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The Yikes Years
by R.A. Hettinga 21 Nov '04

21 Nov '04

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54962-2004Nov16?language=printer> The Washington Post washingtonpost.com The Yikes Years Life as the world's lone superpower is beginning to make the Cold War look easy By David Von Drehle Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page W16 The Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak observed that "history cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing." Which was an interesting assertion from a man who saw, among other clearly historic events, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the Stalinist terror and World War II. But let's work with Boris a little. No doubt he was correct in the sense that history sort of sneaks up on us. Day after day, stuff happens, and some of it is strange, some is unsettling, some is stirring, some is portentous. But we don't often know, in real time, whether these various happenings are adding up to anything meaningful enough to be called "history." Yet there comes a day when you look out the window and notice that the lawn is extremely shaggy. You may not have seen the grass growing, but suddenly it's so high you can no longer find the dog's chew toys or the baseball glove you asked your kid 400 times to put away. And then it rains for three straight days and you realize there is no way your lawn mower can get through the sopping wet, jungle-thick morass without making a terrible mess of the mower, the lawn, your shoes . . . Based on interviews with esteemed experts, the perusal of a stack of dense tomes, a plodding trip through thousands of pages of knotty articles in learned journals, plus the findings of assorted blue-ribbon federal commissions and weeks of squint-eyed reflection, I can report that this is precisely where America finds itself today. We are up to our shins in the sloppy grass of history. Maybe you have noticed. The past half-dozen years or so, strange things, unsettling things, stirring things, portentous things have been happening right and left. The decade of the 1990s danced in with such promise. No more Cold War. No more Evil Empire. The Persian Gulf War required a mere four days of land operations and seemed to spell the end of that gloomy, doubt-America malaise widely known as the "Vietnam syndrome." For a moment, it genuinely seemed that the most interesting question a president could face was, "Boxers or briefs?" Then: February 1998. A bloodthirsty zealot with a billionaire father declared war on America. Weird. From some cave or compound in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden dispatched a fatwa to a London newspaper announcing the sacred duty of Muslims to kill Americans anywhere they could find us. Only a handful of us even noticed. But this strange event turned out to be truly historic. After all, how many rich fanatics have declared war on an entire country? And how many, within six months, have managed to blow up two U.S. embassies? Our elected leaders began making their own sort of history. On December 19, 1998, the designated speaker of the House, Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, marched onto the floor of Congress, announced he was quitting on account of a sex scandal, and called on President Clinton to do likewise. That certainly felt new. The rich guy in Afghanistan was trying to have a war with us, but our government had painfully snagged on what we were calling "zipper problems." Yet this wasn't even the biggest story of the day, because Livingston's speech was a footnote to the fact that the House impeached a president for only the second time in U.S. history. Then bin Laden's troops bombed, and nearly sank, a U.S. Navy destroyer. Then came a deadlocked presidential election, the first in more than a century. All this played out against a backdrop of dazzling new technologies and dizzying new wealth. Men and women barely out of college were making and losing fortunes that might have turned John D. Rockefeller's head -- and how? Strange, unsettling stuff: data harvesting, digital pet-food sales, cooking the books. And then, bin Laden brought his war to the American mainland. Hitler couldn't get here. Brezhnev couldn't get here. But the radical Islamists managed to hit us harder than we had been hit at home since the Civil War. Followed by Afghanistan and Iraq. Some people have begun using the phrase "World War IV." (No, you didn't miss one: WWIII is what used to be called the Cold War.) Rogue states are developing nukes. There's a plague decimating Africa. The polar ice caps are melting. It's no wonder our civic mood is grouchy. We are bombarded by banner headlines, caught in CAPS LOCK mode, deluged with dire declarations. Tom Wolfe dubbed the 1970s the Me Decade. We're living in the Yikes Years. BACK IN THE SUNLIT ERA WHEN THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN, before all hell broke loose, a theorist named Francis Fukuyama published an influential essay announcing "The End of History." It was a highly philosophical piece having to do with the ideological triumph of democracy and free markets, but the catchy title took on a life of its own, coming to stand for the ascendancy of the United States and its ideals. We're going to pay a visit to Fukuyama later in this article, and we'll