alone allowed Bismarck to ignore the parliament, ignore the constitutional requirement that parliament authorize all taxation and expenditures, and keep the machinery of state functioning, to eventually wage two wars.

What followed should have been the grinding to a halt of local and national government across Prussia. Bismarck "commenced a war against Progressives outside the halls of the diet," using state officials (including university professors) and the media to "combat the liberal-Progressive opposition." The press was censored. The Ministry of the Interior forbade local councils and governments from even discussing the matter, refused to approve the appointment of opposition mayors.

"Public sentiment, however, was overwhelmingly against the government," Pinson wrote. Legislators censured and condemned, experts in law said Bismarck violated the "firm moral order and legal order" of society and placed the state in jeopardy. Even the crown prince, future Emperor Frederick (who would reign for only a few months between the Wilhelms), publicly condemned Bismarck. And when the chancellor ordered new elections later in 1862, the liberals and Progressives came back with an even bigger majority in parliament.

In the midst of this, what happened? Were those opposed to Bismarck’s unconstitutional rule and his violation of law able to stop the chancellor? Did Germany rise up, topple the regime and bring about a new era of liberal governance guided by law and freedom? Pinson wrote:

The government continued, however, to collect taxes and make all the government expenditures it deemed necessary. And nothing happened. (p. 130)

A deeply unpopular government, in Pinson’s words, facing a unified opposition in parliament just plowed ahead as if it had the mandate of heaven, as it could and did command majority support among the people it governed. Despite whatever popular sentiment existed against Bismarck as chancellor, there was no popular sentiment against the state. And the political culture of Prussia did not allow for any opposition to either government or state. Merely suggesting that no one should pay their unconstitutional taxes got parliamentarian Johann Jacoby arrested and tried for treason, Pinson wrote.

A situation had developed which seems utterly impossible to one accustomed to Anglo-Saxon parliamentary institutions [Pinson wrote]. Ferdinand Lassalle [founder of what would eventually become Germany's Social Democratic Party] published a keen analysis of the constitutional conflict in which he attempted to show why a refusal on the part of the Prussian population to pay taxes that had not been voted would be ineffective. In this he drew a brilliant comparison between the situation in England and Prussia. In England, wrote Lassalle, if the tax collector were to come to demand taxes not voted by parliament he would be thrown out of the house by the citizen. If the citizen were arrested and brought to court, he would be freed by the court and sent home with praise for having resisted illegal force. If the tax collector were to come with troops, the citizen would mobilize his friends and neighbors to oppose force with force. A battle would ensue with possible loss of life. The tax collector would then be hauled into court on the charge of murder, and his defence that he acted "on orders" would be rejected by the British court since he had been engaged in "an illegal act." He would be condemned to death. If the citizen and his friends had killed any soldiers, they would be released because they were resisting illegal force. "And because all the people know this would happen," wrote Lassalle, "everyone would refuse to pay the taxes — even those who are indifferent — in order not be considered bad citizens." The government can do little since the Mutiny Act made the existence of the army dependent on annual grants from parliament.

In Prussia, Lassalle went on to say, it is different. If the Prussian citizen were to throw out the tax collector who came to collect taxes not approved by the diet he would be hauled to court to receive a jail sentence for "resistance to lawful authority." If fighting and killing ensued, the soldiers would be protected from prosecution because they "obeyed orders," while the citizen who attempted to resist by force would be convicted and beheaded. "And because this is so and because from the start all the odds are against those who refuse to pay taxes, only a minority of most principled characters will refuse to pay, the government will feel confident of any action it undertakes and all the officials will be loyal to it." (p. 130—131)

Do we live in a United States that is more like Lassalle’s description of Anglo-America or Prussia? Between the argument of necessity — the state must continue to pay salaries and support the needy and fund programs, to build roads and equip the military and protect the country — and the sheer power of the president, what power would even a united Congress have against any president, who can and does marshal the kind of power Bismarck used to propagandize and control the "public debate?" If Pinson’s description is correct, the weight of public opinion, of election returns and parties in parliament, even the constitution itself, did not matter to the conduct of Bismarck’s government.

With what so many Americans have invested in the person of the president and the presidency, it would be no great stretch to see heated and fervent support for a president engaged in deliberate violation of the law and constitution for both alleged necessity and the supposed good of the state. We’ve seen shadows of that in the last few decades as presidents wield more and more power, as they grab and clutch and grope more and more legally and morally unaccountable authority. The Bush regime has been especially good at assuming Bismarck’s mandate, proving that public opinion is no real counter to the wielding of state power. No doubt, the next president will expand that power. Presidential power, at least in my lifetime and not since the 1930s, does not shrink.

It is also not be hard to imagine a time when the U.S. Congress is simply unable to pass a budget. Would the United States government simply grind to a halt? Would soldiers go out on permanent furloughs? Would grandma not get her social security check? Would millions of government employees, from poultry inspectors to airport luggage screeners, somehow not get paid? Would aid to foreign governments suddenly dry up? Would the IRS stop collecting taxes? Don’t bet on it. Such a thing would be a constitutional crisis only in the minds of those who cared enough, such as lawyers, scholars and partisan activists. Most Americans, I suspect, would shake their heads and probably support the actions of any president who kept the government working. Even as they tell phone pollsters they oppose the president. Even as they vote for the opposition.

And those same Americans would pay their taxes. They would tell everyone to pay their taxes. Not paying taxes would be "resistance to lawful authority" and the mark of bad citizenship. There might be a residual Anglo-Saxon sympathy for any refusniks, but that would be tempered by a belief in the state and the legitimacy of all state action, a belief that would give state action — including murderous violence — the benefit of all doubt.

Bismarck eventually got a compliant parliament, one that ratified several years of his budgets after the fact. But that’s because his strategy of waging wars, using nationalism to cultivate the liberal and Progressive nationalists (who all believed in a unified state anyway), was very successful. The current U.S. regime has not been so fortunate, but not for lack of trying. Maybe Bush should have attacked Denmark instead of Iraq.

The truth is we are all Prussians now.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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There’s a little Pakistani restaurant in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — I want to say it’s on Al Makaroumah Street, but I’m probably wrong and I don’t remember which north-south drag it’s located on — where I’m told Pakistani presidents and prime ministers arrive soon after taking power and get the formal seal of approval for their governments from the rulers of Saudi Arabia.

"That is where Pakistani governments are made and unmade," an acquaintance told me as we drove by, pointing to a two-story white building close to a major intersection.

I don’t know if that restaurant, with its impressive biryani and kabob take-out menu and its second-floor banquet hall, really was such an important place or not. I never saw Nawaz Sharif there eating chicken tikka and drinking tea while chatting with advisors and waiting for Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Feisal to show up and give him his marching orders, nor did I ever see President (ne general) Parvez Musharraf glancing over the entrees wondering what would best feed his entourage during that all-important meeting with the Saudi crown prince. So who knows if that little restaurant was indeed where Pakistani governments were "made and unmade." When you’re a journalist, lots of people (including other journalists) tell you lots of things. Some of them are even true.

Saudi Arabia has long wielded influence in how Pakistan is ruled. The countries have very close commercial and trade ties, millions of Pakistanis live and work in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (and elsewhere in the Arabian Gulf), and the Saudi government (along with those of several other Gulf states) probably provided significant funding to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. I do not know whether Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Pakistani government is appreciated by a majority of Pakistanis — I suspect not. Nor can Saudi intervention in Pakistan be considered a huge success; Nawaz Sharif’s lengthy exile in the Kingdom following his failed attempt to fire Musharraf was a sign of that.

But at least Saudi Arabia keeps its intervention quiet. No boots on the ground, no grand wars of liberation, no press conferences or speeches planning an end to evil and tyranny as the world knows it. The Saudis prefer quiet, almost stealthily silent, diplomacy. They prefer the power of the purse to the terror of the cluster bomb. And they also know when a situation is veering out of control — their control — and how to cut their losses and make deals with whoever they need to make deals with. After all, regardless of who governs Pakistan, all those Pakistani expatriates will still be working and living in Saudi Arabia, sending their remittances back home while Saudi and Pakistani businessmen take the red-eye between Karachi and Dhahran to make sure the air-conditioner factory is running up to speed or the auto dealership is still profitable.

The Saudis have never lived with the illusion that they can, through the exercise of sheer brute power, stamp their view upon the world. I’m trying to remember the last time the Royal Saudi Air Force bombed a foreign country (1991?). The Saudis have flooded the world with mass-produced Islamic literature, much of it of questionable intellectual quality, but no one is forced to read any of it. (And most alternatives, like the stuff that comes out of Pakistan, is even worse.) The ideology of the Islamic revolutionaries of al Qaeda (and its franchisees and affiliates) is not Wahhabism — though it has been influenced by interpretations if Ibn Wahhab — but is rather a complex stew that owes as much to Egyptian ideas of the last century, the praxis of the Afghan mujahedin, and the preaching and writings of many Pashtu preachers and thinkers.

Americans, on the other hand, do live with the illusion that they can, through brute force, bend the world to their will. Or at least many — possibly most — American policy makers do. Why else would so many well-educated and allegedly "smart" (Washington is full of some of the best-educated dumb people that have ever governed a major power at any time in world history) people have vested so much hope and trust in one flawed and finite human being — Benazir Bhutto — to solve, or at least attempt to solve, the problems of Pakistan.

There are no good options for American interventionists in Pakistan. Democracy, whatever that may mean in the context of Pakistan (either to Pakistani elites, or Pakistani voters, or American elites), was not and will never be a cure to the country’s ills. There is no unified Pakistani "people" to have a unified "will" that could be reflected in a government. There may be a plurality of voters, but pluralities cannot effectively rule in the face of resistance or opposition. The fact that the 1990s were a time of musical prime ministerships between Bhutto and Sharif tells something about the nature of Pakistani politics. Had she survived to become prime minister in January, I suspect Bhutto — who David Ignatius on Friday called "Pakistani political royalty" — would have eventually (and maybe quickly) disappointed just about everyone, including her greatest Western fans, who seemed to expect something of a miracle from her akin to changing water into wine.

Bhutto’s corruption, overlooked by Western fans who could only see some kind of colored freedom revolution in her movement, got her ousted. Their sentimental attachment to Bhutto failed to see that their desires for Pakistan were not the same as those of the Pakistanis themselves (a common failing of U.S. elites who become far too attached to charismatic leaders from elsewhere). And those connections to the West, especially the United States, are al Qaeda’s stated reason for killing Bhutto:

"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen," Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English. Al-Yazid is the main al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.

If trying to influence Pakistani politics hasn’t worked well for Washington for the last 30 years, invading the country, or even dispatching the U.S. military to fight the Islamists directly, would be exponentially worse. This assumes there are adequate soldiers for any kind of operation (above bombing raids or commando strikes). In Iraq, 180,000 U.S. soldiers have only just barely secured a country of 25 million people, and then only with the tacit assent of former combatants who, for the time being, are kind-of cooperative sometimes. Pakistan is home to nearly 170 million people, many of whom would not be glad to see us and could easily make life difficult for any occupation army or even contingent of advisors. If the U.S. invaded and occupied Pakistan, it would need more than 1.2 million men (and women) under arms and in the country in order to match the troop levels currently deployed in Iraq (and we know how successful that has been). Air strikes and commando raids might be sustainable (and deniable), but these aren’t the kinds of things that make friends, or have much long-term positive effect in whatever war the United States government seems to be fighting.

Not that any of this has stopped presidential candidates, Republicans and Democrats, from suggesting that "something" needs to be done about Pakistan — including military action. (Madame Hillary is even calling for an "international investigation" into Bhutto’s assassination, no doubt to be followed up by a month-long air war against Pakistan later in 2008.) That no one, not even Benito, is proposing a draft to increase the size of the U.S. military to a healthy percentage of that needed 1.2 million, is a good sign that sanity, or at least something resembling good sense, prevails somewhere. Big dreams of empire may be uplifting for those yearning release from the tedium of the simple life (of family and work and neighborhood), but Washington’s sheer lack of resources, and the unwillingness to do anything about that lack aside from borrow from China, may actually and finally constrain those imperial dreams.

And this is good news for non-interventionists in the U.S. Because there is little Washington can do, no good options, no great white hope, it is important for us to say "then do nothing!", to say it loudly and constantly, to repeat it over and over again when the subject of Pakistan (or any other possible foreign intervention) comes up. Let Pakistanis solve their own problems. The Islamists do not want power (outside the Northwest Frontier Province, they won’t get it), they only want as many U.S. troops on the ground so they have something to fight and rally support around. Let’s not give them that. Instead, let’s continue to trade with Pakistan (Jennifer and I have a cupboard full of Pakistani basmati rice, the best in the world), make friends and acquaintances and do business with Pakistanis. Even if their government is corrupt and inefficient, Pakistanis must be doing something right if the shops of Azizeyyah in Jeddah and Devon Ave. here in Chicago are full of Pakistani foods, textiles, music CDs, simple manufactured goods and even books.

So let’s not worry how Pakistanis are governed or whether we can feel good about their current leader because she speaks unaccented English, attended an Ivy League university, sounds progressive and promises that "our" interests and the alleged interests of her alleged people are the same.

There will be those who say that if the United States government does nothing, if it doesn’t deal with them over there, by fighting them and helping arrange good government, then Americans will eventually fight them right here at home. But where’s the evidence for this assertion? In fact, the United States has been fighting "them" in various places "over there" for more than a century now, been arranging "good governance" hither and yon for much of that time, and all it has led to is more "them" to fight in some new and different place "over there." Because when one meddles, when one insists upon doing something rather than doing nothing, there is always another "them" to fight. And always another "over there."

Doing nothing also hardly sounds kind. It doesn’t seem to follow the golden rule of loving your neighbor as yourself. If Americans can do something to protect themselves and at the same time help Pakistanis, well, it seems cruel and illiberal not to help them. Yet what is kind about intervening in the way other people do business, about the intolerant presupposition of their overwhelming need and our ability to satisfy that need, about that kind of condescending assumption of incompetence? Suppose some overweening group of do-gooder Muslims, convinced that our society is so damaged by poverty and violence, so disrupted by incompetent governance, decided we need the kind of help only their support and management of our elections, our media and our economy could bring. Or what if they decided we needed to be bombed because our nation is a source of so much of the world’s instability and violence, and because force appears to be the only thing we understand. Would we be angry? So who are we to expect that those we treat as children in need of our good but stern guidance should not, at least some of them, be angry at us for this? We would want to be left alone to sort our own problems out. Indeed, we would insist upon it. We owe everyone else in the world the same.

I do not know if "doing nothing" is Ron Paul’s policy option for Pakistan, but it ought to be. No aid, military or otherwise, to buy the cooperation of an otherwise sullen government, no lectures, no cajoling, no pleading. Honest cooperation against al Qaeda if it is offered, knowing that absent the congressional aid package (and more than six years of stupidity from Washington), it may not be. Let the Saudis deal with Pakistan if that is their wish, and let them have the headache of meddling and of cleaning up the inevitable messes.

At least they know where to get such affairs catered.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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For the last year or so, since my job as a freelance copy editor with the Saudi Gazette came to an end (NOTE TO THE FEDS: Can you please now make the beeping on my cell phone go away?), I have worked whatever jobs I could find to pay bills as I continued my studies. I temped for nearly two months in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Global Missions office, reviewing expense accounts reports from missionaries (did you know that a security guard in Liberia costs $10 per day?), my wife has done child care as needed and worked for the seminary grounds crew, the cafeteria and the janitorial service. I’ve done some mopping and cleaning of bathrooms myself.

There have been some other odd jobs in there — Jennifer and I helped a mad scientist move his research lab one weekend — but I can’t remember them all. My father has been helping, and it’s been enough to pay rent and buy groceries, strangely enough.

Late last spring, not knowing quite what else to do and not having any prospects, I asked the seminary library — a joint operation of both the Lutheran seminary I attend and the physically attached Presbyterian seminary, McCormick Theological Seminary (there are other kinds?) — if they were looking for any help. It turned out the rare and old books cataloger needed someone to load a bunch of old theology and history books into boxes for shipment to a book buyer. Would I be willing to do that kind of work?

My short tenure 20 years ago in the United States Army (18 months, for those of you who are curious) didn’t teach me much, but it did teach me that no honest work is beneath me. So, I put books in boxes. Hundreds of books, old and very old, more history (lots and lots of stuff on the Tudors, the Stuarts and the Civil War — the English Civil War) and a little theology. Probably not as much as the book-buyer wanted, but my job was to simply pack them, which I did in about two weeks of part-time work.

With that done, the cataloger — impressed with my work — decided to see what else I could do. It helped I had worked for a time in the Jewish and Near Eastern Studies Library at Ohio State, and so I was quickly turned loose to help deal with the seminary’s monstrous cataloging problem.

The LSTC/McCormick library is the amalgamation of maybe nine or so libraries, mostly small Lutheran seminaries that merged in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and then a Jesuit seminary and the McCormick Presbyterian seminary. Merging libraries is more than just simply reshelving books and putting the card catalogs together. Different libraries have slightly different cataloging methodologies, and those change over time. This means that different libraries may catalog the exact same book differently, and when they merge, you may never really know how many copies of a particular book you have until you scan the shelves or until people check those books out.

This process is only partly done at the JKM Library. I am helping deal with all the duplicates, the book we have more than one copy of that we may, or may not, need one copy of.

If that is not enough, up until the late 1950s, seminaries built their collections on the assumption that their libraries would be self-contained. This explains all the English history that once covered our shelves (but no longer does). The seminary has gotten rid of books as varied as a 12-volume set containing the complete minutes of the English parliament from 1622 to Wendell Wilkie’s One World, complete and unabridged. I have even scored two copies of Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action (a sixth printing of the 1949 edition and a fourth printing of the 1949 edition) and a third edition (1946) of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson — neither books this seminary wanted to keep. They also have an impressive collection of middlebrow fiction that comes to an end in 1958, much of which has not been checked out since 1958.

My wife, a voracious reader, is checking some of these books out. Most are promptly weeded from the collection.

Weeding out a book that isn’t in our computer catalog involves getting what is called the shelf list card, the cards the catalogers and librarians use to keep track of all the books in a library (they are organized by call number), and then going through the physical card catalog and pulling all the cards — author, title, and all the subjects — and then getting any duplicate volumes that may still sit on our shelves. It’s somewhat tedious work, but I actually enjoy it and after having done this for some months, I know my way around the library.

So the other day, I was looking for two copies of the 1960 version of the Confession of the Church of Scotland (I believe was the title) when, distracted and somewhere else in the stacks, I came across a thin little volume of poetry I had spied earlier in the day as I browsed through the card catalog (I was looking for something else) — The Man and the Hour by Edward Parker Davis, published in 1919. Between the year and the title, this had the feel of poems written to Woodrow Wilson, and I wanted to see if that was true and if so, just how bad a book it was.

It does not disappoint in its sheer awfulness.

Davis was the personal physician to Woodrow Wilson, and one can only hope he was a better doctor than he was a poet. No, actually, one does not hope. The book was "privately printed," meaning that in 1919, no reputable publisher was going to touch this nonsense. That says something. The poems include such gems as: "President of the United States, March 4, 1913," "To Our Leader," "’Force Without Limit,’" and "Somewhere in France," and they are the kind of material I’m fairly certain has been written about every dictator and wanna-be savior of humanity. It’s oddly easy for some folks — many, actually — to go all sparkly eyed and empty headed about the tyrants who lead them.

It’s worse knowing Davis actually knew the man.

The book begins with Wilson’s first inaugural, "President of the United States, March 4, 1913":

Deep as the endless currents of the sea,
Still as the mystic streaming to the pole,
So, in the hidden caverns of the soul,
Flow the rivers of Man’s destiny.
Fixed and eternal as the morning star,
Beams the clear shining of his brighter hope;
Sure as the tides, and with a wider scope,
Circles his purpose ever out afar.
Changeless, immortal, potent and serene,
That which he is comes by his being’s law;
No play of chance, no ill can overawe
His sacred joy in that which he has been!
Fibred in right, he cannot turn aside
From the swift orbit of the flying years;
Here but a day, so soon to disappear
In the great morning where our souls abide.
Such has he been, our leader and our friend,
Now in fruition of his proven power;
Such is the deep meaning of this moving hour,
When years of promise in fulfillment end.
This is no sudden accident of fate
That sets him high upon mountain peak,
A beacon for his Nation; men shall seek,
By his clear light, a better course and straight.
Firm as the hills, his courage shall prevail;
Old as the race, his wisdom shall endure;
Sweet as the flow, his fellow love is sure;
True to himself, and so he cannot fail.

I think Davis was far too fond of inhaling deeply from the ether cone. Is he writing about a mere man, or is this the Messiah, God’s anointed, or the very logos who was present at the creation and through which all things were made? It’s hard to tell. "Our leader and our friend?" Is Davis using the royal we to speak of Wilson as his personal leader and friend or is he saying that Wilson was everyone’s leader and friend? (I think we can guess the answer to that without much trouble.)

And that last line, "True to himself, and so he cannot fail" — that reads like it could be used to describe George W. Bush as well. In fact, I’m guessing this poem could have been written by any supporter of every U.S. president since they claimed something akin to godhood.