hear what he now has to say about history. For the moment, though, just try to recall those days, when our leaders blithely wondered what to buy with our "peace dividend" and how best to manage the "Pax Americana." Some people actually felt a twinge of regret at Fukuyama's coinage. No more history? What a drag! It was such an American response -- after all, history had been good to us, nationally speaking. History gathered up various scattered bands of religious outcasts, economic refugees and insatiable colonists; history molded these elements into a nation; history boosted that nation into the global driver's seat. Several years after Fukuyama wrote his essay, a French leader, Hubert Vedrine, decided that the word "superpower" wasn't enough for us anymore. America wasn't just "super," America was "hyper," as in hyperpuissance, hyperpower. It sounded like something out of a DC Comics futurama. The world had never seen our equal -- a single nation dominating the globe militarily, economically, culturally. In those naive days, it seemed both a great relief and a slight shame to think that Americans might be done with an era of true significance and entering a time of uneventful sameness, that we might be embarking on a tranquil but meaningless period that would eventually be boiled down to a mere sentence or two in the history texts of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Were we destined to share the fate of the citizens of the Gilded Age, who apparently liked to argue over "free silver" while riding bicycles with absurdly large front wheels? Now we see there was no need to worry. One last belaboring of Pasternak: It's clear now that the end of the Cold War wasn't the end of grass; it was more like resodding the lawn. For a while there, nothing seemed to be growing. But new roots were going down, and once they took hold, the grass came back stronger and thicker than before. So, what does this all point to? What does it mean? Years from now, when a virtual teacher downloads the history of our time into a microchip in our great-grandchild's brain, what will the data say? "History?" President Bush answered with a shrug when Bob Woodward asked him how the future will view the Iraq war. "We don't know. We'll all be dead." I've become curious, though, about where the strange and unnerving events of recent years might be heading, and whether we can steer our course or must simply ride irresistible currents. I wanted a hint as to how this movie might end. So while most Washington journalists were tracking each up and down of the presidential campaign, I tried to look past this single election, and even Bush's second term, toward the larger pattern of things. I began reading books with titles like The Future of Freedom and The Clash of Civilizations, magazines with names like Foreign Affairs and the National Interest and Technology Review. I began e-mailing provocative young scholars and sage older ones. I started paying visits to the offices of learned women and men who are paid to ponder where America is and where it is headed. I discovered that they tend to be concentrated along a stretch of Massachusetts Avenue NW, which I came to refer to as "Big Think Boulevard." This is an intimidating world for a layperson to enter. The hushed hallways and book-lined offices of Big Think Boulevard are home to a priesthood that knows precisely the difference between "hegemony" and "empire," not to mention the difference between entente and detente. I found that some of these thinkers fear we are living through the end of the Western alliance, while others believe America's power is already seeping away to China. I met thinkers who fret most about nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and others who prefer to worry about the speed at which our debtor nation is skidding toward fiscal crisis. You know things are scary when you find a wistful note of nostalgia for the relative stability of the Cold War creeping into the voices of level-headed people. True, the brains of Big Think Boulevard have always shown a tendency to be worrywarts, except for when they are overly optimistic. Through the years, a visitor could have heard deep and earnest discussions along that street of the domino theory (by which the communists would conquer the world), the triumph of the German economy (which also did not happen) and the rise of superpower Japan (ditto). But just because predicting the future is difficult doesn't mean thinking about the future is pointless. I found widespread agreement on at least two propositions: First, that some very different sort of world is roaring up at us. Second, that the history of our times will be the story of how we prepared for this different world -- which, so far, is mostly a story of how we have failed to prepare. Yikes. A FORMER GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL, THINK-TANK STAR AND NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST, Jessica Tuchman Mathews is now the president of a venerable outfit called the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The endowment occupies a handsome eight-story building in a prime spot on Big Think Boulevard -- a quietly elegant structure of glass and stone and wood, silent testimony to the power of Andrew Carnegie's millions multiplied by nearly a century of wise investment and compound interest. Human frailty being what it is, Carnegie's original goal of eliminating war has been scaled back over the years, and now the endowment is plenty busy just trying to keep wars from going nuclear. I was hoping that Mathews might be able to summarize why being a hyperpower has turned out to be so unpleasant. Why, just a few years after the dawn of a new American epoch, it sort of feels like a fast-fading twilight. "The past couple of years have shown us that the way we felt at the end of the Cold War -- the dominance we felt in terms of military power, economic power, so-called 'soft' cultural power -- was too facile," she began. America's power is "not at all as clear as it seemed just four years ago. Although we're spending approximately one-half of all the world's total military expenditures, and our power on that plane is supreme, it is not that usable against the enemies we now face." She said this on a late-summer morning when Osama was still in his cave (or wherever he might be) and the low-tech insurgency in Iraq was metastasizing. So it was hard to argue with her assertion that certain foes are not cowed by the most awesome conventional military the world has ever seen. The United States has a fleet of nuclear submarines, every one of which packs enough megatons to decimate a nation. We have 12 aircraft carriers, every one of which totes more power than the entire air force of virtually any other country. We have stockpiles of laser-guided bombs and missiles that we can land on the proverbial dime. Yet we are flummoxed by beheadings -- a technology from the days of Salome and John the Baptist. As it happens, this is a common problem for global powers: Conventional strength doesn't always succeed. The Romans had a similar experience with the Huns. Or a more recent example: In 1898, the British army won an overwhelming victory at Omdurman to regain control of Sudan and establish itself as the supreme fighting force on Earth. Within a year, the same army under the same general went off to fight the Boers in South Africa. At first, all went well: The British quickly seized the Boer capitals. Mission accomplished. But the opposing forces simply melted into the population, then launched a devastating guerrilla war that exposed the vulnerabilities of the superpower army. Which sounds familiar. Mathews continued: "On the economic side, we are very, very vulnerable." Strange: Wasn't it just a few years ago that the American economy was crushing its competitors like Godzilla mashing Toyotas? She cited two reasons to feel nervous. First, while the U.S. economy is easily the largest in the world, we're not even paying the bills of our own government -- not by a long shot. The federal deficit is more than $400 billion this year. And worse is sure to come when the baby boomers start retiring later this decade and Social Security and Medicare become massive drains. For the first time in our history, approximately half of our deficit spending is being financed by foreign nations. It can't bode well for a major power when its potential competitors hold the mortgage on its future. The second economic weak spot Mathews sees is the explosive growth of the global labor market. With populous countries like China and India and Singapore and Malaysia rushing into the manufacturing age, "we're looking at a global labor surplus for an extended period, which is something new," Mathews said. Let that sink in for a moment. An oversupply of a commodity means a declining price. A surplus of labor should mean lower wages, which means less saving and less spending, which means a sluggish economy, if not worse. Even the upside of cheap foreign labor -- the low prices we pay for clothes and gizmos -- often comes with a downside: a staggering trade deficit. At best, the coming years will be a nerve-racking race to convert those global workers into buyers of American exports, not just competitors for American jobs. Brightening briefly, Mathews added: "We're still best in the world at adapting to rapidly changing circumstances. No other nation takes disruption in stride the way we do." So the good news is, we're good at handling bad news. Finally, as satisfying as it may be to many Americans, even U.N.-bashing may be beyond our power in the future. "I think it's clear there are not many really important issues we can tackle alone," Mathews said. Take the example currently occupying her attention -- the proliferation of nuclear technology in places such as North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, places that are hostile, unstable or both. "A huge amount of work needs to be done on proliferation by a lot of countries working together," she said. "We can't accomplish what needs to be done by ourselves. And yet, what's the level of our political influence on other countries right now? When we were going into Iraq and the U.N. was resisting, I must have had 300 people say to me: 'Jessica, don't be silly. When push comes to shove, we'll get the votes.' But then it happened, and we couldn't get Mexico, for heaven's sake. Talk about a country that depends on us. Chile, which had a free-trade agreement on the line with us -- we couldn't get their vote. "This is a long-winded way of saying that we are not nearly as dominant as we all thought we were just a few years ago." I was surprised by how much agreement I found on this general idea among big thinkers, ranging from neoconservatives to multilateral peaceniks, from Republicans to Democrats to unaffiliated foreign intellectuals. They disagreed over nuances, but nearly all of them concurred that the rosy assumptions of the recent past must be completely reexamined. If the touchstone title of the 1990s was "The End of History," the title that speaks to the dawn of this decade might be Robert D. Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy." So where are we headed? Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard offered an early take on that question in his influential 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations: "In sum, overall the West will remain the most powerful civilization well into the early decades of the twenty-first century. . . . [But] the West's control of [key] resources peaked in the 1920s and has been declining irregularly but significantly. In the 2020s, a hundred years after that peak, the West will probably control about 24 percent of the world's territory (down from a peak of 49 percent), 10 percent of the total world population (down from 48 percent) . . . about 30 percent of the world's economic product (down from a peak of probably 70 percent), perhaps 25 percent of manufacturing output (down from a peak of 84 percent), and less than 10 percent of global military manpower (down from 45 percent). "In 1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau together virtually controlled the world. Sitting in Paris, they determined what countries would exist and which would not, what new countries would be created, what their boundaries would be and who would rule them, and how the Middle East and other parts of the world would be divided up among the victorious powers. . . . A hundred years later . . . the age of Western dominance will be over." AND WHAT, YOU MIGHT ASK, WOULD BE SO BAD ABOUT THAT? Back when happy students were building a papier-mache replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and Russian kids were waving American flags in Moscow, and the president of the United States and the chancellor of Germany were fast friends, American dominance felt like a rewarding and gratifying pursuit. Now, we read bestsellers like Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire, both by Asia expert Chalmers Johnson -- books in which the purported costs of our dominance are counted in a litany of miserable tolls. We're hated, Johnson informs us. We're resented. We're increasingly opposed by other nations. And a fair number of the world's people would like to kill as many of us as they possibly can. "In the long run," Johnson writes, "the people of the United States are neither militaristic enough nor rich enough to engage in the perpetual police actions, wars, and bailouts their government's hegemonic policies will require." I once had the good fortune to visit Rome and found myself sitting on a perfect late-summer evening at a cafe on the vast Piazza Navona. Thousands of Romans, ineffably beautiful and thoroughly relaxed, were gliding happily back and forth across the plaza, hailing their many friends. The whole city, it seemed, had just returned from a month's vacation in the hills or by the sea. Shouted greetings and untroubled laughter were accompanied by the soothing music of water splashing in a huge fountain wrought by the master carver Bernini. My tummy was pleasantly full of prosciutto and figs and warm bread dipped in olive oil, and I found myself thinking that the best places to live in the whole world might be the capitals of former empires -- Athens, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Vienna and right there in Rome -- where people enjoy all the cultural riches of having once dominated the world but are blissfully free of the burdens of leadership. There's just one problem with that, said Niall Ferguson. "There isn't always a contender to take over" the job of leading the world; or sometimes there is a contender, but one who happens to be a genocidal maniac. "If the U.S. draws back from the imperial hubris of 2003 -- which I guess it already is doing; after all, it's hard to imagine America taking any new significant military actions for a while -- then the short-term and medium-term scenario is that large parts of the world will be left in a state of misrule under dictators, or in a state of no rule at all. That is rather a troubling prospect." Ferguson is one of the hottest young stars in the foreign policy world, a thinker so big right now that he has hardly any fixed address. Just a few years ago, he was an unknown Oxford scholar working on a history of global fiscal policy (insert enormous yawn here). But it turned out that money really does make the world go around, or at least that it helps enormously to understand money if you want to understand history. Plus, Ferguson writes with flash and verve. His first book was a hit in brainy circles, and he followed it up with book after provocative book. Now, at 40, he's a globe-trotting, multinational theorist of empire. It can take days of e-mail exchanges and transatlantic telephone tag just to track him down; when we finally did talk, he was taking a brief break from a conference in Lisbon. At least I think he was still in Lisbon. While I was trying to find him, I read Ferguson's recent cover article in Foreign Policy magazine, a harrowing vision of a world without a dominant