I want to say it gets better — Davis’ poem about the second nomination celebrates both peace and the fact that Wilson isn’t a conqueror who claims a laurel wreath on his "murderous victor’s brow" (oh yeah?), but rather the freely chosen leader of a nation where happy hearts beat for the "great and lasting good" — but it doesn’t, as the poem "To Our Leader" (January 1918) attests:

Trough the black night of terror and alarm,
Through the wild storm of War’s insatiate harm,
Through the loud tumult where men rage and arm,
Lead on!
Up to the hills where Freedom’s watch first burn,
Up to the heights for which our spirits yearn,
Up to the strongholds where our hopes return,
Lead on!
On, for Mankind is thronging after you,
On, for men’s hearts are calling out to you,
On, for men’s hopes are built anew on you,
Lead on!
He who has called you trod a fearful path,
He who has made you gave to you his faith,
He who sustains you conquered over Death,
Lead on!
There where the morning breaks in shining Peace,
There where Grief’s captives win a glad release,
Rest in that Heaven, once to Heroes given,
Leader who won!

Considering that nothing, at this point has been won, I’m trying to imagine exactly what victory it is that the leader (who could, in this poem, be any president waging any war and written by any groveling sycophant) has achieved? Release of the captives? While Davis does seem to understand that Wilson isn’t quite Jesus, he uses a lot of words that suggests he confuses the two. Why? Was the first Jesus not enough? Did he leave something undone that only Wilson (or any of his successors) were up to finishing?

In "’Force Without Limit’," Wilson is the wielder of God’s "sword of Righteous Wrath" that will bring "Earth Peace again." The war is the "argument of God" against the unnamed "oppressing clod" — always the war or the struggle is against unnamed generalities, and not concrete specifics — and the poem closes with God’s wrath giving place to praise and the "song of better days." (There are better days than war?) Finally, Davis appeals to his sometime patient, the saint and messiah, to:

Strike with the sledge of Justice the anvil of the Lord,
Oh man of God and man of men, safe keeper of his word!

Again, is this a reference to Christ or Wilson? Or, I ask again, does Davis not know the difference?

The volume closes with the undated "My Country, Oh My Country," which is the kind of nonsense you’d expect a too-well-behaved teenager to publicly recite, somewhat teary eyed, at a VFW barbecue on the Fourth of July:

My Country, Oh my Country!
The battle hour has come
For Justice and for liberty,
For human rights and homes.
The free wind blows our trumpet,
Our flag the starry sky,
Our drum roll is the thunder,
The lightning sword on high.
Our ships are in the ocean,
Our planes are in the air,
A mighty folk in motion,
The rushing tide to war!
To go, to stay? to fight, to watch
To keep our hearth fires bright?
Our country asks from each his part,
His duty and his right.
My Country, Oh my Country!
The battle hour has come;
How shall I stand before God’s hand
Who asks, "What have you done?"

Isn’t it amazing just how flexible this kind of poetry is? Written for Lincoln? McKinley? FDR? Harry Truman? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon? Ronald Reagan? Bill Clinton? Both George Bushes? Is any specific war being described here, or it is just any — or every — war the state seeks to wage, the very nature of the state and statism that it can demand all do their duty and right, and invoke God in support of that demand? Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to praising the state and war, just how little changes?

And can’t you just imagine some idiot poet composing this kind of dreck for Hillary Clinton?

Two other things also strike me here. First, the implication that all of creation somehow points to the United States of America in that second stanza. America is the world, the world is America. And not just all the people in the world, who under the assumption of Wilsonianism are all yearning to be Americans, but the very physical, natural world itself. Second, do you suppose Davis really believes that God will hold it against a soul on judgement day if that soul did not do "his duty and his right" to his country? (Or at least the United States of America, to which all human allegiance appears to be owed.) He probably does. I suspect a great many allegedly religious people do.

As I said, it’s probably just as well Davis was as lousy a doctor as he was a poet, or maybe Wilson would have made a better recovery from his strokes and continued terrorizing the world with his arrogant self-righteousness. (It would have been nice if both Wilson and Lenin could have had their strokes a few years earlier than they did.) He apparently wrote at least one other book, A Manual of Practical Obstetrics, a late 19th century medical guide to pregnancy and whatnot. I cannot judge, one way or the other, whether that book is any good.

It probably isn’t anywhere near as bad as his poetry.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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Leave it to a couple of neoconservatives to ruin a perfectly good Bible story.

I’m referring, of course, to the piece on the opinion page of Friday’s War Street Journal (ahem, ‘scuse me, Wall Street Journal) entitled "Jonah’s Dilemma" in which authors and thinkers (sic) Michael Oren and Mark Gerson comparing George W. Bush to the Prophet Jonah.

Yes, the very same Jonah who spent three days in the belly of fish after fleeing "from the presence of the Lord" because he did not want to go preach repentance to Ninevah, who got angry at God when, in fact, Ninevah did repent.

(I’m reliant here entirely on Jim Lobe’s reporting on the subject, because I have not been able to find the entire WSJ piece on line and I do not have time to actually track down the Friday issue and read it.)

Oren and Gerson start the piece out by noting that this reluctant prophet has something to tell U.S. policy makers today:

This year, as on every Yom Kippur, Jews throughout the world will recite the Book of Jonah, one of the Hebrew Bible’s shortest and most enigmatic texts. Jonah is the only Israelite prophet to preach to Gentiles, and the only prophet who clearly hates his job. And yet Jews read the book on their holiest day of the year because of its message of atonement and forgiveness. But Jonah also conveys crucial lessons for all Americans as they grapple with crises in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and yearn for far-sighted leadership.

According to Lobe’s citation, Oren and Gerson state that Jonah’s true dilemma involves the nature of his assignment from God. If Ninevah repents and God subsequently relents, then the people of Ninevah will wonder if they were ever in any danger to begin with, while if they refuse to listen to Jonah, God will follow through on God’s threat and obliterate them. "Either way, [Jonah] loses — that’s the paradox of prophesy."

(I guess I missed the course on Biblical exegesis using the methods of Leo Strauss, but when exactly did the Book of Jonah become all about Jonah or even mainly about Jonah’s "success" or "failure" as a prophet? Isn’t it rather about God and God’s mercy and the fact that we human beings have no control over how God works in the world?)

But no matter. According to Lobe, Oren and Gerson go on to state that this "paradox of prophesy" is the kind of "quandary [that] is routinely encountered by national leaders, especially during crises." Being proper neocons, they go on to invoke Winston Churchill and Harry Truman as perfect examples of this "paradox of prophesy":

Winston Churchill, for example, prophetically warned of the Nazi threat in the 1930s, but if he had convinced his countrymen to strike Germany pre-emptively, would he have been hailed for preventing World War II or condemned for initiating an unnecessary conflict? As president in 1945, Harry Truman predicted that Japan would never surrender and that a quarter of a million GIs would be killed invading it. And so he obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only to be vilified by many future historians. But what if the atomic bombs were never dropped and the Battle for Japan claimed countless casualties — would history have judged Truman more leniently?

This is, Oren and Gerson say, the "tragedy of leadership." (And I just thought it was one unending privilege after another, being Commander-in-Chief of Everything Under the Sun. Whodathunkit that being Potus could be so tragic?) After considering the negative examples of Jimmy Carter in 1979 (failed to act against Iran) and Ronald Reagan in 1983 (failed to act against Hizbullah in Lebanon), Oren and Gerson advise Bush to keep doing what he is doing, aware that the "paradox of prophesy" means that no one will — or even can — truly appreciate what he is doing.

[America's leaders] must decide whether to keep troops in Iraq, incurring untold losses of American lives and resources, or whether to withdraw and project an image of weakness to those who still seek to harm the U.S. If diplomatic efforts fail to deter Iran from enriching uranium, American policy makers will have to determine whether to stop the Islamic Republic by force or coexist with a highly unstable, nuclear-armed Middle East. They will be reproved for the actions they take to forestall catastrophe, but may receive no credit for averting cataclysms that never occur. For Mr. Bush and his successors, this will remain the tragic dilemma of leadership.

Lobe sums the piece up nicely: "So, there you have it. The message from Jonah (and Churchill and Truman) is Sustain the Surge and Bomb Iran."

Um, excuse me, but where is God in all this? I mean, it’s fairly clear that neoconservatives worship American power as their god, so it is possible that the lack of the Lord in Oren and Gerson’s piece is intentional and not a mere oversight. God sent Jonah to Ninevah, "that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come before me," and it was God who was the author of the impending shock and awe against "that great city," not Jonah. Would Jonah have been so reluctant to preach, or exercise judgement (or both), had he had a massive arsenal at his disposal and the ability to use it on a whim? On his own, would he have even given Ninevah that chance to repent?

And what to make of Jonah’s intense reluctance? He flees the Lord and heads as far away from Ninevah as he can possibly think of, hoping to get "away from the presence of the Lord." Most (I think all) of Israel’s prophets have been conscripts and have showed great reluctance for doing the Lord’s work when called, and many were found doing other things when that call came. Where is the reluctance in any of the neocon heroes? (Was Winston Churchill at work laying bricks — he was a member of Britain’s bricklayers union — minding his own business when God called him to fight the good fight against Naziism?) All of them seem happy and eager to do what they claim to be God’s work, which usually involves some kind of war against some kind of evil in order to save God’s people.

Oren and Gerson need not have worked so hard to make the story of Jonah fit their notion of "prophetic" political leadership. There is another tale, one that actually applies to their notion of the prophet who sees all and is confronted with future potential monstrous evil against God’s people. It is one of the many stories told of the Prophet Elisha and it’s in 2 Kings 8:7—15 for those of you with a Bible or Tanakh who want to look up the passage yourselves. I’m going to cite the passage as it is translated in the English Standard Version, which is my preferred Bible translation:

7. Now Elisha came to Damascus. Ben-hadad the king of Syria was sick. And when it was told him, "The man of God has come here,"
8. the king said to Hazael, "Take a present with you and go to meet the man of God, and inquire of the Lord through him, saying, Shall I recover from this sickness?"
9. So Hazael went to meet him, and took a present with him, all kinds of goods of Damascus, forty camel loads. When he came and stood before him, he said, "Your son Ben-hadad king of Syria has sent me to you, saying, Shall I recover from this sickness?"
10. And Elisha said to him, "Go, say to him, You shall certainly recover, but the Lord has shown me that he shall certainly die."
11. And he fixed his gaze and stared at him, until he was embarrassed. And the man of God wept.
12. And Hazael said, "Why does my lord weep?" He answered, "Because I know the evil that you will do to the people of Israel. You will set on fire their fortresses, and you will kill their young men with the sword and dash in pieces their little ones and rip open their pregnant women."
13. And Hazael said, "What is your servant, who is but a dog, that he should do this great thing?" Elisha answered, "The Lord has shown me that you are to be king over Syria."
14. Then he departed from Elisha and came to his master, who said to him, "What did Elisha say to you?" And he answered, "He told me that you would certainly recover."
15. But the next day he took the bed cloth and dipped it in water and spread it over his face, till he died. And Hazael became king in his place.

Elisha is faced with a truly horrific vision, a violent vision that shows clearly what the future portends. So what does Elisha, a "prophet in Israel," do when confronted with the future leader of Syria who will set fire to the fortresses of Israel, kill its young men and "rip open" it’s pregnant women? Does he hold a press conference? Publish a book, write columns for the Wall Street Journal and go on CNN demanding immediate action lest the young men and expectant mothers of Israel perish at the hands of its enemies? Does he contact the kings of Israel and Judah and lobby hard for a "pre-emptive" attack? Are there air strikes? A targeted assassination? An invasion to liberate Syria and effect "regime change," ousting Hazael and replacing him with pliant client of either Israel or Judah?

No. Elisha simply weeps and gets embarrassed.

So far as we can tell from 2 Kings, Elisha tells no one about the threat Hazael poses to God’s people Israel in the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. It’s the moral equivalent not of 1938 but of 1932 and Elisha, given this horrific vision of the future, does nothing. Is there a "paradox of prophesy" in this? If there, the author (and any subsequent editors) of the Kings account doesn’t bother with it, because what follows are occasional accounts of desultory fighting between Israel and Syria. Eventually, by 2 Kings 10:32, God finally intervenes — on the side of Syria.

In those days the Lord began to cut off parts of Israel. Hazael defeated them throughout the territory of Israel: from the Jordan eastward, all the land of Gilead, the Gadites, and the Reubenites, and the Manassites, from Aroer, which is by the Valley of the Arnon, that is, Gilead and Bashan.

Hazael and his army march against Jerusalem but abandon their seige after "Jehoash, king of Judah, took all the sacred gifts that Jehoshaphat and Jehoram and Ahaziah his fathers, the kings of Judah, had dedicated, and his own sacred gifts, and all the gold that was found in the treasuries of the house of the Lord and of the king’s house, and sent these to Hazael king of Syria." (2 Kings 10:32-33) No one suffers from this looting of the temple. This is not the last of Hazael, as he wages war — on God’s behalf — against Israel and Judah for many years, oppressing Israel (2 Kings 13:22) before eventually dying, likely from old age or natural causes (the text does not say how he dies), and being succeeded by his son. The Kingdom of Israel recovers (and then only temporarily — it will fall permanently in Chapter 17) only when it and Syria have new kings, and then only because "the Lord was gracious to them and had compassion on them, and he turned toward them, because of his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." (2 Kings 13:23)

No pre-emptive war. No regime change. No commando raids. No air strikes. No sanctions. No AEI press conferences. Just embarrassment and weeping.

Now, I will grant that according to our neocon exegetes, Elisha is a lousy prophet — he is no Harry Truman, much less the sainted Winston Churchill (who maybe was assumed bodily into heaven without first dying?). He’s constantly cavorting with non-Israelites (especially important Syrians), healing their skin ailments, blessing them with children and raising their dead. He even fails to annihilate a Syrian army when he gets the chance, instead he merely blinds it, leads it right into the camp of the Israelites and then demands that Israel show them mercy — mercy! — by feeding them and letting them go home of their own accord.

This, of course, is why the likes of Oren and Gerson want nothing to do with the real God revealed to us is scripture. They want a vengeful, arrogant and merciless deity, and the United States of America fits that desire perfectly. They want to follow a prophet unwilling or unable to encounter a God whose mercy is real and cannot be controlled by or subject to mere human caprice. The President of the United States is their perfect vengeful, arrogant and merciless prophet.

The perfectly false prophet of a perfectly false god. The dilemma is, unfortunately, ours.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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"[T]he English regard and practice their religion only insofar as it relates to their duty as subjects of the king. They live as he lives and believe as he believes; indeed, they do everything he commands. … [The English] would accept Mohammedanism or Judaism if the king believed it, and told them to believe it."

~ Giovanni Micheli, Venetian ambassador to England during the reign of Henry VIII,
as quoted in Reformation Europe: Age of Reform and Revolution, p. 174

"Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is."

~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower as quoted in Civil Religion and the Presidency, p. 200

The veneration and near-worship of the president, and the presidency, has been with us for a long time, as long as the United States of America has existed as a nation under the Philadelphia Constitution and quite possibly as long as Americans have misled themselves into thinking they are God’s chosen people. In fact, while Americans fancy themselves a Christian people, and their nation a Christian nation, the national faith of the United States of America — and most Americans — is Americanism, and the god of most Americans is their country, its "principles" and its symbols worshiped in deeply held civic faith willed into being over the last two centuries (more or less) from bits and pieces of English Calvinism, deism and 19th century evangelicalism.

And a whole lot of wishful thinking and very hot air.

So is the conclusion of academics Richard V. Pierard and Robert D. Linder, authors of the nearly 20-year-old tome Civil Religion and the Presidency. I came across the book while I was doing research during the spring semester on the views of Martin Luther and Philip Melachthon — the two architects of the German Reformation — toward the state, and knew immediately this website needed a review. Pierard and Linder evaluate the role of nine presidents — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan — in using, leading and shaping the American civic faith and the faith Americans have in the meaning and purpose of their government and their country.

Pierard and Linder begin the book with an exploration of civil religion, noting that human beings in most, if not all, societies throughout human history create some kind of civic faith that stipulates a "u2018sacred cosmos’ which locates their lives in an ultimately meaningful order." Civic faiths unify societies, help create a common shared frame of reference for members of that society, allow for the settlement of disputes and help create "common goals and values validated through some cosmic frame of reference which their members recognize as defining their collective existence."

While religion had filled this role in "ancient" societies, and the institutional church in pre-Enlightenment Europe, since the Enlightenment, the state-centered societies of the West have had to (consciously or otherwise) create civic faiths to take the place or fill the role that a state church would play. While both Rome and Greece possessed strong civil faiths — an offense against the gods was also an offense against the state and against society, and the reverse was also true, which is why Christian martyrs like Polycarp were charged with atheism for refusing to perform public religious rituals like sacrificing to the emperor — true civil religion in the context of Christendom only begins with the Crusades. Early Christians, even after the effective merger of Church and state during the reign of Emperor Constantine, distinguished between the polity where they lived and their patria, their homeland in heaven. This distinction comes directly from passages in Pauline epistles which state the Christians are sojourners and resident aliens of wherever they live while their "citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20, "ημων γαρ το πολιτευμα εν ουρανοις υπαρχει,u201D literally u201Cfor our commonwealth/state exists in the heavensu201D). In fact, in the anonymous early apologetic writing (sometime in the early to middle second century A.D.) the Letter to Diognetus, the author expands on this by writing:

[Christians] live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them, every fatherland is a foreign land. (Diog. 5:5 as printed in The Library of Christian Classics: Vol. 1, Early Christian Fathers, p. 217)

This notion of Christians having their real home in heaven began to change, Pierard and Linder write, in the early Middle Ages, when the king’s realm and the patria began to merge. Taxes and war, of course (for you cannot have one without the other), were the main instrument of this: taxes to pay for the Crusades, which created a concept of "holy land" that would eventually be transferred to the European nations sending crusaders to the Levant, allowing Europeans to eventually consider themselves covenant people chosen by God to do God’s will on Earth. "Before long," Pierard and Linder write, "the French saw war for France as war for the u2018Holy Land of France.’ In this context, Joan of Arc cried, u2018Those who wage war against the holy realm of France, wage war against King Jesus.’"

(The English would take time to catch up with the French, and would not go around claiming they were God’s chosen people until 1559, when English Bishop John Aylmer would claim "God is English." John Foxe would soon thereafter popularize the idea of England as God’s chosen land and the English as his chosen people in his Book of Martyrs, according to Pierard and Linder.)

The same period of time also saw the creation of an organic notion of nation and society similar to the evolving medieval notion of the church. If the church was a "body" with Christ as its head (and the pope as his earthly vicar), than the combined patria-realm would be one "body" with the prince or king as its earthly head. "Reason and nature demand that all members of the body serve the head as well as be controlled by it," they write.

But modern civil religion, the civic faith of nations and the bulk of people inhabiting those nations, is really the product of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. For Pierard and Linder, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau were the great authors of a "minimum civil creed that would instill civic spirit and discipline the citizenry" that might not share a single religious confession. Rousseau envisioned a simple and "exactly worded" civic faith with few dogmas:

The existence of a mighty, intelligent, and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence; the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas.

The problem with Rousseau’s civil faith is that it essentially made the state and the "popular will" as expressed in the state transcendent in and of itself. "Reason enabled each individual member of Rousseau’s civil society to read the revelation of Nature’s God in creation," Pierard and Linder write. "For many practitioners of civil religion before and since, the state encompassed everything that mattered: there was no law or loyalty higher than the state. … The likelihood of idolatrous subservience to the state lurked in Rousseau’s earthbound public religion because it had no fixed transcendental referent by which it could be judged."

American civil religion begins almost the minute the English colonists set foot on the continent. From the Mayflower Compact and John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity (from which the phrase "city on a hill" as applied to the enterprise of being American comes from), the earliest settlers in British North America had a sense that they were being watched by both God and the entire world and were engaged in a mission of "cosmic significance," that they were God’s people Israel crossing the wilderness and settling in the promised land after leaving Egypt (Europe).

According to Pierard and Linden, this sense of chosenness would be one of five main characteristics of American civil faith, the others being: civil millenarianism, the evangelical consensus, deism, and a self-authenticating history.

Civil millenarianism would manifest itself in the faith of American political institutions to save the world. Quoting church historian John Smylie, Pierard and Linder write: "Gradually, in America, the nation emerged as the primary agent of God’s meaningful activity in history. Hence, Americans bestowed on it [the nation] a catholicity of destiny similar to that which theology attributes to the universal church." God will save the world through God’s chosen instrument, the United States of America, and its political institutions.

(If there is a weakness in this book, Pierard and Linder spend too much telling me things, rather than using quotes to show me.)

By the evangelical consensus, Pierard and Linder appear to mean the emotive and experiential Christianity that emerged from the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century — a faith that emphasized the conversion experience, action as opposed to doctrine, and was generally positive in its anthropology (humans may be sinners but they could, of their own accord, choose God) and its outlook. History was getting better, and humans could make their world and the societies better through Christian action and state action (often one in the same). Because God’s chosen instrument for world betterment was the United States of America, evangelical Christians could easily pledge loyalty to both God and nation. (This evangelical consensus would become watered down, somewhat, as the civic faith was later expanded to include Roman Catholics and Jews.)

The deist contribution is important because if deists and evangelicals shared little, they did share common social outlooks. "For example, two Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson (convinced deist) and John Witherspoon (staunch Calvinist) agreed that humans possessed a natural, innate ability to grasp the truth about the world and morality without the need for divine grace or revelation. Thus political thought in Revolutionary America was based on the assumption that the light of natural reason could reveal the eternal principles of God’s law to any unprejudiced, right-thinking individual," Pierard and Linder write. While both deist and evangelical might differ on the sinfulness of human beings, both agreed and believed in individual freedom "under God" and of "freedom and democracy in the context of a New Israel with a sense of divine mission."

Finally, there is the matter of a self-authenticating history, a history which proves (since we don’t actually have any scripture telling us that God gave the Constitution to George Washington after he fasted on Mt. Vernon for forty days and forty nights) American specialness and chosenness. This is a history mostly of bloodshed, of victory in war and the expansion of territory and "freedom." Meaning, a history of "positive" state and government action and of the state as the central organizing principle of American society.

But what of the president? What role does he play in this? Pierard and Linder write:

Few students of politics would dispute that there is a religious component to the presidency, though determining whether the man influences the office in this way of vice versa is beyond the purposes of this book. The truth is that most Americans regard the office with a measure of religious awe [italics mine] and that certain presidents down through history have used the position with great success in playing the role of prophet and/or priest in America’s public religion.

In any event, scholars generally agree that whether he is religiously active or passive, the foremost representative of civil religion in America is the president. He not only serves as head of state and chief executive, but he also functions as the symbolic representative of the whole of the American people. He affirms that God exists and that America’s destiny and the nation’s politics must be interpreted in the light of the Almighty’s will. The rituals that the president celebrates and the speeches he makes reflect the basic themes of American civil religion.

Most of the nine presidents Pierard and Linder have chosen to examine are considered by most historians as "great" or "near great" presidents (with the exceptions, I’m guessing, of Nixon and Carter) who also held the office during times of war and/or great national crisis. Most of the nine did not have strong denominational bonds: George Washington was more of a deist than an Episcopalian and had little time for kneeling in prayer or partaking of the Eucharist; Lincoln may have been a deeply religious man but he was not much of a churchgoer (and no one is certain where Lincoln’s personal faith came from); Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest "religious" influence was lifelong friend and Groton headmaster (and one of the major figures in early American Muscular Christianity) Endicott Peabody, whose religion was "a mixture of messianic idealism and simple pragmatism"; Dwight Eisenhower was only baptized (in a Presbyterian service) after his first inaugural in 1953; Nixon would adhere to neither the Quaker faith he was raised in or the Pentecostalism he spent some time as a young man flirting with, but would rather make America’s "innate goodness," the country’s "spirit" and its national mission his object of worship.

(However, Nixon would spend far too much time palling around with the closest thing to a "state church" the United States has ever had — Billy Graham, who wanders through this book like a false prophet.)

Each of these presidents contributed hugely to the country’s civil faith. Washington defined much of the job, creating the language of the civil faith by constantly invoking "providence" and "the deity" to oversee the country’s affairs. Lincoln, with the Gettysburg Address, added permanently to the canon of American "holy scripture" and outlined "the American Democratic Faith," the belief that American political institutions are central and necessary for the salvation of humanity. (Lincoln, along with Martin Luther King, would become one of the two martyred saints of the American civil faith.) McKinley, in presiding over the war with Spain and the campaign to subdue the Philippines, would attach imperial expansion to the country’s civil faith, giving America and Americans a potentially globe-spanning role as the savior of the world, emphasizing in particular America as God’s chosen instrument for world and human salvation. Woodrow Wilson further expanded that sense of global mission and further moralized that American sense of mission. Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded the civil religion beyond the country’s Evangelical Protestants to include both Roman Catholics and Jews. (The civil faith had always invoked God the Father far more than God the Son anyway.) Dwight Eisenhower intensified the civic faith during the Cold War, portraying it as a struggle with "godlessness" and harnessing religion in general to "democratic" political institutions. Richard Nixon, consciously seeing himself as the central figure of the civil faith, "hoped to lead in the revival of moral values by making a dramatic public emphasis on worship [in the White House], and in doing so he created an extraordinary syncretism of church religion and civil religion."

Pierard and Linder identify three main ways the president manifests himself in the civil faith — as pastor, as prophet, and as high-priest. The pastoral job is most obvious at time of "national crisis" (wars, natural disasters, space shuttles blowing up, school shootings), when the president seeks to reassure the country that its election is intact and that God still has great things in mind for America and Americans. Neither Pierard nor Linder spend much time on this function (save to say it was Eisenhower’s primary job), but FDR was probably the first real pastor president, the first president able to speak words of immediate "comfort" to Americans, since being the pastor to all of America requires a mass media that allows the president to "talk to" millions of people at the same time. Only radio and television can accomplish that.

The prophet calls Americans and America to be better, to aspire to their better natures and the values inherent in the covenant, to live up to their founding ideals and to expand those ideals to those not originally included. The prophetic has largely been the preserve of Democrats — FDR comes to mind — but Lincoln’s presidency was very much a "prophetic" one. In fact, both Pierard and Linder say that if a religiously tinged presidency is unavoidable (a conclusion they appear to come to), prophetic is best, since it actually aims the nation at transcendent values that lie outside the nation itself. It holds the nation and its leaders accountable to something other than themselves.

(For another example of the “prophetic” in action in American politics, one need only look at Jim Wallis and folks at Sojourners, who like all Progressives past, continue to mistake God’s command to God’s people — that would be the church — to be just, merciful and charitable toward the poor with a command to the nation, and all that entails — taxes, force, coercion, state power and death.)

This leaves the high priest, a model both authors seem to believe Republicans have adopted in the last few decades beginning with Richard Nixon. (George W. Bush is clearly a high priest president.) This is a dangerous model, they write, because "[t]he president as high priest possesses what amounts to a sacred character, and thus his actions may not be resisted in any meaningful fashion." The authors quote at length 1968 Republican campaign strategist Ray Price on the matter of who Republicans then believed the president was in the eyes of the people:

People identify with a President in the way they do with no other public figure. Potential presidents are measured against an ideal that’s a combination of leading man, God, father, hero, pope, king, with maybe just a touch of avenging furies thrown in. They want him to be larger than life, a living legend, and yet quintessentially human; someone to be held up to their children as a role model; someone to be cherished by themselves as a revered member of the family, in somewhat the same way in which peasant families pray to the icon in the corner [emphasis mine]. Reverence goes where power is; it’s no coincidence that there’s such persistent confusion between love and fear in the whole history of man’s relationship to the gods. Awe enters into it. …

Selection of a President has to be an act of faith. … This faith isn’t achieved by reason; it’s achieved by charisma, by a feeling of trust that can’t be argued or reasoned, but that comes across in those silences that surround the words. The words are important — but less for what they actually say than for the sense they convey, for the impression they give of the man himself, his hopes, his standards, his competence, his intelligence, his essential humanness, and the directions of history he represents.

Whether Americans, or even Republicans, see the president this way (I think many do, actually, and many Republicans seem to have developed an idea of the presidency as a kind-of Davidic kingship), it’s pretty stunning that a major political party in an allegedly democratic nation state can speak of leadership in such, well, undemocratic terms. (To be fair, the above paragraphs can just as easily describe the devotion to and the cults surrounding FDR and John F. Kennedy, and what I’ve seen of the cult of Barak Obama.)

The problems with a high-priest presidency are two-fold. First, opposition to the president and the nation he (or, I suppose, she) isn’t just treason — it’s heresy. Religions, even ones cobbled together from junk, can be brutally intolerant of heresy. Second, the high priest isn’t really accountable to the people, he’s accountable only to God. (And, to be fair, the prophet isn’t accountable to anyone but God either.) He stands in front of the people but faces the altar, rather than at the altar facing the people. We are his to dispose of, and our wills, our desires — our persons and our very humanity — do not matter.

Better, however, would be no civil religion at all, no faith in the nation, its institutions or its purpose. I do not need nor want the president to stand in my stead before God, to mediate my encounter with the divine. I already have Jesus, so what need have I of George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton? My purpose comes from elsewhere, and so should yours. But that is about as likely as the government disappearing tomorrow. So I encourage non-belief in the civil faith and non-observance of its rituals. A committed Christian, a faithful Jew, a devout Muslim, has no business believing that the United States of America, its values, its spirit, its ideals and its institutions, can save the world. That is to worship a created thing, a transitory thing, an artifact of history, one that does not and cannot transcend anything.

I’m not sure any of this can be reformed or changed, because it may not be possible to have "America" without this nonsensical civil religion, without the sense that Americans are God’s chosen people, that America and American institutions can save the world. I could accept an Americanness that did away with the sense of mission and the evangelical faith in "democracy," an Americanness that assumes we are and allows us to be just another people living in just another country. But this sense of ourselves as God’s chosen people, as cosmically special, may be too central to our overall sense of ourselves, and our faith in our political institutions — including the wretched presidency — may be too strong and too essential to rid ourselves of. It may not be possible to have Americanness without it. I don’t know.

But I do know this: the American civil religion is a form of idolatry, a false religion that worships a false god and promises things — salvation, grace, community, purpose, love — it simply cannot deliver. We have no business believing in any of it.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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Twice last week, Republicans were mumbling in public what I suspect many have been arguing in private for quite some time.

First, Thomas Sowell, in one of his lazy columns of disconnected anecdotes, considers the fate of the country:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

And then swathing the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, Harvard professor of government and political philosophy (and "manliness" advocate) Harvey Mansfield waxed long and lovingly on the need for a strong executive and "one-man rule" to save the Republic:

Now the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule. The first is that law is always imperfect by being universal, thus an average solution even in the best case, that is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot, who can judge particular circumstances. This defect is discussed by Aristotle in the well-known passage in his “Politics” where he considers “whether it is more advantageous to be ruled by the best man or the best laws.”

The other defect is that the law does not know how to make itself obeyed. Law assumes obedience, and as such seems oblivious to resistance to the law by the “governed,” as if it were enough to require criminals to turn themselves in. No, the law must be “enforced,” as we say. There must be police, and the rulers over the police must use energy (Alexander Hamilton’s term) in addition to reason. It is a delusion to believe that governments can have energy without ever resorting to the use of force.

The best source of energy turns out to be the same as the best source of reason — one man. One man, or, to use Machiavelli’s expression, uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he regards it as necessary to maintaining his own rule. Such a person will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli’s prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant.

How deep and dark the thoughts of Republicans have become these days! I had never heard of Mansfield until this week (proving that one can lead a deep, fulfilling and very manly life without consulting one of the country’s resident philisophes on the subject), and Thomas Sowell has never impressed me much. Since his columns first caught my eye sometime in the 1980s (I think), he has always struck as a shallow and eager defender of "energetic" government, particular energetic policing and war-making by Republican presidents.

But we should be very grateful that rather than huddle in tiny conventicles mumbling these things to themselves, Sowell and Mansfield have wandered up to the tops of mountains and shouted them to the world.

There is a streak of authoritarianism in Conservatism in the United States, and there always has been. I and others have written at length about it at this web site, and I hope we continue to do so. However, that streak is getting wider, taking over much more of the Conservative Republican soul. This desire to be led, to be ruled, to succumb to "one-man rule," will lead surely lead to dictatorship. It will lead to dictatorship because too many Republicans want it to lead there. They want a führer, and they are not likely to stop until they get one.

One need only look at the current crop of Republican presidential candidates (Ron Paul excluded). All are strong advocates of a vigorous executive, of executive power, privilege and prerogative. Both Giuliani and McCain would make serviceable führers, and I’m certain that is exactly their appeal with the leadership-hungry base of the GOP. (Mitt Romney is more a CEO type, and Republicans already voted for that in 2000. While the party faithful cherish and support their current CEO, I think they are a more than a bit disappointed that he isn’t enough of a leader.)

But this is an old American desire, older than the "War on Terror" and older even, I think, than the Cold War itself. (I’m old enough to remember some cranky old Conservative publication from the early 1980s pining for an American Cincinnatus to take charge of the nation during our near-eternal "wartime" and lead it, selflessly, to victory. This desire is as old as the American presidency itself. It, however, fails to understand that dictatorship is rarely as selfless as they’d like.) But 60 years of nearly endless confrontation and war have sharpened this desire for a dictator, and Conservatism’s ignorance of its own history has left its adherents unable to understand why they want "one-man rule" or what it really means.

And there is this overweening sense of entitlement among Republicans that the presidency is, by rights, theirs. That sense of entitlement dies hard, and itself will likely be rubbed bloody and raw should a Democrat (Hillary Clinton most likely, with Barak Obama in the Dick Cheney seat) get elevated to the presidency in 2008. But because we have invested so much in the presidency, so much power and authority and responsibility, so much of our national identity, and because we Americans have come to view so much relying on the outcome of political processes (including the very survival of our supposed civilization), there will come a day when someone will not want to surrender that office merely because voters said they need to. Or someone will try and take the office despite being told by voters they can’t have it.

"Too much is at stake," they will say.

For a long time I feared the military — whose officer corps have been Republican-occupied territory since sometime in the 1970s — would give its support to any Republican efforts to seize power. Based on what I’ve read, however, the officers of the Army and Marine Corps are much less enchanted with the GOP-run executive and are probably much less likely to assent and support a seizure of power. This is the sole silver lining, however, on an otherwise very dark cloud.

Because I’m not so sure Republicans need the active support or even passive assent of much of the military anymore. Especially its officers. They will have the legions of "private contractors," the Blackwaters and the CACIs, currently at war in Iraq, to act as their Freikorps in the event they decide to seize power. Who or what is Blackwater loyal to? And while the Army officer may have a very Conservative Republican sense of duty, that sense of duty usually also involved the nation and its principles, and not just a certain party’s leaders. I don’t think we can say the same of the militias — um, sorry, private contractors. Do Blackwater soldiers swear an oath of allegiance or loyalty to a constitution or a government? Or do many — most? — Blackwater "men at arms" swear their loyalty to a junk ideology which includes a kind-of cultural conservatism that believes in "order" brutally and efficiently administered by whatever "authority" shares those values? (I dare you to imagine Blackwater in service to a future Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama administration…) Besides, I doubt men sign up to fight in private armies because they want to help people.

But another future risk are Iraq veterans themselves, many of whom have served (and will serve) multiple tours in Iraq. Much of the political and social instability of the 1920s and 1930s was caused by soldiers unable to adjust to life outside the trench and the battlefield. Ordinary life, the life of family, church and commerce, no longer had the allure that the camaraderie of the military unit had, and no longer provided as noble a purpose. Fascism owed much to these soldiers, who not only provided its muscle but also instilled in European fascism its reason for being — creating a regimented society united in purpose in which all belonged (or could be made to belong). I’m not saying Iraq veterans will pose this kind of threat to American democracy, but some could. What will many think when they don’t get parades or thanks of a grateful nation for years of miserable and life-threatening service? Unlike Vietnam vets, these men (and women) go to Iraq and come back (and go, and come back, and go, and so on…) in coherent military units, rather than as atomized individuals. Some, maybe many, will miss that sense of belonging, the daily fighting for life that makes mundane human existence pointless and unbearable. In the 1920s, Fascism promised, and tried to deliver, a cure for that.

Republicans are also advancing their own "stabbed in the back" myth to explain away the "defeat" of Iraq and Afghanistan. Dinesh D’Souza is only the latest to advance the notion that the "Cultural Left" is somehow responsible for the loss, and I expect that between the traitorous media, Democrats, university professors and whatnot, the Right will eagerly deflect any responsibility for the war or the very real nature of the defeat of American arms. But calling someone a traitor, labeling whole swaths of fellow-citizens as responsible for defeat, these are words that logically lead to consequences, they demand action. Why only fight an enemy abroad when that very same enemy needs to be fought at home? I think they are words and ideas that Republicans and Conservatives will eventually demand be acted upon. They can only do that if they control the state. George W. Bush clearly has not been the man to take that war that seriously. But I fear someone will.

I don’t yet know in what circumstances the Right might try to seize power in this country. I can imagine the outcry from Conservatives and Republicans following a major terror attack eight months or a year into a Hillary Clinton administration. If we get the mutterings of Sowell in the midst of a Republican presidency, can you imagine how hoarse some will scream, and how blunt they would wear the nibs of their pens down, how they would thrash their keyboards? I suspect there would be a demand to topple President Hillary Clinton and install a junta of some kind, and the pressure might be great. The good news is that Republicans would likely fail in any attempt to seize power under those conditions, if only because they will not likely have enough of the military on their side. The bad news, however, is two-fold. First, failure to seize power will not leave them as completely defeated as actually seizing and wielding power, and subsequently failing would (America is too big to be ruled by a dictator, and "one-man rule" in this way would probably fall apart in a few years). Whiny, self-righteous Rightists would linger and organize for another attempt.

Second and worse, however, is what a Democrat administration would do in the face of a failed attempt to topple it. I’m not sure how much of law enforcement and the military would follow orders, but attached as they are to state power, police and soldiers would — at least many of them — likely follow orders, even if (maybe especially if) those orders involve the mass arrest and detention of Americans. Whiny, self-righteous Right-wingers could actually claim something resembling a moral high ground under such circumstances. What could then follow would be a slow unraveling of the country and a descent into political violence and insurgency.

The upside of this is that secession would finally be a real option.

Am I being overly pessimistic? I don’t want to be. But I don’t know. Our Conservative friends are oft reminding us, words have consequences, and the words many use to describe their fellow citizens are intemperate, alarmist and angry. As I pondered whether the Queen of Denmark could use another loyal subject, a very good friend cautions me in my pessimism that there is another way, that we do not need to emulate those who have wandered down the path of dictatorship because some (or many) very vocal and active people wanted it. The French avoided fascism in the 1930s and later military rule during the Algerian War, so it is possible, despite facing as many discontents and discontented as we do, to avoid this fate.

But as energetic Conservatives constantly and vociferously remind us, we are not French. We should take them at their word.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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Does anyone remember the days when “libertarians” spent their time arguing the merits of government contracting? That it would be more efficient, cheaper, and provide “better service” to have “private contractors” do the same jobs that “civil servants” are currently paid to do? (Maybe there are “libertarians” who still passionately argue these points, I don’t know.)

The Sunday New York Times ran a lengthy story that ought to put paid to any notion that “private firms” contracting with the government can do government’s work cheaper, better and faster:

Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

Contractors still build ships and satellites, but they also collect income taxes and work up agency budgets, fly pilotless spy aircraft and take the minutes at policy meetings on the war. They sit next to federal employees at nearly every agency; far more people work under contracts than are directly employed by the government. Even the government’s online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced (and is famously difficult to use).

And there’s this, in reference to a CACI contract that hired six people to review other pending federal government contracts:

The price of $104 an hour — well over $200,000 per person annually — was roughly double the cost of pay and benefits of a comparable federal worker, said [Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight].

And then there’s this description of the explosion of contracting:

But the recent contracting boom had its origins in the "reinventing government" effort of the Clinton administration, which slashed the federal work force to the lowest level since 1960 and streamlined outsourcing. Limits on what is "inherently governmental" and therefore off-limits to contractors have grown fuzzy, as the General Services Administration’s use of CACI International personnel shows.

Oh, and there’s this, which is absolutely precious:

"This is the new face of government," [said Stan] Soloway [president of the Professional Services Council, an Arlington, Virginia-based group which lobbies on behalf of government contractors.] "This isn’t companies gouging the government. This is the marketplace."

No, Stan, it isn’t. There is no “marketplace” for government services because there is no marketplace for government. The state maintains a legal monopoly on force and the provision of whatever “services” it decides only it can provide. It doesn’t make any difference if civil servants or “private” contractors do that work if government gives itself the legal monopoly on “service” provision. Monopoly, and only monopoly, is the problem.

There is no virtue in reducing the number of civil servants — government workers — if the role, function and jobs of government are not only not reduced, but actually expanded. Which is what has happened in the Clinton and Bush Jong Il years. Contracting also creates whole “businesses” completely dependent on taxpayer dollars — legal theft and lawful coercion — businesses that then specialize not in the making and selling of products, but in lobbying legislators for ever more business. Businesses that specialize in taking from you and me. According to the New York Times piece, Lockheed Martin is the biggest federal contractor, making more from contracts than the federal budget allocates to either the Departments of Justice or Energy. Can any of us walk into a Wal-Mart and buy something — anything — made by Lockheed Martin? Would we even want to?

Then why must we be forced to buy “services” from Lockheed Martin?

The only way to reduce the costs of government is to reduce government. And the only way to do that is to end the state’s monopoly. On everything.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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There’s something in the air here in Hyde Park. And it isn’t the crisp winter chill or falling snow, which apparently Chicago has not had all that much of this year. Nor is it the sound of the occasional work in the street as the city of Chicago replaces water pipes in the neighborhood.

No, it’s the fact that favorite son, local resident and junior Illinois Sen. Barack Obama appears to be running for president. I say appears, because while he has all but announced his candidacy, he is still only "exploring" the option.

I know, the fact that anyone is running for president, is aching to become the "chief executive" of the United States of America, is not something any self-respecting anarchist like myself (or even libertarian, I suppose) ought to celebrate. As far as I’m concerned, the presidency is best left unoccupied, a vacancy unfilled and unstaffed, the residue of a long and frightening nightmare that once disturbed a sweet, sound slumber. A second-best solution would be to elect someone deep in a coma, a brain-dead individual capable only of drawing breath and taking nourishment from a tube, who could make neither speeches nor implement policy, incapable of signing treaties or ordering troops into battle. Such a comatose president would do wonders for the civil rights of the disabled, but this would only work if the vice-president himself (or herself) were also utterly uninterested in governing, perhaps instead in permanent thrall to nickel cigars or playing marbles in the dirt with children and grandchildren.

Such a presidency would, by necessity, have to leave vacant the zillions of national security and policy positions that accompany the executive like flies on a cow. The executive office buildings scattered across Mordor-on-the-Potomac would become dark and cold, haunted by the chain-ratting ghosts of dead bureaucrats and regulators as well as by clouds of bats. Or they could, with a little work, become fine homes for Washington’s many homeless. Frankly, I can’t think of a more honest solution to that problem anyway.

In short, I’d like to see an executive branch devoid of human beings who actually want power and want to use it. That’s an actual possibility in a monarchy (and one of its advantages), but it an almost completely unlikely outcome in a republic governed specifically by those who aspire to political power. Sigh. I can have my daydreams too.