country -- a condition he called "apolarity" or "a global vacuum of power." We've seen such periods before, he observed: the so-called Dark Ages, for example, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and, more recently, the demoralized 1920s, which gave rise to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini in Europe and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the United States. We now see that the '20s also sowed the seeds of today's violent Islamicism, thanks to the dispirited intellectuals of the former Ottoman Empire, who began dreaming of a new order founded on strict Islamic law. So: "Be careful what you wish for," Ferguson warned those who might like to see America pull back from world leadership. "Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age: an era of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic plunder and pillage in the world's forgotten regions; of economic stagnation and civilization's retreat into a few fortified enclaves." It's one thing to say, as most big thinkers do, that no nation has ever remained on top forever, and thus the United States, too, will someday see its period of dominance come to an end. The tricky part, as Ferguson's worries about a new dark age remind us, is figuring out a relatively peaceful path from hyperpower to former power. There are plenty of theories about potential rivals to American power 20 or 50 or 100 years from now. At current levels of growth, China will blow past the United States as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next half-century, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. China's influence over East Asia is growing even faster than that. China's military is no match for ours today, but it has nuclear-tipped missiles and a big army, and the wealthier China becomes the more it can spend on guns, bombs, airplanes and warships, if it so chooses. Many theorists can paint a vivid picture of a not-so-distant world in which Asia is the center of the action, with China dominating the continent. One piece of that picture appeared in a recent article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's magazine Technology Review, which declared that the "world's hottest computer lab" is the one Microsoft has established in Beijing. If Bill Gates is betting on China, perhaps we all should. But even if things go smoothly for the Chinese, their nation is years away from rivaling the United States. And things are not likely to go smoothly. The coming years for China are precisely the phase in which other developing countries have experienced financial panics, civic unrest, economic meltdown and stagnation of trade. Maybe Europe? Charles A. Kupchan of Georgetown University said the United States and Europe were bound to clash after their common enemy -- communism -- was conquered. Arguments over Iraq and the global warming treaty simply sped up a process already underway. The development of the European Union is moving much faster than anyone expected, Kupchan said, and the United States might soon find itself competing with a confederation of European countries. There may be a tipping point when the combined EU economy becomes larger than the U.S. economy, when the euro rivals the dollar as the global currency, and when America no longer sets the rules for global banking and finance. Not everyone buys the idea of a bulked-up Europe, however, because Europe has problems of its own. European military power is mostly hollow, and some of Europe's leading economies are wheezing. The demographic picture is bleak: Native populations, especially in Western Europe, are aging and shrinking, which means fewer workers and more pensioners -- not exactly the muscular image of a rising superpower. If it's true that no other power is ready -- or even close to being ready -- to step into the yoke of history, America's choice is to either hang in there or give up. Much of the world is not going to like either choice. "Our real enemy may simply be . . . chaos in the world," said Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mead is another of the hot hands in the foreign policy business, harder to reach than a mid-list movie star. When I spoke to him by telephone, Iraq was boiling over and the United Nations was dithering about the genocide in Sudan. Yet Mead pronounced himself "optimistic" about the way history is unfolding -- as long as events aren't allowed to drift into madness. "Where I worry," he said, "is that the social and economic changes underway are going to create chaos." Some countries, like the change-loving United States, will be able to hack it in a world of change. Others will not. The widening gap between the two is a zone of enormous danger, Mead believes. "In many ways, I see Islamic terrorism as reflecting the changes of modernity in societies that may not be ready for them, or are divided by them," he said. "As the pace of change accelerates, and more and more people are affected, I worry we will see increasing resentment aimed at the country often seen as the source of these changes -- the United States." Which brings us back to: Yikes. I HALF-EXPECTED TO FIND FRANCIS FUKUYAMA SMOKING A PIPE AND PEERING AT A GLOBE WITH HIS BROW FURROWED. Or standing over a huge table covered with maps and encoded dispatches, his hands clasped behind him. Fukuyama is among the most widely acclaimed