We live in a society populated by statists, by people who believe in the efficacy and moral necessity of state action, of coercing others to either encourage the good or forbid the evil, that the arbitrary "we" of America are somehow "all in this together" and therefore must be led, Moses-like, toward whatever promised land the prophet-of-the-moment is promising. Or, as the case may be, frogmarched at gunpoint to that alleged promised land. And so we must suffer their occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm for various and sundry candidates for office, our aspiring prophetic leaders. (Is there still any real popular enthusiasm for George W. Bush out there? Anywhere?) Since this awful habit of electoral politics isn’t going away anytime soon — it is not likely that America will collapse into several hundred or several thousand tiny Hoppean monarchies (another one of my happy daydreams) — it would be best to try and appreciate the spectacle for what it is.

Obamamania appears to be just such a spectacle.

As a poor seminarian (I repeat myself?), I don’t have the wherewithal to get out much. I attend a very liberal school where the annoying (and meaningless) phrase "social justice" is spoken frequently, worship (only as often as necessary and when my wife and I cannot get to alternatives) at a very liberal church where every third sermon seems to focus on the evils of global warming. Hyde Park has money, and it could even be called a wealthy neighborhood, but most of that "wealth" doesn’t appear to have been really made (today) by anyone. Not really. Most Hyde Park residents are, to use a word I first encountered in Deirdre McCloskey’s recent book, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, members of the clericy — academics, theologians, clergy, lawyers and the like. People of bourgeois sensibilities with romantic and revolutionary outlooks. (And oh, what damage such people have done to the world…) Their incomes are, I’m guessing, mostly salaries, the fat rendered from someone else’s land, either taxes taken by force or bequeathed from the trust of some dead industrialist who thought the way to make the world the world a better place was to invent "public policy."

I cannot say there is a universal Obamamania here, because as anywhere, most people don’t really care about politics. (The Bears are a much bigger deal…) But where political enthusiasm meets the real world, there appears to be an earnest love for the senator. I remember from high school the ache some people had for the very early 1960s, the few years of the Kennedy regime, and this ache for Obama has that kind of feel to it. It’s nostalgic and hopeful at the same time, a Janus-face looking both forward and backward. Truth is, Obama is an empty chest into which hopes and dreams are being stuffed by people who appear to yearn for an American future modeled after that of New Frontier: earnest Peace Corps and Vista volunteers and Freedom Riders, of noble and uplifting speeches inspiring to do and be better, of the never-ending expansion of Freedom and Security at the hands of a Just state led only by the Righteous and Virtuous. It’s the same old nonsensical Progressive/Social Democratic version of history as the never-ending expansion of freedom, that only the American state can lead humanity to a more perfect future, one in which we are all equal and free, and suffering and want are eventually banished for ever and ever. (The Republicans version of this teleology is not much better, just as state-centered and a lot more violent.)

But there’s a lot that Progressives choose to forget in their vision of the good and kind society. They forget the men and women the state bends and breaks on that ever-turning wheel of Progress, the men and women who must be broken if the promised land is to be reached. They forget the Great Society had international branch offices that had nothing to do with the Peace Corps — Cuba, the Dominican Republican, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And then there’s of course the most insidious legacy of New Frontier/Great Society era, that the best and brightest are capable of solving all problems, from urban unrest at home to Communist insurgencies abroad, without involving those they seek to help or even asking them.

Progressivism, in its 19th and 20th century versions (and most assuredly in its looming 21st century version as well) is a violent creed that demands the bending the individual human will for the convenience of and to the purpose of the collective. The individual only has value insofar as he or she is part of and participates in the great march of Progress. It may not be as overtly brutal or murderous as fascism or communism, but Progressivism is just as totalitarian, just as reliant on force, just as enamored of the state, and just as focused on the creation of a new kind of human being and a new kind of humanity (and the necessary destruction of the old).

What, after all, is the value of a single human individual life or soul when it’s the promised land we’re marching to?

But this Obamamania is tinged with fear. There are doubts I hear from Obama supporters — best articulated by a rabbi guest-lecturing in a class one evening. The fear is that the good senator will, as he seeks higher office, compromise his principles. I’m sorry, but I find this funny. He is seeking power, the power to coerce, compel, steal, kill and destroy. Power to annihilate. That desire has no principles to begin with, and certainly none it can compromise.

This isn’t to say that Barack Obama isn’t a brilliant politician. He is. He speaks well. You can’t hardly visit a small business in Hyde Park in which a picture of the good senator standing with the proprietor isn’t prominently displayed. He talks about God and religion honestly and sincerely, something most Democrats (and few Republicans) can do. About all muttering rightist detractors can seem to dream up is that he is a crypto-Muslim who would turn America over to the enemy first chance he gets. (I’ll leave the hard work on dissecting and deconstructing Obama to the fine folks over at Counterpunch.org — they have more time than I do and are also demonstrating the man has utterly no principles to compromise.) With 22 months between now and next presidential election, a lot can happen. But if the Republican Party implodes between here and there (as I expect it will, over Iraq and Bush Jong Il’s imperialistic foreign policy), it’s very likely the next president of the United States will be a Democrat. And that Democrat could very well be Barack Obama.

I look forward to the spectacle, but I don’t look forward to much else. I had thought that when I left Washington last summer, I was done with presidents and senators and other lesser congresscritturs and their minions. (Obama may live here in Hyde Park, but I’ve never run into him grocery shopping or anything.) I was looking forward to the fact that my daily life would no longer involve encounters with the Secret Service or the other Uruk-hai in the employ of our current Dark Lord. Obama runs for president, however, and that will change. The Secret Service will encamp here for the duration, with all the inconvenience that brings with it.

I will certainly let you know if I run into them.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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Washington Post columnist David Ignatius appears to get it. A "serious" member of the "establishment," Ignatius may not get much, but it appears he is beginning to understand the limits of American state power and the wisdom of the very elite to which he belongs. In an essay that verges on the silly in some places (what else could something called "The Politics of Murder" be?), Ignatius concludes:

The idea that America is going to save the Arab world from itself is seductive, but it’s wrong. We have watched in Iraq an excruciating demonstration of our inability to stop the killers. We aren’t tough enough for it or smart enough — and in the end it isn’t our problem. The hard work of building a new Middle East will be done by the Arabs, or it won’t happen. What would be unforgivable would be to assume that, in this part of the world, the rule of law is inherently impossible.

It’s nice to see that someone in Washington and attached to something as staid and statist as the Washington Post has come to that conclusion. As a friend (who is much more "establishment" than I am, though that says little) wrote me Friday, the faster this idea catches on, the sooner the United States government will pull the plug on the Iraq venture and the quicker American soldiers (and Marines, and sailors, and airmen) will be withdrawn.

But even if this idea catches on, the fight is not over. For as much as I would like to see an honest conversation about future U.S. foreign policy include isolationism, it won’t. At least not yet. Instead, the conversation will boil down to whether the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and, eventually, Afghanistan) failed because War Minister Donald Rumsfeld and the entire Bush regime were incompetent and mismanaged it or because remaking those parts of the Muslim world (or any other part of the world) was never achievable to begin with.

This is not simple hairsplitting. The former question suggests that under the right leadership, the invasion was actually doable, that the goal of democratizing Iraq and Afghanistan through force was not just a good idea, but something force could have actually accomplished if done right. The latter claims exactly what it says — many things could have been accomplished through the use of force, but a substantial remake of Iraqi politics and the creation of a shining beacon along the Tigris and Euphrates to inspire the entire Islamic world as to the benefits of social democracy was not any of them.

I fully expect some Democrats — especially “serious” ones — and some Republicans to take the first stance, and thus focus on Team Bush’s alleged incompetence. (And they are incompetent, but that is mainly because they are stupid and deluded themselves into believing the Middle East could be remade, and remade on the cheap as part of a show of force, and not because they are bad managers of war — even though they are that too.) The American policy elite, the New York-Washington think tank axis which swirls around the Council on Foreign Relations, will probably take some version of this stance as well. And the reason for this is simple — those who craft the country’s interventionist foreign policy want to save American state power and global influence (and prospects for future inventions — this, I believe, is why so much ink is being spilled over Darfur). They fear a world run by someone other than Americans. Or they fear a world in which the United States is something less than a first-among-equals. They hope that with better management, the international power, prestige and authority held by the United States government to influence or even determine world events will return to what it was in the Clinton and Bush Il Sung regimes, in which Washington led the “global community” but did not quite dictate to it (at least not all the time). First-among-equals sums it up, I believe.

But there are some — and maybe Ignatius is one of them — who have concluded, or will eventually conclude, that better management will not return Washington to the status quo ante of 1999, that the loss of power, prestige and influence that has marked the six years of the Bush Jong Il regime is permanent and cannot be regained. They won’t necessarily argue for isolationism, but will, instead, argue for a truer international order. The U.S. will not necessarily be a “first-among-equals” in this system, at least not in all things and not all the time.

(And let’s be fair, the zenith of American hard power — warmaking — was in 1945, just as the European nation-state was at its most powerful militarily in 1914. It has been down hill from there. The events of the last six years are not really new, they merely confirm a trend that has been true since V-E Day.)

This will be the fight, at least for the next few years. Hard power is finite, costly and difficult to actually deploy, and is only becoming more expensive and difficult to use, so the latter argument will eventually prove itself to be the better argument (and better understanding of the world as it actually is). But I suspect few real policy makers will want to embrace a real decline of American power — both hard and soft.

The truth is state power works more on the basis of consent and cooperation rather than coercion. Hard power only really works if a potential opponent has something to fear from its use. This is why deterrence works and why the hydrogen bomb functions better simply sitting atop a missile in the North Dakota prairie than it does roaring across the pole. Those who rule states have a lot to fear from the application of someone else’s hard power — mostly their own power and privilege. Again, this is why deterrence works in state-to-state interactions. But when faced with non-state actors, groups like Al-Qaeda, Hizbullah, Hamas, and others, hard power can accomplish little because those waging that kind of war have very little to lose and utterly no incentive to give up as long as individuals can resist on behalf of the organization. Non-state actors also get far more bang for their warmaking buck than do states, and thus are proportionally much more effective at actually waging war than states. Every dollar a state spends on warmaking buys less — a lot less — than every dollar a non-state actor spends on warmaking.

Team Bush, however, put all of its faith in waging war, in pursuit of that conservative grail, "peace through superior firepower." It’s the only kind of power movement conservatives and most Republicans either respect or understand (and thus they think it’s the only power anyone else understands too). But one need only look around at all the war in the world. Has superior firepower gotten Israel any "peace" with the Palestinians or Hizbullah? Has it achieved peace in Iraq or Afghanistan? Superior firepower actually guarantees very little peace and not a lot more victory. However, for the true believe, the answer is more firepower, which constantly reminds me of Ronald Reagan in 1980 chiding Democrats for believing that the answer to failed government programs were more programs and more spending. It’s the same approach to governing and the same faith in government, really.

And the Bush Administration’s attachment to hard power is part and parcel of the Conservative kulturkampf, the belief that the specific struggle against bad guys abroad using bombs and soldiers is part of a greater cultural struggle against degenerates, liberals, leftists, atheists, Europeans, homosexuals and other malcontents and non-conformists. Team Bush has a whole mess of wars — the military struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan and the political struggle to lead the world and use force to dictate what its “correct culture” ought to be. Hollywood and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province are, mysteriously and ridiculously, intertwined and turned into the same kind of place and the same kind of threat.

For all their faults (I don’t like Rockefeller World Empire as articulated by the CFR or any of its minions, affiliates, franchisees and subcontractors), the American policy elite understands, in their guts if no place else, that the Conservative kulturkampf is a pointless and no-win proposition because, for the most part, American (and European) values already rule the world. They are triumphant, largely because they are (and have been made to be) so appealing. This is especially true for the very wealthy and well-connected — the global policy elite, the people who work for and run Rockefeller World Empire — as the places they hang out look the same no matter where in the world they are. M Street in Washington, Tahliyyah Street in Jeddah (especially toward the Cornische), the Upper East Side of New York City, and parts of London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, or a hundred other great big cities all look the same, and are populated by the same people who are at ease moving between them and managing the world’s global institutions — the UN, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, global corporations and so-called non-governmental organizations — consuming the world’s products and generating the world ideas (or what passes for them). Globalization works, and works very well, for them. It is a world of social democracy, of managed states, of managed state-capitalist economies, of consumerism with a human and environmental face, it is a world in which one can be at home just about anywhere. And this package of what might be called enlightened humanism (it’s an icky term, I know), not revolutionary Islam or Bolivarianism or fundamentalist Calvinism or whatever, are the values most of the world’s people aspire to.

And this highlights Team Bush’s greatest failure. For not only did it make war on Al-Qaeda, Iraq, the Taliban, terrorism wherever it existed, tyranny in all its forms and even evil itself, but it more or less made war on the very world community the United States had spent so much time, energy, effort and capital trying to breathe into existence after the Second World War. I would not be surprised if the policy elites, more at home in that world than Bush’s (and seeing the complete collapse of Bushworld), as they consider the efforts they need to make to salvage American power, have concluded that a good internationalist Democrat, a la Al Gore, would be a much better fit given the global effects of alleged and assumed American leadership. (Whatever shall I call Hillary Clinton should she be elevated to the presidency?) They let Bush win in 2000 (or rather, they accepted the Bush “victory”) and then supported both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and occupations because they will support anything they see as possibly advancing American power. And I suspect many bought into the idea that American hard power would accomplish what many neoconservatives and Republicans believed it would. They were as much invested in the success of those wars as anyone living and working between Westchester and Alexandria. That it has failed has left them worried (the signs of this worry were clear by the spring of this year) and wondering what will become of them. It isn’t that they’d sell out the United States of America (because they see American interests and global interests as more or less synonymous), but that they would very happily believe that American interests are better served — and American goals most effectively accomplished — by an “international order” that is much more “multilateral” and cooperative than what Team Bush currently presides over.

And while I shed no tears for the “realists” of ages past (who gave us such wonderful and enlightened actions as the 1973 coup in Chile) nor the multilateralists of more recent eras (I became a libertarian/anarchist because of the 1999 NATO war on Serbia), the wreckage of Bush’s world does spark a perverse and quite unexpected and unwanted fondness in me for those happier days (ick!) of Clintonian “multilaterism.”

The problem is not, however, that some conspiratorial cabal of either CFR guys and gals on the one hand or a group of deluded and stupid neoconservatives on the other are plotting to hijack the country’s foreign policy. The real problem is the whole existence of foreign policy itself and the very idea that there is, or even can be, something called the "national interest." And as long as people, even well-meaning rightists with isolation carved upon their hearts, argue that the government can somehow speak as one voice for 300 million people and work on behalf of their single and unified "interest," and then devote resources being that voice and furthering that "interest," then there will always be something so shiny and pretty and attractive that it’s just asking to be hijacked.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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I’ve long been worried about just how Republicans and conservatives (or rather, the muscular, militant nationalists who pretend to be conservatives these days) are going to deal with the defeat of the US arms in Iraq. Some version of the “stabbed-in-the-back” mythology will be the prevailing explanation, but just how that “stabbed-in-the-back” myth will work, given that the war was planned, launched, conducted and overseen by Republicans — who have for as long as I can remember sold themselves as the only people competent enough to wage both foreign policy and war in the world in which we live — I do not know.

Alan Bock, Orange Counter Register columnist and weekly contributor to Antiwar.com, thinks he knows, and in a review of an essay by Spencer Ackerman in the The New Republic, I think he’s right on the money:

In brief, they [war supporters] have shifted from emphasizing the prospects for victory to warning about the dangers of defeat — and placing the blame for possible defeat not on conditions on the ground or the wisdom of the war itself but on a lack of will to win among strategic elites back home. We’re losing not because the future of Iraq is not, or should not be, America’s to dictate, but because critics of the war, and even of the administration’s prosecution of the war, are sapping the will to fight brutally enough to win.

In short, it is the fault of all of us who failed to have faith in our leadership — and that would be Bush Jong Il and his ill-fated administration (odd, but these rules about faith in wartime leadership never seem to apply in quite the same way to Democrats, like Lyndon Johnson or the militarily promiscuous Bill Clinton) — that cost the United States the war.

This is magical thinking. To believe that doubting the regime is the cause of that regime’s military failure is akin to believing that harboring bad thoughts about someone is the cause of their misfortune should misfortune arise. Yes, war is about the will to fight, but that’s not all war is about, and simply having the will to fight is pointless if the goals put forth are simply not achievable. And the domination of and rule over others against their will is, in most cases today, not an achievable goal. Especially if one leaves home and travels halfway across the globe to wage that war.

This “lack of will” talk is a recipe for authoritarianism and tyranny. It gives government the power, in fact the duty, to punish those who do not believe in the war, because the fate of the war hinges entirely on whether everyone supports it, and not whether it was smart to start the war in the first place. And it allows people to ignore their contributions to the disaster. The best example of this is what happened to the German Imperial Army following its defeat in late 1918. Because the German army was never forced to face its very real battlefield defeat (in the allied offensives beginning in late August), because the German government that launched and waged that war was never forced to face the consequences of losing the war it launched (this, however, was Woodrow Wilson’s fault, and not that of the Germans), the German right easily and eagerly accepted the story of the “November criminals” (those Social Democrats who led the post-imperial republican government and accepted the armistice), and that story became an essential part of German right-wing mythology in the 1920s. And Nazism as well.

We know what Republicans did with this kind of talk after Vietnam — the war in Southeast Asia was winnable, if only "the politicians" (code for "Democrats") had let the military do its job properly and without restrictions. (Whatever that means. More bombing? Was it possible to have bombed Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia more than it was actually bombed?) In fact, all American wars are winnable if only the right people wage them (code for "not Democrats"). And America needed to "flex its muscles" and use its power in the world. The long, sorry march to Baghdad in the early spring of 2003 can really be said to have begun in the Gulf of Sidra in 1981, when US Navy jets downed two Libyan MiGs in what was, for the time, an amazing and brazen show of force. And will.

It remains to be seen how the failure of the Iraq war will play out in Republican politics — it may be that because the war was in fact launched and conducted by a very self-consciously Republican and supposedly conservative administration, that some reasonably smart people will be inoculated against the kind of thinking I’ve described in this essay. But I rather doubt it, because bad ideas die hard. What I’ve seen on the web tells me that some, at any rate, are willing to blame the media and Democrats exclusively for the defeat. How that works mechanically, especially given how little power they have in determining policy, is anyone’s guess. But we are talking about magical thinking after all.

It also means that Republicans, if they take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion (and thankfully most of them don’t), are going to demand something akin to one-party authoritarian government the next time they wage war. A government with the power to keep all possible secrets, detain all possible opponents and control all domestic media. Why do anything less if success in war — and thus the future of civilization itself — hinges on it? Given the level of love for an unbound, near-dictatorial presidency among Republicans (a feature of Clinton Democrats as well), these things are a distant, but very real, possibility.

But not even dictatorship will save Republicans from the consequences of stupid and unwinnable wars. Because dictatorship doesn’t save anyone. (Did it save Hitler? Mussolini? Brezhnev? Saddam Hussein?) Which means the next logical step is the rack and the inquisition — “Do you support the war? Do you love and trust your leaders?” And torture and death for those who do not. That is, after all, what the state does when it demands the allegiance and support of all its citizens. However, how they will explain defeat in those circumstances is beyond me. But magical thinking tends to have no bounds and is rarely accountable to reason.

At any rate, the Bush Jong Il regime will likely run out the clock on Iraq, keeping soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen killing and dying there until the dear leader himself can hand the entire disaster over to his successor. Who can then take the entire blame for the debacle. Especially if he (she) is a Democrat.

Bock continues with a short but important review of American “grand strategy”:

Most of all, it can’t be because the grand national strategy of “extraregional hegemony” — which Christopher Layne, author of the fascinating new book The Peace of Illusions, argues has been the de facto U.S. grand strategy since at least shortly before World War II — by its very nature gets the U.S. involved in conflicts that are not only hard to win but utterly marginal to core U.S. interests. Almost all elected Republicans and Democrats, while they might not cop to the term, subscribe to this territorially and ideologically aggressive foreign policy, though they may quibble over where to intervene to create yet another test of American “credibility” next. We certainly can’t expect them to rethink something so intrinsic to their very political natures as to be virtually unnoticed as an ideological position at all.

And this, I think, gets to the heart of the matter. Ruling the world is not only intrinsic to the identity of America’s permanent ruling elites — those who populate and make up what Murray Rothbard called the "Rockefeller World Empire" — its college-educated, development and international aid do-gooders (all of whom have tremendous economic stakes in the preservation and extension of America’s world empire), but it has also become very important to the millions of men and women who populate the heartland and the suburbs, people who know little of the world and respect it even less but somehow see American soldiers as missionaries of order and civilization, bestowing upon the world something it needs, or merely beating it into submission and keeping it at bay. This identity is too important, I think, for Americans of all political flavors to ever question in any great depth or ever consider any alternatives. Even alleged "progressives" are far too attached to an American world empire to ever give it up voluntarily. Or even contemplate giving it up.

I would like to see Americans lay down their aspirations to global power. It has gotten us nothing of value (certainly neither prosperity nor real national security) and frankly, it would be the best course for us and for everyone else in the world. However, I also know this will almost certainly not happen. I don’t think it will be ripped from our hands either. But it is crushing us, this overweening desire to rule the world, this notion that we think we can, and we will go bankrupt, we will collapse, under the weight of it. That is both my fear. And my hope.

Because it is the only way we will be rid of it.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

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Pope Benedict XVI got himself in trouble this week when something he said in a speech ticked off large chunks of the Muslim world.

Benedict has apologized, which is the polite thing to do (your mother said so, right?), even if he didn’t mean the offense and even if most of the people protesting in Karachi, Jakarta, Ankara and elsewhere have no idea what it was he actually said or why.

During a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, the offending passage was actually an introduction to a much more dangerous subject (and one I suspect most journalists wouldn’t really know how to write about) — the connection between faith and reason in the Christian West and the essential role Greek philosophy and Greek concepts played in the creation and evolution of the Christian faith. At least I’m fairly certain this is what the speech was about. Benedict XVI’s writing is fairly dense and he tends toward understatement, and I always need to read anything of his at least three times to get his point.

Based on an unofficial rush transcript I downloaded from the BBC World Service web site, this is the offending passage:

In the seventh conversation [between Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an unnamed "educated Persian" on the subject of Christianity and Islam sometime in 1391] edited by Professor [Theodore] Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that [S]urah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion." According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels," he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God," he says, “is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…."

Now, I wouldn’t have picked this quote, not because it would be misunderstood, but because while it may accurately reflect what Manuel II Paleologus actually said, it isn’t really true. The emperor, like many Christians, failed to properly appreciate the distinction between spreading Islam and spreading the rule of Islam. The latter was easily spread by the sword, and when Islam emerged from the Arabian peninsula, a region peripheral to the empires of the time, conquer it did. But the Muslim conquerors neither demanded nor expected conversion initially, and the Christians of the Levant and North Africa, who were mostly heretics on the matter of who Jesus was, were happy to exchange a hostile authority with one indifferent to disputes over Christology. Conversion would come, slowly, later, and generally not by compulsion.

This whole notion of spreading the faith of Islam by the sword can easily be put to a test. If Muslims did indeed believe that they were required, by their scripture, to compel all the people under their rule to convert or die, then there would have been no Hindus left in India or Indonesia, no Christians left in the Balkans or North Africa (or the Levant, or Greece, or Hungary, or Spain, or Sicily, or anywhere else), no Jews left in Morocco, Iraq or Yemen. (Or else they were very bad at it, in which case no one really has to worry.) The only Muslim place largely bereft of non-Muslims is the Saudi part of the Arabian peninsula, and this — as I understand it — is (with the exception of the holy cities of Makkah and Madina) a fairly recent occurrence, something that happened only in the last century. (And not really true anymore either thanks to the large presence of Christian expatriate labor from near and far.)

This is not to say that the spread of Islam was without its fair share of violence and atrocity. The early spread of Islam in Africa was, often times, a product of coerced conversion, just as Islam and Judaism were the deep wells for what would become much of the Christian West’s racist views toward Africans. Sunnis and Shia, especially after the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the codification of Twelver Shiism by the Saffavid Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries A.D., could go at each other mercilessly, tossing around the word "heretic" and demanding conversion upon pain of death. (After the merger of Al-Saud power and Ibn Wahab’s ascetic revolutionary theology in the late 18th century, even strict Wahabbis tolerated infidel Christians and Jews as they persecuted heretical Shia.)

Compare this by looking at the number of Muslims left in Spain and Portugal after reconquista in 1492. Or in Sicily after the reasonably tolerant reign of Roger II. Christendom is as much built on the conquest of peoples and their often times forced conversion to the faith. While Manuel II’s words about the evil of compelling faith are beautiful and inspiring, the decaying empire he presided over had itself been fond of threatening violence against individual human beings over their unwillingness to accept the "orthodox" Christian faith. (Remember all those Monophysite Christians in the 700s more-or-less happy to accept Muslim rule?) The only significant Christian society that tolerated Muslims and Islam was Orthodox Russia. (That said, I do not know how many Muslims lived in the Austrian Empire, nor do I know what their legal status was.) Throughout much of the history of the encounter between Christendom and Dar al-Islam, non-Christians have fared poorly within Christendom, while non-Muslims have generally been much better off within Dar al-Islam.

And that is why I would have picked a better way of starting my talk about the role of faith and reason working together. Benedict has this problem of picking very poignant but somewhat problematic examples. In his beautiful essay on the role that conscience has in confronting the brutal reality of power, then-Cardinal Ratzinger used the example of the de Las Casas and the native girl to show how powerlessness, as powerlessness, can move the conscience of the powerful. The only problem with the argument, as well drawn and moving as it is, is that de Las Casas’ answer to the horrible treatment of the natives of the Americas by their Spanish conquerors was the importation of enslaved Africans. His conscience moved him to solve one grave injustice, one evil, with another.

Were I advising Benedict XVI, I would tell him to lay off references to Islam because he simply does not understand Islam, just as most Muslim theologians, historians, scholars and "clerics" (for lack of a better term) simply do not understand Christianity. (Can he truly assume that the Muslims who translated the works of the Greeks, and thus saved them for eventual rediscovery in the West, were simply scribes who never bothered to read or consider or comment on or be inspired by what they were reading?)

But I am not the pope, and clearly Benedict XVI had bigger fish to fry. The whole point of the reference, I think, was to suggest a Christendom under threat — both from without and within — by quoting the leader of a dying empire surrounded on all sides by Muslims who would, within a century, take its capital and hold that city up to the present day.

In his speech, Benedict XVI was also clearly interested in noting exactly what Europe — and the Christian West — truly is and the debt it owes to the marriage of reason and faith in Christianity:

The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And here the pope is on much more solid ground (though one must never forget the opposition of the likes of Tertullian and Tatian to the intertwining of Greek learning and philosophy with scripture). Benedict XVI sees reason in logos, the Word made flesh as Christ. He sees "a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry" in the Macedonians’ request to the Apostle Paul for help. He even sees this meeting in the Septuagint, the translation of Hebrew scripture into Greek for the many Hellenistic Jews who no longer could function effectively in Hebrew that also made the scripture available to non-Jews, where there is "a profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion."

In fact, Benedict XVI goes on to say that while the Gospel is a universal message (and Christianity did in fact spread in several directions from the Middle East), it only really became the edifice most of us understand as Christianity in Europe, where that melding with Greco-Roman ways of thinking and reasoning would also eventually give rise to Christendom:

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history — it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

It is this Europe, and particularly the detachment of reason from faith (a process he calls "dehellenization") that particularly exercises the pope. In this, he notes three important processes: the rejection of metaphysics as "derived from another source" and something faith needed to be liberated from (taking a nice sharp swipe at Protestantism); the reduction of Jesus to the status of preaching a "humanitarian moral message" in line with "modern reason" (the merger of Cartesianism and empiricism); and a science that reduces certainty and truth solely to those things which can be verified empirically or mathematically.

This detachment of faith from reason, and all the ways it has manifested itself in Europe, is dangerous because:

… [I]t is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science," so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.

Indeed, science and the civilization it has spawned cannot properly contemplate the what and how of the world without also coming to come conclusions about why:

The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

He continues:

Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought — to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.

Benedict XVI is doing several things in this speech. By provoking Muslims (needlessly but not, clearly, pointlessly), he is telling largely secular Europe and its intellectuals that "we Europeans, religious and secular, are in this together." He emphasizes again his belief that Europe is Christendom, and that non-Christians really cannot be Europeans. He says a secular Europe is essentially a meaningless place, a non-human or even anti-human place where life can have no real meaning. And he also notes that without a solid and confident faith, Europeans cannot conduct any kind of real dialogue with different cultures and religions that do not differentiate so brutally between reason and the divine (such as, ahem, Islam).

The pope, in short, wants a West possessed as much with metaphysical certainty as it is with physical and scientific certainty. Perhaps because he believes that confidence, and only that confidence, will allow Europe and Islam to meet each other equals. Or perhaps because he believes only that certainty will allow the Europe to avoid the fate of the Byzantines more than five centuries ago.

And who knows, maybe he is right.

But there are a couple of problems with what Benedict XVI wants. First, he ignores the fact that men certain of "the Truth" tend to find it much easier to kill, subjugate and plunder other men. Or to be mobilized to support death, destruction and violence. Or, ahem, to compel others to believe. The Cross of Christ was a banner under which much blood was shed and much suffering inflicted by sword, cudgel, pike and rifle. Even if the metaphysical certainty invoked not God or Church but Nation or State or Working Class or Race or The Oppressed of the World, it was still a faith in a "Truth" that could not be touched nor seen or otherwise empirically proved but was nonetheless very real for every true believer who set out to do good by killing others. En masse if necessary.

Europe has been possessed by a lot of metaphysical certainty in the last 200 some-odd years since the French Revolution inspired a whole new kind of idolatrous faith in Humanity and the State. And it may be, in fact, after many centuries of killing for firmly believed intangibles — God, church, state, party, revolution — and especially the carnage of the last 100 years that Europeans have grown tired of the kind of metaphysical certainty that leads to sacrifice and suffering, to pain, destruction and death. Such certainty was always a balm to statists (and churchmen) who believed the minds of men — and their souls — somehow were public property. After such a history, who can blame Europeans for wanting to breathe deeply of peaceful and non-aggressive uncertainty?

Benedict XVI is trying something very difficult, thinking he needs to instill enough backbone to allow people to be strong and confident in who they are without making them arrogant and cruel. I don’t know whether Europe is in need of Benedict’s backbone, so I don’t know whether he will succeed or fail. Most likely the pope will not live to see the results. He is an old man — a brilliant man, but an old one, and the leader of a church whose dynamism has shifted far away from the stone citadels of Christendom.

From the vantage point of North America, parts of Europe seem drenched by an existential dread that it will drown and disappear, the victim of fecund immigrants who neither understand nor want much of what Europe has to offer and surrounded by people who desperately want to live as Europeans without any comprehension of just how much hard work Europeans had to do in order to get there.

That may all be true, but note this — people plagued by existential dread are not particularly confident ones, and they rarely make good or humane decisions. A Europe (one could add North America to this) prompted to inhumanity in order to save itself would not be terribly Christian, and probably not worth saving. A fierce critic of state power who has openly questioned the justness of just war theory, Benedict XVI ought to keep this in mind.

Perhaps nothing can save Europe or the residue of Christendom it represents. That is not necessarily a bad thing, for not only will the Gospel and the Church survive, but Europe’s ideas will survive because they essentially drive the world. Europe was exceedingly successful at conquering the planet, not only physically but intellectually, and its ideas and ways of thinking have been imported to all corners and adopted by people hither and yon. Oh, they may not mean quite the same things in India or South America or China as they mean in the West, but is the West really the same place it was 10 centuries, five centuries, a century or even 10 years ago? In order to work in India, imported Western ideas would naturally be altered by Indians for their own ends, just as Christians "altered" Greek ideas and made them work with and even essential to Christianity. Could the Axial Age Greek thinkers have ever conceived of Paul of Tarsus and what he did with and to their ideas? Or Augustine? Or Aquinas? Or Martin Luther? Or Thomas Jefferson?

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

Such are the first three words to the preamble of the United States Constitution, and possibly the three most influential and powerful words in the American political lexicon.

Those three words defined a new world, a world in which the entire people, and not merely a single monarch, would be sovereign over the nation. Those three words described how that nation would be different from all other nation-states and empires that had come before it. The whole of the people shall be sovereign. The government shall be responsible to them. The nation shall belong to them, and they shall be the masters. The government exists to serve "the people," and not command them.

It was a powerful idea, and I suspect had it not found itself articulated in both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, the idea would have been expressed somewhere else. (Some version of it would still have torn France apart in the 1780s and 1790s.) It has moved men to take to the streets, to rebel, to topple governments, behead monarchs, demand parliaments, and expel colonizers. Even more than its sometime twin democracy, some version of popular sovereignty — "We the People" — has animated most revolutionary political movements of the 19th and 20th century. In fact, more than electoral democracy itself, popular sovereignty may eventually become America’s great ideological legacy to the world.

Which is truly a pity. Because it’s an illusion. Worse than that, it’s a bright shining lie — one of the most dangerous and destructive lies of the last 250 years. It is simply impossible for "the people" to be meaningfully sovereign over anything.

Allow me to illustrate. Suppose for a moment I own a single share of international oil giant ExxonMobil (which settled at $63.98 Tuesday afternoon). There are roughly 6 billion shares of ExMob outstanding, for a total market capitalization of $387 billion. I don’t own ExxonMobil shares — I don’t own any shares in anything right now, actually — but let’s say that I do.

What exactly do I own? Do I own a one-six-billionth piece of ExMob? That would be one way to look at it, that I own one very tiny piece, a miniscule fraction of a great big company. Put together enough of those tiny pieces, make a big enough piece, and I could conceivably control the company. But I also own a share, a share which itself represents that fraction of the company but is also complete and whole in and of itself. It may seem both obvious and a foolish matter of semantics when I say the best way to look at it is that I own one share of ExMob, and not a one-six-billionth fraction of it. And I don’t really own a piece of the company, I own a share in the company. They are not quite the same thing. I cannot point to property ExMob owns, find my square inch or two of tank farm on the Texas Gulf coast or some shiny pipeline joint at one of the Qatar natural gas projects, point to it, and say "that’s mine." It doesn’t work that way.

In fact, if I try to walk on to ExMob property without being invited, I will likely be invited to leave. Or manhandled and tossed off. Or even arrested. Protestations of "But I’m a shareholder!" notwithstanding.

How, then, does it work? The only thing that is mine is the piece of paper, the stock certificate, the actual share itself. Owning the share entitles me to a portion of the profits, if there are any and if the share contract stipulates payment of a dividend. Past that, I can hold the share, bury it in a jar in the backyard, set it on fire, make a kite out of it — whatever. Most importantly, I can sell it if ExMob someday offends my sensibilities (or I need the cash). I can buy more if I like ExMob or if, someday, I feel rich enough to try and gain a controlling share of the company. Unless ExMob shares are part of my employer-provided pension fund or some kind of trust fund, I’m not required, not forced, to own any shares whatsoever in the company.

So, what does this have to do with popular sovereignty? How do these things even compare? Looking back at those 6 billion ExxonMobil shares, let us suppose every man, woman and child on earth owned a single share, and no one owned more than anyone else. All are equal. No one can sell their shares, no one can buy another share. Were this the case, could you realistically say that anyone effectively owned ExMob? Would a share that could be neither bought nor sold truly be of any value? And could you really describe ExxonMobil, the company itself (as opposed to its assets), as private property in any real sense?

Absent effective ownership, who then gets to decide what strategies ExxonMobil as a company pursues? Who gets access to company property? The managers hired by enough of the shareholders. And in a world in which 6 billion people each owned a share, I can see great campaigns on the part of aspiring ExMob managers, promising bigger dividends and whatnot, to get as many of the 6 billion shareholders to vote them into office. Consider — each of those managers owns a single share, no more and no less than the rest of us, but they get to walk on the grass, turn the valves, flip the switches, park in the parking spots, fly in company planes and work in company offices. More important, they get to tell us — the owners — what products will be available, where, when, and how much they cost.

So, who’s really in charge? The owners? Or the managers they hire?

There are some significant differences between publicly traded companies and nation states (though the power of managers is very similar), there are two very important distinctions. First, no business or corporation can compel anyone to do anything without first having secured the approval or assistance of the state. Secondly, no one can be forced to own any portion of a company or have their ownership rights restricted in any way. But what I have just described in my absurd little example is, I believe, the essential problem of popular sovereignty. (And it is very much the same problem as that of socialist property.) "We," who each own an equal and inalienable share of the United States of America, cannot "rule ourselves." It may be possible for 30 people to "rule themselves," but it is impossible for 3 million to do so and utterly impossible for 300 million. So, we write a constitution that defines "ruling ourselves" as the process of hiring people "from time to time" to do the job "in our name." Each of us, as American citizens, allegedly "owns" (or has a "stake" in) a one-three-hundred-millionth bit of America, but like the fictitious ExxonMobil share owners I describe above, none of us can point to our square inch of the National Mall, or our acre of BLM land in Nevada, or our US Army Apache attack helicopter, or our file cabinet in the Department of Commerce’s cavernous Hoover Building. None of us can effectively exercise that "sovereignty" which we supposedly inherit from the Constitution.

The reality is that the hired managers — elected officials and civil servants — gain all the power and authority of ownership without any of the concomitant risk or responsibility of ownership. We "hire" them, and then they boss us around. (I’m trying to remember when exactly it was I signed up for this deal…)

Don’t think so? Try walking onto "government" property some day without permission to enter. Try using government resources without being on the payroll. You will be invited to leave. Or manhandled and tossed off. Or even arrested. Protestations of "I’m a taxpayer and a citizen!" notwithstanding.

Moreover, citizenship — the right to participate in politics — cannot be legally bought, sold, bartered or traded. (Someone who is taxed more than I am ought to have more citizenship than I do, since that person pays for more government than I do.) At least I can sell my ExxonMobil share and incur no further obligations to the company and make no more legal demands of it. But renouncing one’s citizenship does no good. The police can still clap you in irons and the taxman will still demand his share as well. And in this era of nation states, how do you travel abroad without a passport?

Popular sovereignty, when combined with electoral democracy, has created a very powerful and addictive illusion — the illusion that the people can rule, can rule themselves collectively. The reality is that the many are ruled by the few in almost every place and at almost every time throughout human history. And that is just as true of America today as it is any other place and at any other time.

We live, however, in a world of popular sovereignty, a world in which peoples — allegedly represented by elected branches of government, or one-true parties, or by chosen races or by cresting waves of history — believe they can and should rule themselves (and others as well). It’s a mystical doctrine, as strange and ineffable as the Holy Trinity, kept afloat solely by faith while the tide of evidence and experience tries hard to pull it under (popular sovereignty, that is, an not Trinity). As I’ve said before, I don’t have any problem with mystical doctrines. They just make a really awful basis for governing, for sticking guns in people’s faces and telling them "you must or else."

I see no sign, however, that faith in popular sovereignty will disappear from the face of the earth or the mind of man anytime soon. No one wants to believe they are ruled, even as they willingly submit to their "leaders" and explain how wonderful they are. Those who fight unjust governments or wicked rulers all too often do so in the name of that same abstract and ineffable "people." So unfortunately, we are not done with this miserable and destructive idea yet.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a seminarian and freelance editor living in Chicago. Visit his blog.

In short, I saw commerce — of the unlicensed, and therefore "illegal," kind.

No, not drug dealing or anything like that. There’s a lot of construction going on, tall brick buildings going up, filling up the muddy lots in-between expensive condos and federal office buildings. And where there’s construction, there’s usually a migrant workforce, busy setting concrete and laying bricks and hanging drywall and connecting pipe and whatever else workers of the construction trades do. And despite the fact that the buildings going up are very likely a closely monitored federal project (with various and sundry set-asides and carve-outs for favored contractors and legal stipulations that all workers be citizens or at least legal residents), no doubt some of those workers are the undocumented kind.

Some might call them illegal, but when should honest work — or an honest worker — ever be illegal?

But that isn’t what I saw either. As we turned right off a great, big oval roundabout, Jen and I passed a small woman, who appeared (at first glance) to be from Mexico or Central America, selling food out of a cooler in the back of her minivan. (Within spitting distance of the same federal courthouse where John Walker Lindh and Zacharrias Mussaoui faced their juries and where Judith Miller cooled her heels.) Or at least it appeared to be selling. I didn’t stop to make an offer to buy anything. She may have been giving her food away, brought a late breakfast or early lunch to her husband or brother and his coworkers at the job site. But I don’t think so. There was an awful lot of cooler in the back of her minivan, more than you’d need if you merely bringing someone you loved lunch.

If she was selling food, most likely she didn’t have a business license. And good for her!

Governments the world over strive to stifle one of the most basic human impulses — to earn a living through making and selling — by licensing sellers and regulating business. Ostensibly, most governments say they do this to protect the health and safety of ordinary citizens, to keep them from fraud and abuse. After all, the woman may be selling poisoned empanadas! Or she may take her customers’ money and then run away!

But the reality is that governments want to control who is in business and how business is done. At best, governments want to be able to count everyone who trades (and all their transactions) in order to tax them, which is why government data is never as innocent as it seems. At worst, governments want to make sure that no one can "make a buck" without first cutting those who run the state in on a share. Or, the managers of the state use their monopoly power to make sure only their friends can make "an honest profit."

The old core of Jeddah, called Balad, is full of such "illegal" businesses, men and women (mostly from Africa) in Saudi Arabia sell wares brought from home. Some stay beyond the expiration of pilgrimage visas, and some sneak into the country solely to do business. When I was in Jeddah, I bought two dashikis from a Senegalese woman who had spread her clothes out on a giant mat in a dark corner of a side alley, hiding — like many of the Africans — from the police, who have taken to making fairly frequent sweeps of the country’s less reputable districts to arrest just such people. It’s a pity. I can understand not wanting your country full of people who are there "in violation of the law" by entering without a visa or staying past the expiration of a visa, but what Saudi is going to sell dashikis in a dark corner of Balad?

And what American is going to sell good home cooking to Latin American construction workers building a new annex to the Patent Office?

Even Saudis skirt the law in their own country. The big masjid in Rehab district, where I lived, would play host to a tiny market every night after the ‘isha prayer — the last prayer of the day — with businessmen and women selling cheap textiles, appliances, pots, pans, dishes, fruits and vegetables and keeping careful eyes out for the police, who (strangely enough) never wandered by. And Balad is, in fact, full of Saudis making and selling, everything from incense to gold to lingerie. Some do very well, and some just barely get by. That is the way of things.

Commerce is an essential human activity, and by that, I mean that making things, buying things, and selling things are essential to our very humanity. Trade is one of the things that makes us human. Governments have tried through history to eliminate, regulate and prevent trade, but that doesn’t stop it. Where there is a need — base or noble, depraved or innocent — it will be filled. Because that is one of the things human beings do. There is simply no way around it.