foreign policy theorists in the world. Even people who disagree with him routinely describe him as "brilliant." But no, Fukuyama works in an ordinary professor's lodgings at 1619 Big Think Blvd. His is one of several small offices grouped around a bullpen at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. (Eggheads simply call it SAIS -- pronounced "sice.") His standard-issue desk is heaped with the usual mounds of paper, and his nondescript bookshelves overflow with volumes that pool on the tables and spill to the floor. There is an appealing humility about the place; you have to scour the jumble with your eyes to spot The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama's book-length extension of his influential essay. Contrary to the assumptions of people who only read the title, Fukuyama never claimed that historic events were going to stop happening after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His thesis was limited to a philosophical claim. He reminded readers that for almost 200 years, dating back to the German philosopher G.F. Hegel, many big thinkers -- notably Karl Marx -- viewed "history" as a sometimes violent struggle to determine the best way to structure society. History was believed to be headed toward a solution. Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War was "the end of history" because it left no plausible alternative to free markets and liberal democracy. End of argument, end of history. Within that narrow definition, he may still be correct. The global clash of ideologies may well be over. Bin Laden isn't trying to create the future so much as he is trying to escape from it to the past, and a very distant, parochial past at that: medieval Arabia, and step on it. Still, Fukuyama acknowledged that this rarified use of the word "history" is less enlightening than it once seemed, because any notion of history that doesn't include the destruction of the World Trade Center is of dubious value. The world has moved on, and so has Fukuyama's thinking. His recent cogitation has produced a seemingly simple but subtle realization that might explain a lot about why America's role in the world has become so difficult. America's enormous power, he noted, actually violates an axiom of the political philosophy we have been promoting for the past two centuries. How so? As every civics class graduate knows, liberal democracy and free markets depend on "checks and balances" to rein in excess, to correct mistakes and to unleash creativity by bringing more ideas to the table. But now the unmatched military, economic and cultural power of the United States flouts the principle of checks and balances on a global scale. We don't expect monopolies to work well in economic markets. We don't expect dictatorships to survive free elections. Perhaps, he suggested, we should not be surprised to find that hyperpower has not ushered in a pastoral future. "We believe that power without checks and balances is not safe -- even in the hands of well-meaning people. But today, we are an unchecked power," Fukuyama said. "After September 11, the world saw America's unchecked power in the military sphere. We reached out and overturned two regimes halfway around the world, essentially without help, and said to other countries, 'If you don't like it, you can just stuff it.' " This rankles the rest of the world, which is naturally suspicious of unchecked power and, in fact, has a lot of practice in resisting it. Europe, for example, relied for generations on a "balance of power" strategy to stabilize the world. Whenever one government or axis became too strong, a fluid system of treaties would generate a competing alliance to level the field. This system wasn't pretty -- oceans of blood were shed in the age of Napoleon, in World War I and in World War II. Yet rulers preferred it to living with a single unchallenged power. Then came a streamlined version of the same idea: the Cold War, in which two nuclear superpowers checked and balanced each other through the threat of mutual destruction. American power "generates a big backlash," Fukuyama continued. While no nation is in a position to offset American military power, the world has other ways to thwart our intentions. Fukuyama envisions a difficult period in which the United States is stymied by "the rest of the world [deciding] not to cooperate with us on a lot of little things that, over time, really matter." Iraq may be one of those "little" things. Al Qaeda could turn into another. The doozy, though, is nukes. Nukes are the great X-factor, the cloud of uncertainty, floating over Big Think Boulevard. The future of Europe, the challenge of China -- such topics are good for the next conference in Lisbon or Aspen or New York. But bin Laden with a nuke: That's not a conference, it's a nightmare. Everyone knows this, on some level. During the presidential campaign, both George W. Bush and John F. Kerry agreed that it was the No. 1 national security threat to the United States. But not everyone has really digested the problem, which is significantly more complicated than the nuclear threat during the Cold War. Having lived their entire lives in the shadow of The Bomb, many Americans prefer not to ponder the ways in which today's nuclear picture is more dangerous than ever. During the Cold War, the world's security was built on a handful of interlocking truths