Honest labor, honest trade, makes everyone richer. Was I defrauded by the woman who sold me the dashikis? I still have them, more than two years after I bought them, and the Ghanaians at my church think them very fetching. If anything, I defrauded the green grocer at the masjid one evening when I insisted on paying him five Saudi riyals (about $1.30) for three tomatoes when that was the price he was asking for an entire box — a box I did not need and could not use.

The only party worse for wear is the state, which did not tax those tomatoes, or those dashikis, or very likely the lunches served to the construction workers. Now, Saudi Arabia doesn’t tax its businessmen and women much, but that doesn’t stop the kingdom from imposing license fees and some pretty silly regulations (like what you are allowed to call your business). It’s why so many work "illegally" to begin with. (And why you shouldn’t trust any published Saudi "unemployment" figures.)

I do not like the words "illegal business." No honest work — work that doesn’t defraud, harm or coerce— should ever be "illegal." No one seeking to make an honest living by selling a good or providing a service should ever have to get the state’s permission to do business. That just feels so wrong, so inhuman.

You want an illegal activity? Government. Which of us would voluntarily wander a dark alley, or saddle on up to the tailgate of an automobile, and pay for that?

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an itinerant freelance editor who currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He and his wife are preparing to start seminary in Chicago in September.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.

It isn’t true anymore. I quit my editing job at the Oil Daily, one of a series of oil and gas-related newsletters published by Energy Intelligence, at the end of April to sort through and pack our belongings and get ready for a move to Chicago this summer. I’m starting a Masters of Divinity program this fall at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago with an eye toward eventual ordination as a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

(I’ve thought long and hard on writing about my journalism career and how to describe its stunning and spectacular failure. But that would be a lie — it did not burn up like a wayward satellite sent aloft on an errant rocket and now making its fiery way back to some distant and lonely piece of Earth. Rather, it simply went splat, falling to the ground like a soft wet bag of sand dropped from about waist-high.)

In fact, Jennifer and I would already be there were it not for the fact that, at the very last moment, someone from the seminary’s housing office contacted me and told me that no one was moving in June so could we please come in July instead? No room at the inn, so to speak, and they didn’t want us holing up in some corner of the parking garage — the modern-day equivalent of a manger. So, we hung around Alexandria for the last month, going through more stuff, throwing things out, giving them away, and marveling at just how much space our books take up. It’s amazing just how many boxes a solid collection of books can take up; there’s simply no way Jen and I could get away with renting the tiny little truck U-Haul recommends for studio apartments.

We’ve been living on an IRA I liquidated (part of which will pay for school this fall), part of an insurance payment we received following Jennifer’s accident in January (part went to pay the credit card debt we acquired paying for the plastic surgery needed to put skin back on Jennifer’s right foot) and partly on some part-time editing work I’ve been able to put together — work I should be able to continue doing while I go to school.

A couple of years ago, I was an editor at the Saudi Gazette, the English-language newspaper published by Okaz, possibly Saudi Arabia’s largest circulation newspaper and the kingdom’s scandal-sheet of choice. The gazette was relaunched as a slightly titillating tabloid, and I was one of several American editors brought in to oversee and supervise that change. Mostly, I worked with reporters and rewrote copy, and after about six months of that, decided to come back home.

As Jennifer and I were wondering exactly how we would provide for ourselves during the MDiv program, out of blue, the Jeddah bureau chief — a fearless and talented young woman who had been one of the reporters I had coached while I was there — contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to join the paper again as a part-time editor, working a couple of hours every morning rewriting local copy, six days a week for about $1,000 per month.

It was a no-brainer. I told her yes. So, for the last two months, I’ve been reworking local Gazette copy, everything from interviews with jailed Moroccan prostitutes to government executioners to the daily police blotter to angry municipal council meetings.

Jennifer wondered if there were going to be any problems with getting paid. Specifically, she wondered if getting wire transfers from Saudi Arabia — even a paltry $1,000 — would suddenly put me (okay, us) on some kind of watch list. I think I dismissed her concern at the time, saying the greater concern would simply be getting paid at all, and not the response of the US federal government.

Turns out, however, Jen and I were both right.

It took a long time — about 10 days, longer than I would have liked — for that slightly less-than $1,000 wire transfer to wander from Riyadh Bank to our bank in San Antonio, Texas. When I physically worked at the Gazette, I did once have a problem with a wire transfer getting lost (the Saudi bank sent it to the wrong bank in the US, and it ended up in the special hell where electronic money goes when it gets lost), but most of my wire transfers, done through the Saudi-American Bank’s system, took about 48 hours to get to the United States and show up as happy little digits in the family bank account. Not 10 days.

The progress of an international wire is interesting. I discovered when I was in Saudi Arabia that most US banks (or at least the one I had an account at) do not participate in the Belgium-based SWIFT system, used by much of the world to send money hither and yon and apparently tapped by the Bush administration in the days following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Anyone sending 100 Saudi Riyals from Jeddah to Dakha, Bangladesh, via Western Union needs to know that money first flows through New York — virtually the entire world banking system does — making it possible for the US government to watch just about every electronic financial transaction in the world. That’s what makes US sanctions so effective.

While my cash did not show in my account until Wednesday morning, the folks I had working on the trace said it arrived at in the United States — specifically, at a Federal Reserve Bank — at around 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Sunday.

And by Sunday afternoon, I noticed a regular beeping-clicking sound on my mobile phone every two or three minutes — a sound I’d never heard before and one that whoever I am talking with cannot hear. It could be a problem with the phone, a Sony-Ericsson T68i I bought in Saudi Arabia more than two years ago, but the other SIM I have (and don’t use very often) does not have the same problem. (Oops, sorry, it does now.) It could also be a problem with my Cingular account, too. But I doubt it. I suspect my mobile phone has been tapped. The timing, starting the same day as my first payment from the Saudi Gazette arrived in the US, is just a little too “coincidental.”

Aside from making light of the whole thing — "Hello, this is Charles, and this line is unsecured" — I’m not entirely sure what to do about this. Complaining to Cingular would be pointless. There isn’t anything they could tell me anyway.

Since I started sending e-mail and doing on-line stuff, long ago in 1989, I have always just assumed that someone, somewhere, with a badge and maybe a warrant (but most likely not) was reading or watching or monitoring. Or could whenever they wanted to. Certainly it shouldn’t be that way, but it is. And there isn’t a thing any of us can do to change this any time soon. (Unless, of course, you’re putting your faith in Hillary Clinton’s or John McCain’s future Justice Departments?) This is the unfortunate reality of the world in which we live right now, of governments staffed by those wishing to know and control everything.

That said, we should not let surveillance, or the possibility of surveillance, silence us or shut us down. At least half of being free is thinking and acting like a free human being, whatever the consequences might be. The possibility that all my phone calls are being monitored (I suspect they are being recorded, and then filtered through software for various phrases and subjects) does not keep me from expressing my views on George W. Bush (idiot), the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan (disasters), and that the political and social changes in Saudi Arabia since King Fahd died (nothing short of amazing). If Caesar is going to make thinking about these things or talking about them a crime, then I’ve already presented a fairly convincing case against myself without any recorded phone conversations.

Besides, I’m rather intrigued at the prospect of boring the heck out of whichever FBI or NSA flunky gets to read my conversations. Especially when I start Biblical Greek and Lutheran Confessions in the fall. Sayyed Qutb and revolution it ain’t.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is an itinerant freelance editor who currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He and his wife are preparing to start seminary in Chicago in September.

I’m not sure what’s worse: the fact that federal prosecutors went all-out to indict Lay and his associates for crimes that apparently have little or no legal definition or the fact that so many people are happy to see Lay et al. facing "justice" for what they’ve done. It’s as if someone has to pay for the collapse of the go-go 1990s, and since Bill Clinton can’t, and all the dot-com bazillionaires have disappeared into the muck from which they emerged, it might as well be Martha Stewart and Ken Lay, the last two sad faces of a strange era in which companies thought they could make a whole lot of money without actually making any money at all.

The pillory, a bucket of hot tar and a pillow of goose down for them. And then a rail, to run them out of town on. Such is "justice," I suppose.

I had a run-in with the clever young men of Enron, in the middle of 2001, as that company and my own were both dying. Everyone knew Bridge Information Systems was doomed, even in April. A few smart people had inklings something was beginning to stink at Enron, but suspicion would not be widespread in the energy industry press until late summer.

It was hard to know what was going on, since most corporations I covered during quarterly earnings — a collection of natural gas distributors, merchant power generators and publicly traded utilities — wouldn’t let journalists ask any hard questions. Usually, the earnings conference calls were open only to a select group of "financial analysts," one of whom would usually start his question with "Great quarter Biff! Are we up for golf next weekend?" Rarely would anyone ask penetrating questions about the actual balance sheet or what stuff on that actual balance sheet meant.

All that mattered, especially for the merchant energy firms, was manipulating the government-mandated quarterly reporting process to boost the stock price.

I was covering California power markets during the horrid winter and spring when the Golden State was struck by rolling blackouts, Pacific Gas & Electric went belly up (okay, not really, they only filed the belly-up papers in court) because they were unable to raise their rates thanks to some extremely stupid business decisions made by PG&E and Southern California Edison when California "liberalized" its power markets, and wholesale power prices neared $500 per megawatt. We had developed a daily story that required me to visit some websites for information (power flows on the big direct current intertie between the Grand Coulee Dam and Northern California, the snow pack in Northern California, water levels in Washington reservoirs, and the California Independent System Operator’s projected loads for the day) and then call up a bunch of West Coast spot power traders and ask for prices or bid/ask spreads if no power was trading. That was rare, since power was usually always trading. California needed it.

There were a number of traders I learned to rely upon as sources, traders with smaller merchant power firms or public utilities — Avista Energy, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Sempra, Dynegy, there were a couple of others I’m not remembering. But Enron was the player, the big trader of spot and next-day electricity on the West Coast, and the traders at Enron would rarely talk to me, and almost never until after trading was over, which by then was too late for my deadline.

If you remember the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I can tell you what Jeff Spicoli did when he grew up: he became a wholesale electricity trader for either Enron or Dynegy, replacing his marijuana-induced mellowness with a take-no-prisoners view of getting the top dollar for the electrons his company had for sale. Nothing wrong with that, that’s how traders make a living and that’s how people get hog bellies, coffee, sugar, gold, oil and platinum and a whole host of other things.

"Dude, I wish I was back in San Diego, cuz I’d be surfing right now," a Phoenix-based Dynegy trader once told me after a particularly rewarding day.

One morning, I had gotten on the phone, dialed up Avista Energy, and got a very puzzled trader on the phone. "Off-peak power at Palo Verde [the California-Arizona border, when the three units of the Palo Verde nuclear power plant feed into the California power grid] is quite a bit more expensive than daytime power," she said to me. "If you find anything out, please let me know."

In addition to being a reporter, I was also something of an information broker, not only asking traders what prices they’d seen, but sometimes giving them the other prices I’d found. Sometimes, the trader did that just to see if I knew what I was doing. But sometimes that became a favor I could trade for later. Like a price quote during a very busy morning. Or the rumor of the day.

So, after trolling around and finding other allegedly perplexed traders seeing the same thing on their trading screens (Enron’s online service, I suspected), I called the aspiring wave riders of Dynegy in Phoenix. "Somebody at Enron has heard a rumor about Palo Verde," the trader responded. "Don’t know what it is."

I stared long and hard at the phone. I’d never made any headway talking to Enron traders, and I didn’t expect to do so that day. But I owed my editor and the readers of my power report something, even if it was "Enron traders refused to comment." (The folks at Palo Verde, operated by the Arizona Public Service Co., never talked about "market sensitive" plant operations, and calling them for information on an unspecified rumor had proven pointless.)

So I picked up the phone and dialed Enron’s trading floor. What I expected was defiance and "go away." Instead, what I got was embarrassed silence. "Um, yeah, the number three unit is being taken off-line overnight, an unscheduled outage. We figured we could take advantage of the loss of base load to Southern California," the trader told me.

It was the first — and last — time anyone at Enron ever gave me any useful information.

But what stunned me so about the whole encounter was not just that the Enron trader talked to me, but that he sounded so sheepish, so guilty, so caught. As far as I know, there was nothing wrong, nothing illegal, about having that bit of advance knowledge and then using it to raise the ask price of off-peak power. Even the most anxious power buyer or power scheduler, who would have access to better sources of information than I did and who would probably have more favors to call in and dole out than I did, could probably have figured it out eventually. Palo Verde was the only West Coast trading point that day where off-peak prices were higher than peak prices; someone would have eventually concluded something was up with one of those reactors or the substations which connect them to the grid.

A combination of government action and inertia eventually did my daily power story in. First, it’s hard to continue working for a dying company, even if you plan to stick it out to the last day. Second, George W. Bush’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission capped the price of West Coast wholesale power at something between $96 and $97 a megawatt, and that ended that. No point trying to discover prices when the legal cap became the only logical price.

The principle behind what Enron was trying to do — turn everything into a traded commodity — was not a bad one. In fact, it is a rather nifty idea, and one whose time will come again (and again, and again, and again). But the founders and traders of Enron made two important mistakes. First, they tried to prove the notion in thinly traded and very closed commodity markets, which was just plain stupid. And second, they thought the rules — and by this, I do not mean the law — did not apply to them. Enron became another dot-com, a business trying to prove you can make money solely by buying and selling stock, by hyping ideas, rather than actually selling products to paying customers.

Truthfully, no one in their right mind with speculative venture capital invests in traded electricity. So far as I know, no major investment funds are trying to make power trading work. There is almost no mechanism for paper settlement of contracts — if you trade at the South Path 15 (the connection between the PG&E and Southern California Edison), you’d better be prepared to take "delivery" of whatever electricity you buy. The PJM (Pennsylvania/New Jersey/Maryland) electricity contract is only slowly evolving as a proper electricity future. It does not help that across North America, government-regulated utilities built power grids that made it difficult rather than easy to move power from one state or region to another, meaning that the logical trading hubs are also choke points.

Without speculators — the speculators and investment funds who make the oil, wheat, platinum, sugar, coffee, natural gas, and frozen concentrated orange juice (to name a few) markets work — then you do not and cannot have a proper market. The pari-mutuel betting (think: horse racing) that typifies the derivatives markets may not be real hedging or risk management, but without at least a few people willing to place bets against each other and settle their wagers at the end of the day (and who wouldn’t know what to do with a barrel of oil, a bushel of wheat, or a short ton of frozen concentrated orange juice), all you have is a really fancy spot market on expensive real estate tailored for a few dozen power schedulers and ISO managers.

Looking back, it amazes me that anyone at Enron thought they could make a go of this. It is more amazing that anyone else took them seriously. (And they talked about trading telephone bandwidth, a good that simply isn’t scarce enough to trade; and municipal water, systems that are even more closed, isolated and regulated than electric grids.)

And this gets to the second point. Every now and again, human beings go crazy and decide certain physical and natural laws no longer apply. The 1990s was just such a time. Common sense abandoned much of the business world, and companies floated along solely on the value of their stocks — values not based on anything resembling sales or income. Enron and Dynegy’s traders thought they could buy and sell the world. They flew high. There was no down to fall to.

But there is a price for thinking that neither gravity nor profits and losses apply anymore, and Enron paid that price — the company went bankrupt after swirling the drain for some months while accountants and senior executives conjured up new gimmicks to make the company appear profitable (and thus boost the value of the stock) when it wasn’t. Bankruptcy is the best price to be paid for such a thing; it is the best remedy for those who think their business models are too clever by half. It’s final. It’s the closest thing we have to a truly objective assessment of a business. Because no matter how nifty your business model is, or how handsome your CEO looks when talking on CNBC’s Squawkbox, if the checks cannot clear, then you’re done.

No investor wants to be made the fool. No investor wants the value of his or her investments to ever go down. And no one wants to get stuck holding worthless stock that had only, months before, been a ticket to a life of wealth and ease. One of the things the complex welfare state we live in claims to guarantee is that no one will ever be poorer at the end of a day than they were at the beginning. Much of the state’s regulatory apparatus is designed to show that state managers are doing their darnedest to prop up the value of shares, of bonds, of real property, or prevent what the state simply cannot — the kind of foolishness and idiocy that allows people to think they can make a zillion dollars without actually having to do anything.

It’s hard enough protecting honest folks from grifters and pickpockets, much less the gullible, the foolish and the greedy from hucksters and showmen whose only real crime is the fact that they have successfully deluded themselves.

Hope is a wonderful thing. It makes human beings wake, work, love and persist when there appears to be no real reason to do so. But it also deludes and blinds, and leads people to think something can be had for nothing, that cargo is coming, that government can cure all ills, that share prices or house prices or commodity prices can never or will never fall. Puncture that false hope, leaving men and women with nothing but the shards and shreds of their delusions, and you risk provoking the mob. Near as I can tell, it is the way of things.

So the mob grabs its torches and its pitchforks. It wants vengeance. It wants the sport and satisfaction of seeing the culprits suffer, and it isn’t enough to sue them into oblivion. The mob wants blood — blood only the federal government, as the instrument of the people’s wrath, can properly shed.

Whether that beats the noose dangling from a lonely cottonwood that both Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling might have faced in another era is something they’ll have to decide on their own. They will soon have plenty of free time to ponder this.

It’s time you and I are going to pay for, too, whether we like it or not. At least we had a choice when it came to buying Enron’s shares.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.

So here’s what I came up with:

US Vice President Dan Quayle meets Her Highness, Princess Royal Shaykha Yamama, daughter of Abu Fedora III, the Endive of Ersatzstan, during a 1991 visit, to thank Ersatzstan for its support of the coalition during Operation Desert Storm. US Air Force personnel used the country’s sole air base, built by the Soviets in the early 1960s, as a supply hub for operations in northern Iraq during the war and to support the Kurds during Operation Provide Comfort.

Ruled by the last Central-Asian dynasty able to trace its lineage directly to the Mongol Khans, the Endive of Ersatzstan was forced into exile following an army coup in 1961, which brought pro-Soviet nationalists to power. For 17 years, the country was ruled by General Hassan Bukend and his brother Hosein Bukend and their People’s Popular Revolutionary National Party, which merged militant nationalism and a kind-of Nasserite, third-world socialism. Hassan was the strong man of the regime, but Hosein — a Moscow-trained academic — was its ideologue. For a time, he put together a collection of ideologically correct quotations (allegedly from his brother) into a book, the title of which loosely translates as “Notes From the Goat-tisserie,” because most of the quotes were supposedly made to peasants and herders during dinners. During the mid-1970s, before the regime was toppled, it was the only book Ersatzstanis were legally allowed to own. Most who did could not read it.

As a pro-Soviet, one-party state, Ersatzstan had a horrible human rights record, and there were allegations — later confirmed — that the interior ministry forced prisoners to ride bicycle generators, often times for six hours or more in a sitting, to augment the capital city’s meager electricity supply.

For a time, several thousand Soviet “advisers” were deployed in the country, using its proximity to Turkey and Iran to listen in on Nato communications. A series of border skirmishes in 1969 between Iranian troops and the Ersatzstani army very nearly led to World War III, averted only because US leaders were concerned with the Vietnam war and the Soviet leadership was still reeling from the complications of the invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year. Ersatzstan was also difficult to get to, making a clash over the country impossible to justify.

Bukend’s leadership, however, was deeply unpopular, and during a trip to Moscow in late 1979, a popular revolt (partially inspired by the Iranian revolution the previous year) combined with an army mutiny ended his regime. The former royal family returned soon after. Abu Fedora III has ruled the country since 1983, when his father died. During his exile, first in Monaco, and then in Cyprus, Abu Fedora made regular radio broadcasts to his country via shortwave, and those few Ersatzstanis with radios remember with fondness his words of support. That made the return of the monarchy a fairly easy matter, and most Ersatzstanis proudly display the monarch’s portrait in their homes and businesses even though no law requires them to.

The Bukend brothers both died in exile in Moscow. Hosein, unable to find more than part-time work teaching dialectic semiotics, was beaten to death by a crowd of angry Muscovites after trying to cut in front of a line for toilet paper during the winter of 1983. Hassan froze to death in his apartment in 1994 after the Russian government halted subsidies for all ex-Western defectors and deposed Marxist leaders.

Ersatzstan maintains very close relations with the United States, and has since the monarchy was restored. However, those relations have been strained in the last few years by the imposition of a new succession law which would allow women to ascend to the throne. The Shaykha is Abu Fedora’s only child, and she would become the Muslim world’s first female monarch. The country’s Muslim clerics, heavily influenced by Iran since the early 1980s, have agitated against it, and a recent demonstration found huge crowds demanding the law’s repeal. Since Abu Fedora’s stroke last year, the Shaykha has been quietly running the country’s day-to-day affairs.

Ersatztan’s Shia, who make up the bulk of the population (about 85%; there is a tiny Jewish population, a few Christians, and a handful of traditional goat worshipers), are called Niners, and believe the ninth Shia imam was the last true one. Rather than following the Iranian lead of believing that the occultated 12th imam will return to bring justice and peace to the world, the Niners believe the body of believers themselves constitute both the mahdi and the final imam, and thus the Niners believe the Shia community has had its religion and society perfected. Their clergy are called Jizmallah (literally, “Body of God”), and the country’s leading jizmallah is Ihmed Ali Barbikewi. He has been a life-long supporter of the monarchy but is known to be very unhappy with the decree allowing the Shaykha to succeed her father as endive.

So Abu Fedora’s death, when it comes, is expected to result in a serious political struggle. Clashes between police and demonstrators are frequent enough that the endive imposed a state of emergency in late 2003 that has yet to be lifted.

The continued presence of about 800 US Air Force personnel, deployed as part of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, does not help matters much.

Ersatzstan has few resources of its own, being a largely mountainous country. About 60% of the population engages in subsistence farming focused mainly on goat herding. In fact, the goat is an object of veneration — the fact that the country’s flag depicts both goats and mountains is evidence of that. Most people live in the countryside, few are literate, and there is little industry. The country’s major industrial product is wooden shoes, which were exported to the Soviet Union up until it collapsed. Attempts to attract Japanese and Korean investment have proved fruitless, since as a landlocked country, Ersatzstan does not have access to ports, and no Asian firms were interested in buying wooden shoes. (Many people recall the day in 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev, during an interview, symbolically tossed a stalk of Cuban sugar cane and a Cuban orange into a wastebasket and said “the old economic order is done and the new one is beginning.” What they tend to forget is that he stuffed that sugar cane into an Ersatzstani wooden shoe first.) The country’s wealthiest businessman, Mohammed Bubkis, recently traveled to Mongolia — a country of pastoral cattle ranchers — in an attempt to promote a beef-goat trade deal, and has tried to woo other potential markets for goat meat, fur and milk.

Recently, several Indian companies have expressed an interest in Ersatzstan because of its very low labor costs.

* * *

This was not the first time I’ve ever written about Ersatzstan. The idea has swirled in my head for more than a decade, and were it not for a badly timed computer failure in mid-1995, Ersatzstan would very likely have gone on line as a virtual country, complete with a constitution (seven branches of government, all of which could veto the actions of any other branch of government), a Revolution and its Leader ("The Little Plaid Book of Chairman Lawrence," who would be played by a black-and-white photo of Antonio Gramsci, looking suitably hegemonic), an official ideology ("Personal Dictatorship," in which the oppression of one man by another is eliminated by the oppression of the self, for — under this sick and twisted scheme — men could only be free if they became their own oppressors), a flag (yes, with goats and mountains) and a hyperactive government bureaucracy complete with agencies like the Ministry for Stacking and Storage, the Department of Roads and Waterways (Route-Canal) and an official news agency (covering popular demonstrations in which people would shout "Democracy nyet! Oppression si!"). It was located in Central Asia somewhere (it was important to be vague about that), but suffered under Japanese rule during WWII as "Ersatzkuo" — an occupation the Japanese themselves don’t seem to remember. The government constantly raged and battled against the "Forces of Nastiness and Evil, of Awfulness and Wretchedness, of Filthiness and Vileness," but those forces were, of course, never named.

The idea would have been to allow people to become on-line "citizens" of this benighted, miserable place, and then let the virtual politics happen. I wasn’t sure how that would work, and never got far enough with it technically. As I said, several months of work disappeared when my computer failed. I did not have a backup and did not feel inspired to try and recreate everything. And so the world never got to experience the virtual country of Ersatzstan.

But a group of unsuspecting students at a Midwestern college did. As the story was related to me, they not only got a lecture on the country, but were told its national holiday was April 1 (a nice touch, and not mine) and then, at the end of class, instructed to look the word "ersatz" up. I wasn’t there, so I do not know how credulously any of the students (a mixture of undergraduates) actually took this, but according to my friend the professor, no one let on or said anything publicly, not even when the quiz was given. There was, allegedly, some shock when the country was revealed to be fraudulent.

It would have been easy enough to figure out that there is no such place as Ersatzstan without consulting other sources. Look up the word ersatz in any dictionary: ("adjective (of a product) made or used as a substitute, typically an inferior one, for something else : ersatz coffee. u2022 not real or genuine," according to the dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OSX). Or crack open an atlas. I placed the country somewhere between Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the once-upon-a-Soviet Union — it ought to have been easy to find. Or not find.

I was reminded of all this when I read the results of geographic literacy survey conducted by the National Geographic Society which found that "young adults in the United States fail to understand the world and their place in it." According to the survey, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to locate Iraq on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent supposedly could not find Iran or Israel. Nine in ten couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia, and 54 percent did not know that Sudan is a country in Africa.

It’s not just a knowledge of the outside world that apparently befuddles young Americans. Half could not find New York State on a map of the United States. One-third did not know where Louisiana is. When given a map and told they could escape an oncoming hurricane by going to the northwest, apparently only two-thirds could indicate which way northwest is on a map.

Maybe the 18—24 cohort, especially the university students among them, would do better if their professors (and those professors’ close friends) weren’t busy writing the histories of and giving them lectures and quizzes about fictitious Middle East countries. However, I rather doubt it.

None of the survey results should come as a shock to anyone. But I’m not going to, as so many have (these surveys and their depressing results are annual rituals for egghead flagellants), bemoan the ignorance of America’s youth. Or Americans in general. One hundred years ago, could the majority, or even a sizable plurality, of Americans aged 18—24 (or anyone else) identify where the Panama Canal was being built? Could they point to the Philippines on a map? Could they identify Austria-Hungary? Did they know where Oklahoma or California were? Or the best direction to escape from San Francisco in the event of an earthquake? I’m guessing not. High school graduates in 1906 may have been much better educated than they are today, but far fewer people graduated from high school then — or even attended school.

Some folks will blame television, bad schools (or the whole edifice of public schooling) and the ubiquitous X-Box for the problem, but again, popular culture — whatever form it has taken — has always provided both meaning and distraction, a compelling "alternative" to a harsh real world that few people have much control over even if they do know where Qandahar or Pleiku are.

It may also be true that if more people were better educated, perhaps they would not be misled so easily. But I doubt that too. The well-educated and very literate are just as easily seduced by murderously bad ideas — nationalism, militarism, statism — as the unschooled and illiterate. Maybe even more so, if you consider the historical performance of America’s "best and brightest" (sic).

(People will learn what they need to or wish to learn, the things that are relevant to what they do or that simply give them pleasure. And they won’t bother learning the things that don’t interest them or that have no obvious pay-off.)

No, it doesn’t matter whether a majority of Americans know where Iraq is, or anything else about it, so long as they aren’t bombing or occupying the place. The rub comes when Americans obey the siren call to war made by some or all of the elite that governs them. The issue is not ignorance of the world, but the clueless arrogance and nearly unquestioning faith too many Americans have in their government, their society, their own goodness and their ability to do good in the world.

I’ve always been puzzled by my countrymen. Americans can be, and often are, very kind, compassionate and open-minded. But we can also be intensely cruel, brutal and horrifyingly judgmental. We can both welcome outsiders and hate and terrorize them mercilessly. We say all men are created equal, and yet we clearly believe ourselves to be better men, first among equals, men chosen by God or History or Providence to do for others what they cannot or will not do for themselves. We fear the world, and wish to smite all those in it who might mean us ill. Yet we also want desperately to save it, and to be loved and appreciated by all we see and all we save.

The really confounding thing, at least for me, is that we do and believe all of these things at the same time.

But what kind of salvation can you bring to the world when you don’t know anything — and deliberately don’t want to know anything — about it? What kind of salvation can you bring to a world you only fear and do not really love? How can Americans save Arabs and a whole Arab society (or Filipinos, or Vietnamese, or Afghans) when so many engaged in that salvation have little love, and no respect, for the people they are supposedly saving? When so many engaged in that enterprise believe in cruelty and brutality as means to something resembling a noble end?

Love for "humanity" in the abstract is meaningless if it inflicts pain and suffering on real individual human beings. Which is exactly what that kind of "love" usually does.

Ignorance is not a problem if there is no politics, no war, no violence, no desire to exercise authority and dominion over others. (Yes, I know, Eden before the fall.) But truth be told, I’d rather have ignorant Americans ready to live more-or-less peacefully with and in the world (and each other) than legions of bright, shiny and smart faces ready to do good regardless of whether the world wants their good or not. Regardless of the cost in treasure, suffering and blood.

Unfortunately for you and me, we live in the worst of all possible worlds from this perspective. Ignorance combined with power, especially state power, is a problem. Which is why we’re stuck with college students — and others — who cannot find Iran on a map or a globe and yet, because enough of their government has been incessantly saying so, believe the place may need to be pulverized from high altitude. Who do not know where Sudan is but want to save its children, with guns if necessary. Who cannot find New Orleans and know nothing about it but have an opinion about what the government should do to help — or hurt — people hit by Hurricane Katrina.

Or who cannot tell a fake country from a real one.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.

I hope you’re both [you and Jennifer] doing well in DC, and enjoying [Chinese President] Hu Jintao’s visit. I am glad he’s finally finished screwing up my commute.

Actually, the nice (nice?) thing about living and working in Mordor-on-the-Potomac is that the place is optimized for the presence of dignitaries and life can pretty well go on unhindered as they move around the city. D.C. isn’t like the provinces, where visits are rare and police, unused to the hot and angry breath of the powerful and their never-ending entourages, panic easily. I remember then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to San Francisco in the early summer of 1990, and the knots the city tied itself in over that (and the concurrent visit of then South Korean President Roh Tae-woo): fidgety police, Secret Service and Soviet officials everywhere, blocked intersections, live coverage of his motorcade from San Francisco International Airport, cheering and gawking crowds along his route through town.

It was a big thing, especially when the soon-to-be ex-Soviet leader got out of his motorcade to shake hands and meet people. (Hmph… I’d like to see George W. Bush do THAT in San Francisco.) There was concern bordering on near panic — a state that always whips the SF police’s tactical squad into a brutal frenzy, and they were happy to clear the crowds — when every Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian and Armenian in the San Francisco Bay Area decided to camp out around the Soviet ambassador’s residence in Pacific Heights.

No, Mordor-on-the-Potomac is always full of visiting dignitaries of one kind or another, wandering around town, making speeches, getting briefed at the State Department, meeting congresscritturs, begging for handouts or other kinds of help, either from Uncle Sam or his affiliates at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. Blair House, the official guest residence for visiting heads of state and heads of government, is occupied more often than not.

One afternoon a few years ago I was standing outside the IMF, having gotten a press pass for an upcoming World Bank-IMF shindig, when a motorcade screeched to a halt outside the World Bank just across the street. Out of a giant SUV popped a half-dozen huge, heavily armed and heavily armored "federal agents," each toting a sub-machine gun and glaring out at the world from underneath steel-blue Kevlar helmets. The agent nearest me, a giant man I nicknamed "Bubba" because he was a little too big for his uniform, danced and fidgeted (and jiggled — jiggling is not threatening, not even when it is done by a heavily armed man) nervously as he looked around, aiming his weapon every which way (including at me) as a long, black Cadillac pulled up. A group of men in suits got out followed by a quivering, shriveled-up old man in what looked like a faded green wool army suit and a long, starched white-and-black head-dress. It was Yasser Arafat!

As his own security men, flanked by a group of federal agents, walked the decaying Palestinian leader into the World Bank, I considered for a moment shouting "Allahu Akbar!" But realized that was likely the last thing your typical suicide bomber says before blowing himself to pieces, and with Bubba training his weapon at me and already extremely edgy, my wife probably could have buried me in a coffee can by the time Bubba and his comrades in uniform were finished with me. Fear properly overwhelmed me, and I held my tongue.

It took about a minute to get the decrepit Mr. Arafat shoved into the World Bank, and the federal agents piled back into the SUV (imagine a great big clown car full of heavily armed clowns) and disappeared as quickly as they came. No muss, no fuss, no exchange of gunfire. Can’t imagine anything like that going that well, or that quickly, in Seattle.

No, we in Mordor are used to living with leadership, and we make our way around it just as you would any other mess. Even if every leader in the world showed up at the same time, I expect it would cause little heartache or consternation, block little traffic, and prove no more inconvenient than our current chief resident. In fact, Bush Jong Il is much less an inconvenience than Bill Clinton ever was, since there’s nothing here in Mordor he much likes to begin with and he takes his helicopter out of town whenever he can. When you live with The President of The United States, you become very thankful he has at his disposal a fleet of helicopters, just because he doesn’t block traffic that way. Clinton felt the need to visit his alma mater Georgetown a couple of times a year, and it was always unnerving trying to get to classes under the ever-watchful glares of rooftop snipers. I thought that kind of thing only happened in Texas.

And, truth be told, in Mordor-on-the-Potomac, there really is only one leader who matters anyway — the President of the United States. The Clinton folks called him Potus, an ugly name I like and use whenever I can because it sounds vaguely Roman and imperial. The Bush people, however, don’t use it, and have resorted to that old Nixonion term The President. It’s like the term the Pope, because while there are a few popes — a Coptic one, a couple of anti-popes — there is only one the Pope, and you know exactly who he is. Similarly, the world is full of presidents — the local Rotary has a president, Exxon Mobil has a president, Equatorial Guinea and Brazil both have presidents, a president even heads the UN Security Council. But there is only one The President, and you know who he is too.

All other presidents are mere reflections of his shadow.

In fact, Hu’s visit would have gone utterly unnoticed save for the Chinese flag flying from Blair House I saw as I rode by (they only completely block Pennsylvania Ave. to foot and bike traffic when the prime minister of Israel visits, because who really cares about the security of the president of Ghana anyway?), were it not for the army of the Falung Gong faithful who marched around for three days, blocking intersections, making speeches and handing out fliers.

They were the annoying ones who plagued downtown commutes.

The Falung Gong showed up early, days before Hu got here, and there were hundreds — perhaps thousands — of them. They carried well-made but badly translated banners demanding an end to the repression of Falung Dafa (the practice of Falung Gong?), giant posters of the decapitated corpses and cut upon bodies that are the result of the Chinese government’s (alleged) harvesting of organs from imprisoned dissidents. They had a float, pulled by a small Japanese pickup truck, with live actors depicting such a surgery. There was a marching band, dressed in matching blue and white uniforms playing "God Bless America" as they made their way south along 14th St.

I don’t know quite where they went. To the Capitol, maybe, and then they came back, to march past Lafayette Park north of the White House. For two days they marched around Washington, tying up traffic, keeping police (and Taiwanese teevee crews) busy and everywhere they went, followers in yellow shirts handed out little newspapers, complete with more photos of corpses and more allegations of cruelty, abuse and human rights violations.

The day Hu arrived, they blockaded the intersection of 17th and Pennsylvania, very close to Blair House, banging drums and holding signs. (I like to think they had spent all night banging those drums, trying to keep Hu awake as he tried to sleep two doors down, but I suspect the security forces would have made quick work of them if they had.) They even had a new year’s dragon, its various heads bobbing up and down under the watchful gaze of the Secret Service and the curious eyes of commuters like me.

Protesters also waved Chinese and American flags, and all I could think of when seeing the two together was "All hail the great Alliance."

And on the sidewalk in front of the White House, along the broad, half-mile, traffic-free stretch of Pennsylvania Ave. that fronts Blair House, the Old Executive Office Building, and Lafayette Park, three troops of believers did their morning tai chi (or whatever the Falung Gong call their exercises), one team dressed in blue, another in pink, and another in red, all carrying drums and holding streamers. And moving as one. It was a little like watching a teevee program from North Korea.

I don’t know what to make of Falung Dafa and it fervent followers. There is a kind-of glaze-eyed quality to the believers, something reminiscent of the Moonies at San Francisco State who were constantly trolling for folks to come to their free dinners — and their (alleged) forest boot camp — to learn all there was to learn about the unification principle. But that’s no reason to outlaw them, or imprison them, or cut them up and sell their organs to wealthy businessmen from Shanghai (if that is indeed what is happening). And I am impressed at the efforts they went through to be seen and heard by one man — Hu Jintao — who otherwise has the luxury of never having to see them. Or even think of them.

You’ve all heard of the protester who was arrested for interrupting some joint press conference between Hu and Bush. What’s most interesting to me is what the protester reportedly asked, in English, for — “President Bush, stop him from persecuting the Falun Gong!”

(Forty-seven-year-old Epoch Times reporter Wang Wenyi has been charged with "harassing, intimidating and threatening a foreign official," and could face up to six months in a federal prison. A pity, too, because what she did — interrupting a press conference — should not be a crime.)

But that question, my goodness, what did she expect Bush to do? Or want to do? Or even be able to do? Use harsh language? Twist Hu’s arm? Beg and plead? Threaten to bomb China? Actually bomb it? What power did Wang Wenyi expect that Bush had in this situation? It’s one thing to tell Hu that his days are numbered, that he should let the practitioners of Falun Dafa go, and that he will be answerable to someone for his deeds. It is one thing to face power and speak the truth. It is another thing to ask another powerful person to consider the murderous. What else is the logical implication of that question? How far would the practitioners of Falung Dafa go? Would they countenance war? Or have they even given the matter much thought?

Maybe Wang Wenyi simply assumed that Bush could do anything. After all, he is The President.

Instead, Bush simply apologized to his guest for the interruption. Hu left the following day for Saudi Arabia, a place with no (so far I know) Falung Gong and where, as in China, no protests are allowed (and are met with swift and brutal policing when organized). It will be a situation much more to his liking. At least he will be able to get a decent night’s sleep, without all that drum banging.

As for Bush, I have no idea where he is. Probably got in a helicopter and left D.C. He can at least do that. Because after all, he is The President.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.

I would like to request that you write a column — or perhaps a short series of columns — with the subject being how Bush could (or even should) have appropriately responded to the events of “9-11″ and state-sponsored terrorism in the aftermath of those events.

I would like to see the column(s) written from the perspective that you are informing someone (who admits ignorance as to what exactly is wrong with using force to pursue sponsors of terrorism, yet realizes that the situation has indeed been handled so that it is now FUBAR) of the FACTS as to what is wrong, & present a moral argument convincing that person why what was done and/or how it was done was wrong (on any number of levels) without using heated invective — or, perhaps better stated, avoids using the “code words” and “code phrases” of the staunch anti-war position that don’t benefit the cause of convincing someone who is, to a certain degree, an “outsider.”

It’s a good question and I believe he deserves an answer. I hope this fairly lengthy essay is that answer.

The Bush administration made a number of profound mistakes in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon — mistakes that no one in the White House or the Pentagon needed to make. The first of these was to create a single, over-arching "War on Terror" when simply dealing with al-Qaeda’s brand of Revolutionary Islam was going to be difficult enough. The second mistake was to decide that fighting al-Qaeda, a highly decentralized movement that is more an ideology or a brand name than it is an organization in any hierarchical sense, was going to be too difficult, and that the United States needed to pursue a war it could fight — "shock and awe," the moving of large numbers of troops across borders to fight armies and destroy governments. Stuff the US military can do, but stuff that was also completely irrelevant to the struggle against al-Qaeda. That led to two more really rotten ideas: that by toppling a recalcitrant Arab government, the US could demonstrate to Arabs and Muslims that we were not to be messed with, restoring the value of American military might as a deterrent in the "War on Terror." And the hugely unconservative notion that by addressing the "root causes" of bad governance in the Arab (and Islamic) world, by removing tyranny and allowing the (alleged) natural human desire for democracy to spring forth, the great lake of rage and resentment that watered Revolutionary Islam would be dried up and we would more or less live happily ever after. That made Republicans sudden and enthusiastic supporters not of mere Clinton-style nation-building, but of Soviet-style nation and state building.

And it took our eyes off the prize — al-Qaeda, its affiliates, associates and franchisees. Had it been my war, the United States would have remained focused solely, completely and entirely on al-Qaeda.

Sure, the Ba’ath Party government of Iraq had close ties with terrorist groups like Abu Nidal and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There’s never been any doubt about that. But those groups belong to the golden days of the Left-leaning, Marx-inspired, Franz Fanon-touting era of Arab terror, and by the mid-1990s, these organizations were done. They were no longer important. (And Saddam Hussein’s support for Abu Nidal did not stop the Reagan administration from extending agricultural export credits, military intelligence or loans to an Iraqi state in a brutal and bitter war with Iran). To equate them with al-Qaeda, to blur that line by referring to "terror" as Bush constantly does, is foolish: they have different motivations, cite different texts, and want vastly different things. Neither the Iraqi state, nor any other Arab state, supported al-Qaeda as a matter of policy. The declaration of war on terror itself — a technique practiced by many different and disparate groups — was a needless expansion of what would be a difficult enough conflict on its own. Besides, it was Muslim revolutionaries, not Marxist revolutionaries, that blasted a hole in the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, that bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, that blew up the night club in Bali, that attacked the trains in Madrid, and that organized the dreadful attacks of September 11, 2001.

(Yes, conspiracy theorists, Muslims working all by themselves were behind all of those attacks. I have supped with revolutionaries and believe them to be smart enough, motivated enough and clever enough to pull those things off without any help from the CIA or anyone else.)

The war against al-Qaeda was not a conflict that should have employed soldiers or armies. It required ruthlessness, tenacity, and a great deal of determined patience, not the methodical and brutal war we wage best. The men and women who would fight that war — and there only would have been a few thousand at most — would have done so silently. Some would have skulked around the hills and in the shadows of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Yemen and wherever else was necessary, carefully and quietly looking for leaders, organizers, runners, anyone involved in al-Qaeda. And capturing them or slitting their throats with big sharp knives. In the event of mistakes, for there would have been mistakes, they would have had large sacks of cash and gold to hand out as hush money. Many of those other "fighters" would have done their jobs from US Treasury Department offices in Washington and New York, going after al-Qaeda’s money and communications networks with a passion and a vengeance, getting inside it, pinging and spoofing those networks (physical and otherwise), stealing its cash, learning how the network functions so as to muck it up and take it down. And learning, always learning, as the complex adaptive network that is al-Qaeda and like-minded folks adapts to us.

That war also required understanding who our allies were. Had it been my war, I would have reached out early to Damascus, Tehran and even Saddam Hussein himself and made deals — help us and we will help you. For Iraq, the incentive to cooperate would have been an immediate end to sanctions, replaced by a fairly loose technology control regime. Damascus was the best natural ally we had in the fight against Revolutionary Islam, and we needlessly alienated the Syrian government to the point where it is now most certainly allowing Iraqi Islamists and foreign Islamists fighting in Iraq to use portions of Syria as a staging and supply base. This is not say that all governments in the region are perfect, nor should we have loved them or defended them unconditionally as allies. Saudi state policy, and the ruling Al Saud family, is vehemently opposed to the revolutionaries, given the first thing most Muslim revolutionaries that I knew wanted to accomplish was to topple the Saudi regime and replace it with a proper Islamic one. Yet, some individuals within the Saudi state, and even the Al Saud family, continue to provide financial support and very likely other kinds of assistance to the revolutionaries. That is a reality we would have to accept and deal with — deal with who we can deal with eyes wide open and no illusions, taking what help we can.

But virtually every Arab Muslim government — Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan — has faced a revolutionary Islamist threat to its legitimacy and its rule and defeated it through force of arms. The honest truth is that Syrian soldiers can do things in Hama (or Jordanian troops can do things in Makka) that American soldiers, as occupiers and ferengi, cannot get away with in Fallujah. Or anywhere else. We were fools when we failed to understand and take advantage of that.

I would have had little or no respect for national sovereignty or international borders. If an al-Qaeda training camp or communications hub sat somewhere, the men in black jammies with very long, sharp knives (or even Army or Marine commandos or paratroops) would pay the place a visit, no matter where it was. As quietly as possibly, especially if the government in question was helpful officially but divided in practice. The conflict would look a lot more like highly militarized police work rather than war. But the goal would not have been to arrest al-Qaeda suspects with an eye to trying them; that’s a waste of time and effort, though I might have kept the idea of a few show trials of major organizers or fighters, in international venues, as part of the process of keeping European allies on board. The goal of the fight is to get inside the organization, to disrupt its operations and planning to the point where anyone who adopts its means and ends has to work too hard to keep a step or two ahead of the United States.

And rather than lecture Europeans on their softness, I would have reminded Americans that European governments are a whole lot more experienced at dealing with non-state terror groups than ours is. During the 1970s and early 1980s, internal terror groups, motivated mostly by Marxism and having ties of convenience to the East Bloc, kidnapped people and blew stuff up with regular and giddy abandon. (Anyone remember Bader Meinhoff? The Red Brigades? The IRA? Even the PLO?) European police and European laws are better placed than ours for such work, and they have skill and experience we don’t have. They are also a lot loss likely to panic over the whole thing — and panic is something American officials seem all too capable of when it comes to terror. So, it was important to make sure and nurture the support and sympathy of European governments that arose in the days following the September 11 attacks.

(If there is anything Bush needs to be faulted for, it is the squandering of all that international sympathy and goodwill.)

Toward that end, one of the first things I would have done following September 11, 2001 (as much as I hate the idea of new international rules) is sat down with major NATO allies as well as the UN and said "we need a fifth Geneva Convention covering non-state combatants, their rights, and our obligations toward them." That would have outlined any rights those suspected of being Muslim revolutionaries, limited the likelihood that anyone would have resorted to torture and mistreatment as official policy, and prevented the establishment of a permanent prison camp in a legal and constitutional black hole like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Frankly, I have few problems with suspected al-Qaeda fighters being physically held in the United States while being held under an entirely different legal code that does not afford them constitutional rights or even proper due process (as long as the death penalty is not involved). So long as mental or physical torture and mistreatment are not involved (bad policy no matter how you consider it), I don’t even (God forgive me) have much problem with permanent legal limbo for such folks.

Finally, I would begin a fairly rapid drawdown of US forces stationed abroad — especially in the Middle East. We are no safer with many hundreds of military bases scattered across the globe, nor are we much safer with large numbers of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines stationed in and around the Arabian Peninsula. It would be necessary for some troops to remain in the region, but I would keep the presence as low-key as possible, and focused on Kuwait and Dubai, places where our presence was not so problematic. I would also re-evaluate ties with Israel, forcefully and firmly tell the Israelis they need to yank out most of the West Bank settlements and cut the Palestinians loose, yesterday if possible.

There are risks with the war I would have waged. The biggest is that al-Qaeda would not have gotten from me what it wanted most — an American army on the ground, invading and occupying an Arab Muslim state — and would have tried harder in their next attack to provoke that response.

What was it al-Qaeda wanted to accomplish with the September 11 attacks? With any of their other attacks? I think the organizers of the attacks believed that by leveraging our stupidity and arrogance against us, they hoped we would invade a Muslim state and occupy it. The hope was, I think, that would give wavering Muslims a cause to rally behind, might even result in the toppling of a government or two, and give the revolutionaries a new cause to organize and fight around.

Let’s take a quick look at the failure of Revolutionary Islam by 2001. In nearly 30 years of fighting governments, the revolutionaries went toe-to-toe with Arab security forces and lost. Even when local politics worked in their favor, such as Algeria or Egypt, brutal and efficient policing on the part of the state combined with the fact that mass violence alienated the revolutionaries from the very people they sought to govern deprived them of any significant popular support. Only when the revolutionaries fought foreign occupiers in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, has there been both significant popular support and military victory. All the revolutionaries could point to, in 30 years of fighting, was the alleged Islamic state of Sudan (the result of coup d’tat) and the Taliban (and they were only accidental allies; as the Taliban were rising, the revolutionaries distrusted and were hostile to them, accusing them of being a creation of the CIA). Fighting one’s own government was a losing proposition, and they knew it.

However, they had a couple of other examples. The mujahedin beat the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, Hizbullah forced the Israelis to withdraw from Lebanon, and Hamas has returned blow for blow with the Israelis, and can even be said to have forced the Israelis to quit Gaza. Fighting foreign occupiers, if you can swing it, is the way to victory.

So why not get the Americans to do your work for you? Every one of their attacks in the 1990s was designed to provoke us to do exactly what the Bush administration did three years ago — invade an Arab state and topple an Arab government, giving them an easy battlefield they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Like Afghanistan, it would be a training ground, a place to make contacts, and create the links that would serve well in creating terror and mayhem for another 20 years.

I would not have given them that battlefield, believing that one enemy at a time is enough. And al-Qaeda, a self-organizing, self-perpetuating and ideologically motivated network which one identifies with more than "joins," was going to be enough of a struggle for a rigidly hierarchical state to deal with. No one — and I mean no one — needed the costly distraction of fighting insurgencies and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq, no matter how many girls’ school we built or how many elections we sponsored.

Given that, al-Qaeda would likely have begun preparing for the next attack, one likely more devastating than September 11, one they surely would have hoped would give them the war they wanted. That’s why it was so important to commit whole-heartedly to dealing with al-Qaeda, rather than throw up our hands and saying "Waaah! This is too hard! Let’s invade Iraq instead! That’s easier!" Muslim revolutionaries are not impressed or frightened by our strength; they would not have spent the 1990s trying to goad us into war had they been. Any show of strength would have been huge waste of time and effort. The Republican willingness to accept a Likudnik worldview, that the only way to achieve national security is to threaten and beat all potential enemies into submission, is a losing proposition, and it is unfortunate that no one in the United States forcefully articulated an alternative position in the weeks following the attack. That allowed America’s Likudniks, the neoconservatives and the muscular nationalist Republicans — people who fear the world and believe that preventative violence is the only realistic response to possible threats — to dominate the discussion on national security, to say that you either support total war (the Republican version) or you support capitulation and appeasement.

Let’s be clear — there is no way to deter the revolutionaries nor is there any way to awe them into compliance. But that very fact is the problem with the total war outlook of the Likudniks. Overwhelming force will never buy you security. It is important to emphasize over and over again that almost nothing Team Bush has done since September 11, 2001 — and that includes total war against the Muslim world — demonstrates their seriousness in actually fighting and defeating al-Qaeda.

This also explains why there has not been another attack in the United States — al-Qaeda simply doesn’t need it. The revolutionaries have what they want. Oh, from the standpoint of motivating Arab masses to revolt and support their neighborhood Islamists, the invasion of Iraq has been a stunning disaster for the revolutionaries. But it has provided a new training ground, a new place to make friends and connections that will bite us all again over the next two decades. But an unexpected result of the invasion of Iraq, one al-Qaeda did not anticipate but I believe has discerned and hopes to take advantage of, is the fact that it is going so badly for us, that we are a very divided nation over the whole endeavor (that division was guaranteed when Bush and the Republicans made support for their version of the never-ending war a party political program and the international branch office of the Culture War, something I would not have done), and we are slowly bleeding in a very expensive conflict that is proving to the world just how easily American arms can be fought to an effective draw.

Revolutionary Islam may have its roots in religion, but it is above all a political ideology, and it makes promises about a paradise on earth that it cannot and will not be able to deliver. That failure, just like the failure of Marxism, will prove the ideology’s undoing. Only in Palestine do the revolutionaries have any experience governing, and there they govern well simply because there is no other real government — aside from brutal occupation or the venal authority — to speak of. The nation-state at greatest risk for a likely seizure of power by the Islamists is Pakistan, the home of the movement’s chief ideologue, the late Maulana Maududi, and a society saturated with Revolutionary Islam. With our resources stretched thin, our military broken or nearing broken, our finances a disaster, and Republicans unwilling to exert any kind of fiscal discipline or hold the president accountable for mistakes and bad decisions, how any US administration deals with the possibility of Islamist control of Pakistan is beyond me.

So, above all, I would have reminded Americans that while we face a tenacious and dangerous opponent, our enemy is dangerous in large part because their ideology is doomed to failure and ignominy. It has already failed. It is selling goods few in the Muslim world want to buy, has little popular support, and will burn up of its own accord eventually if we are patient, vigilant, cautious, determined, do as little harm as possible and simply let it.

I never believed the war in Iraq was “winnable” in any way you might define victory (save for the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his government’s army). The only way to have "won" that war would have been to have appointed a Sunni general as the new leader of the place soon after arriving in Baghdad, looking down at our watches, and saying: "Here’s a list of people we want in custody. We want to go home now. Get us those people, and we’re gone." But the nonsense about democratization (and that’s why I take that excuse for the war seriously; had it been a mere resource grab, we’d of done just what I propose) turned the invasion into an occupation, and there was no way to win that.

I had fewer qualms about Afghanistan, and had few problems with the toppling of the Taliban and certainly supported going after al-Qaeda’s operations and personnel there. However, this effort to rebuild Afghanistan in the image of a prosperous, stable Social Democratic nation-state is nonsense and will fail in the end. The Soviet Union spent more than a decade "nation-building" in Afghanistan (including the much-loved elevation and education of women), and it was all for naught when their government collapsed a few years after the Soviet Army left. It’s nice the Taliban don’t run the place, but really, that is a secondary issue compared to dealing with the real bad guys.

But I have now also concluded that the war against al-Qaeda will be lost as well. We are not serious about fighting the revolutionaries, never have been, and even if the next administration decides that invading nation-states is a lousy way to fight a non-state, self-organizing network (and this self-realization is unlikely, given who is running), it will be too late, we will likely have lost too much time and squandered too many resources. Because of Iraq, we face the potential of 20—30 more years of well-trained and reasonably fearless terrorists. The attempt to leverage the war for political ends as part of the American Kulturekampf has needlessly and pointlessly divided us. (I do not apologize for my part in that division — I was as willing as most anyone else to support the Bush administration in the outset, and did so until it became clear they didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t want to.) That doesn’t mean the revolutionaries will win either — they won’t march up Constitution Ave. and hoist a green flag over the US Capitol. Aside from some of their more fantastic pronouncements, conquering and converting the ferengi has never been a serious goal of Revolutionary Islam. Outside eternally besieged Palestine and wobbly and perpetually ungovernable Pakistan, the revolutionaries will probably not gain control of any nation states. Most of their goals will go unwon. So it will be a wash, though as a long-time wargamer, I would suggest that al-Qaeda will win a "marginal victory" on points alone.

I also suspect that future historians will someday marvel at all the damage and catastrophic change 19 men with box cutters were able to wreck upon the world, and how easily they were able to twist in knots the globe’s wealthiest and most-powerful nation-state and set it at war with the world and with itself.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.

Occasionally, when we aren’t glowering at each other over political issues — he’s generally supportive of Bush and the Iraq war, though he’s more a "thoughtful" supporter than a chest thumper (like you, I have a hard time believing anyone who supports such a war could be called thoughtful, but let’s set that aside for the time being) — we talk about our respective religious experiences and journeys. There, despite the fact that he was born Jewish and rediscovered the faith part of Judaism only later in life, while I was raised without faith, became a militant Muslim for a time, and am now bound for a Lutheran seminary this fall, we have found a fair amount of common ground.

To prove to me that he is not the rabid, government-loving and war-mongering fiend I often want to think he is, he expresses his doubts — in the most general way, and not specifically; he saves specifics for past actions, things long dead and done — about government action, including war. For example, he says all his friends consider him a libertarian rather than a conservative. And he said he’d like to have a license plate for his Toyota hybrid that says "LTD GOVT" as a way of expressing his sympathies (cute, no?). And to be honest, nearly two years of having to deal with the often-times rabid anarchist that I have become (just about anybody is more supportive of the US government than I am) and my incessant loaded questions on the morality of the Iraq war has, by his own admission, had an effect on him.

If nothing else, he told me, I’ve forced him to think about things. I am fortunate, I suppose, that he has not punched me in the nose. Especially the day I called him a "fascist."

Anyway, one day, my friend said, in response to a discussion about the willingness and eagerness of US governments to bomb people, that his rabbi told his study group recently, "war is a bad habit to get into."

A nice way to put it, I said. And then I asked him: "How much war is too much? When does it become a habit?"

Having perfected the brilliant, non-specific, non-answer, he shrugged. He is not as sure of the answers to these things as I am, he told me.

Another point I’m happy to admit. Because it is clear to me, as it should be clear to any thoughtful human being, that war has become an American habit. A bad one. The United States of America has been at war for nearly all of the last 15 years, more or less continually since August 1990. Under two Bushes and a Clinton, American arms and soldiers have deployed hither and yon to the deserts of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the denuded hills and fields of Haiti, the hardscrabble beaches of Somalia, the villages and cities of Kosovo, the mountains of Afghanistan, and again and again and again to the poor and benighted land of Iraq. (Oh, and let’s not forget all those military "advisers" in Colombia, and the thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines manning the far-flung marches of the global empire, from Bulgaria to Diego Garcia to Tajikistan.) American bombs and missiles have taken aim at targets continually in Iraq, smote the wicked in Bosnia, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and obliterated a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

But why stop there, with that fateful August of 1990? Twenty-three years earlier, the summer of 1967 when I was born, was a season not only for a little bit of Love (for those few who decided to tune in, turn on and drop out) but also a whole lot of war, in Vietnam and vicinity, another land full of poor, proud and resolute people who probably wondered in their spare moments exactly what it was they had ever done to deserve the full wrath of the United States of America. My father, an Army officer, fought in that war, and would go on to spend a good portion of his military career figuring out how to shoot down ballistic missiles. As an engineer and project manager for an armaments maker, he would spend the rest of the 1970s and much of the 1980s doing very similar work.

If you count the Cold War — the very Cold War that kept my father and so many like him employed in the giant weapons laboratories and factories of Southern California — as World War III (and why not?), beginning in March 1946 with the civil war in Greece or the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in May 1948 and ending either with Ronald’s Reagan declaration of its end in 1988 or the actual fall of the Berlin Wall the following year, the United States of America was at war in one form or another for more than 40 years.

And we can rattle off the names of all the places that have seen American soldiers or been struck by American bombs since V-J Day in 1945 like a travelogue of the tormented damned — Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Cambodia, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Panama. I’m certain there are a few of them that I’ve missed. If we count places where only advisers helped, where proxy wars were fought, where the existence of petty rightist tyrannies were dubbed essential to the survival of "The Free World," we can add to that list: Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Angola, Zaire, Ethiopia and Somalia. And I’m certain there are more of those places I’ve forgotten, too.

(In fact, I think all the countries deliberately attacked by the United States since 1946 could sit down and form an international organization of their very own, a League of the Bombed, one that could rival the Non-Aligned Movement for membership and FIFA for enthusiasm.)

Except for two years — or a year, depending on how you calculate it, and even that is broken by several weeks "at war" in Panama in 1989 — Americans and their government have been at war, in one form or another, for nearly all of the last 60 years.

Sixty years. A habit? Clearly. An obsession and a compulsion, too.

War, the practice for war, the expectation of war — the fear it loomed over the horizon, across the North Pole, under the bed, or just the other side of the Fulda Gap — has been our normal for just about all of these last six decades. It has warped our economy in such a way that I’m not sure we even know what peaceful capitalism without government meddling is anymore. Since the end of the Second World War, the country’s economy has been tightly bound to the warfare state. In fact, a number of high-placed thinkers concluded in the late 1940s that the economy of the modern managed state could not function without the constant planning and preparation for war to suck up all the "excess" production that so terrified capitalists and the emerging managerial elite in the late 19th century and again in the 1930s. Look at the world around you — what isn’t the result or an offshoot of some part of the permanent American welfare/warfare state?

But it has also warped our national mindset, character and worldview. We are not a free people anymore, if we ever were (and likely, 100 years ago or more, we were). We have become a frightened, anxious and extremely self-centered people, terrified of the world we live in and the people we share it with. Most importantly, war has made us servile, that ugly combination of passive and aggressive, sycophantic to superiors and cruel to inferiors, bored and impatient at the same time. Servility is the personal attribute most needed by the state, for it makes effective management possible. It also makes war an easy habit for the state to cultivate. At the same time, warfare and the constant preparation for it breed authoritarian hierarchies and more servility, for the state needs compliant men and women unwilling and unable to think about the consequences of what they do. It needs them to be killers on one hand, and quiet, dutiful consumers on the other — frequently at the same time. It also needs loyal commanders who will believe in the state, who will make its means and ends their own, who will give the kinds of orders — the torture of individuals, the annihilation of cities — that will be considered rational and reasonable, and will be obeyed.

Only nation-states can plan and organize for this kind of war, because only states can muster the resources needed to denature and degrade human beings so totally. Only the modern state, with schools, media, churches, armies, bureaus, laws, regulations, propaganda and social pressure, can infiltrate Men’s souls in such a way as to thoroughly alter and destroy them from the inside. That’s why nearly every total state created since the latter part of the 19th century eventually gave us war of one kind or another, because war is the natural result when you treat individual human beings — each a child of the living God — as mere resources to be managed.

Americans of each generation since 1945 have wondered in stupefied awe how Germans could have just served their government in the Nazi era, how they could have "simply followed orders" they must have known were wrong. Mostly, those questions involve the mass murder of European Jews, and not the actual waging of war (which is odd in and of itself, if you think about it). But there is a very American version of this claim, one which may puzzle future historians and ethicists almost as much as the German one vexes us today — "that’s above my pay grade."

Who hasn’t heard that phrase? It’s everywhere in the US government, and not just the Pentagon (I ran into it several times at USDA during my stint covering the place, a good excuse — even possibly a real one — not to give the wire service reporter information he has just asked for). And given how deeply the Defense Department, especially contracting for the Pentagon, has penetrated suburban life in this country, it’s everywhere outside the government too.

The phrase describes perfectly the nature of being a human cog in a giant machine, a machine whose parts are made of the blood and flesh of denatured human beings, of men and women degraded and deprived of their essence as conscious moral beings. "I am not paid to think about the consequences of what I am doing, that job is done by someone else, someone with a higher rank and more responsibility than me. I will simply do my job the way I was told and hope nothing bad happens to me. I have a mortgage, a family, a pension to worry about." It is why the President of the United States can give a bad order, or set a stupid and murderous policy in motion, and no one inside the hierarchy will question, even when many people in that same hierarchy can see disaster coming. All the way down the line, no one (or almost no one) says "no," or "stop," or even "wait," because the person they are immediately accountable to accepts either the legitimacy of the order or the legitimacy of the system which transmitted the order.

And so monstrous evil is done. By our loved ones, our neighbors, our family members, fellow parishioners — people few of us would generally conceive of as evil. People who, when acting as human beings rather than as badly molded pieces in a great and awful machine, would never hurt, kill or steal.

I enlisted in the US Army in the summer of 1985, and part of the curricula the sergeants at Ft. Leonard Wood drilled into our mushy little heads that summer involved lawful orders and the Geneva Convention. In fact, we spent a whole afternoon going over what orders we, as soldiers, were required to obey and — more importantly — which orders we were not required to obey. We were tested on the subject, and the drill instructors, most of whom had themselves joined the Army in the raggedy days following the end of the Vietnam War, took the matter seriously. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that we had the right to think, to question, to consider, and to say "no" if we understood or believed some wrong was about to be committed. Even as lowly privates making barely more than $500 per month, some things were clearly not above our pay grade.

Now, whether the Army actually intended that we use that training, I do not know. Given what I discovered serving in Panama, where immoral and illegal orders were issued regularly and were expected to be followed, I’m guessing much of that afternoon was window dressing, an effort to salve the consciences of men and women who like their sausage spicy but get queezy even contemplating how it’s made. These days, I do not know if soldiers even get such training, worthless or not. I won’t be surprised if they do not.

I’m not sure it would matter anyway.

No order, regulation, law or procedure that results in the destruction or degradation of human beings is worth following or supporting, and no authority that gives such an order can ever be morally legitimate, regardless of how "legal" or duly constituted it is. As an individual human being, nothing is above my pay grade, and the same holds for you too. Such a saying is not worthy of free men and women, of men and women made in the image and of the essence of a merciful and compassionate God. That talk is the talk of slaves, of people who serve cruel and capricious masters, who only care how full their bellies are, who have abandoned any sense of ownership of their own fates and any sense they have anything in common with the rest of humanity.

In short, it is the talk of Americans, a servile people well-schooled in brutality and cruelty, and given almost totally over to the habits of war. And the habit of war.

Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.