that were dreadful to contemplate, but blessedly stable. First truth: It took a lot of money to develop a nuclear weapon. Second truth: It wasn't easy to deliver those weapons. You needed a long-range aircraft or intercontinental missile to put a nuke on a target without being vaporized yourself. Together, these facts created the third truth: We felt pretty sure that if we were going to be hit with a nuclear attack, we would know where it came from and whom to bomb back. The fact that nuclear bombs came with return addresses allowed us to deter nuclear attacks by threatening apocalyptic, glowing-molten-rubble retaliation. Every brick of that deterrent edifice is now crumbling. Technology makes all things cheaper, including nukes. North Korea, a country where peasants forage for grass like goats, has nukes. Pakistan, where impoverished youths seeking an education must turn to schools preaching radical Islamism, has nukes. Some experts might call them "crude" nuclear bombs, but remember: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit by "crude" nuclear bombs. Nor do you need a sophisticated jet or missile to deliver a bomb anymore. It turns out that suicidal zealots driving panel trucks are very cheap, very precise guidance systems. Who knew the world contained so many of them? Cheap bombs plus cheap guidance systems mean that a nuke could go off in Washington tomorrow, and we might never learn for sure where it came from. Nor, as we've seen in our hunt for bin Laden, would we necessarily know where to find the culprits. Nor, with an enemy that fetishizes death, could we be sure the culprits would fear retaliation. For all these reasons, what worked in the Cold War won't work anymore. The bomb will determine whether America's current fight against radical Islam represents a bump in the road of history or, as the venerable neoconservative Norman Podhoretz argued recently in Commentary magazine, "World War IV." Minus the bomb, in Fukuyama's words, "Islamism is much weaker than fascism or communism were. Its appeal is limited to Arab and Muslim countries. It has come to power in just three places -- Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia -- and all three are a mess. It's a protest movement of angry, marginalized people who haven't been able to integrate into the modern world." But . . . "If they take over Pakistan, say, then they have 60 nukes. And all of a sudden you have to take them pretty seriously." In other words, one of the biggest historical questions the United States now faces is impossible to answer. Ten years from now, will al Qaeda be a fading threat, or will downtown Washington be a pile of radioactive debris? Before leaving his office, I asked the professor to think back to the End of History days. He smiled ruefully. "It's definitely less pleasant today," he said. "We've got some real problems now." "YOU WANT TO HAVE SOME SOBERING THOUGHTS?" Walter Russell Mead had asked during our conversation about world chaos. Before I could answer no, he posed a mental experiment: "Ask yourself, what's the worst that terrorists could do to us in 1901?" History gives an approximate answer: In 1910, radical labor leaders bombed the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, whose publisher was a staunch anti-unionist. The building collapsed, killing about two dozen people. "Now, what's the worst they could do in 2001?" That's easy. They did it on 9/11. "Okay, what's the worst they could do on September 11, 2101?" Ugh. Advances in science and technology -- material progress in general -- are not just a force for good. The bad guys also benefit. "It's not just nuclear you have to worry about," Mead said. "It's biological, too." The same genetic discoveries that promise new cures will, no doubt, reveal new ways to kill as well. "See, technology strengthens the forces of order and law, but it also strengthens the forces of anarchy and terror. Technology is not the automatic problem solver. The notion of liberal democracy and capitalism leading to the peaceful, quiet end of history underestimates the dynamism that capitalism and liberalism actually contain. In that sense, it's Pogo who has the last word: We have met the enemy and he's us . . . It's not clear that our ability to cope with change is growing as fast as the pace of change itself." We might be getting to the nub of the matter here. What were the 1990s all about in America if not a nation intoxicated by the perfume of change and drunk on the promise of technology? We chose a free-associating futurist, Newt Gingrich, to run Congress and a president who painted word pictures of a sunny bridge to the 21st century. Business leaders chanted the mantra "change or die," while the newsstands were full of magazines offering to teach us how to make change our friend. There was a giddiness to it all. In the future, people would live forever, and the Dow would never go down. Only fuddy-duddies and Luddites and cranks saw any drawbacks to the future. But other people, including some cranks in caves, were taking a very different view of change and of the future. They were asking which changes they could prevent, which ones they could reverse, and which changes they could turn into weapons against the future, judo-style. They failed to rivet our attention because we didn't think they merited attention; they weren't with the program. But guess what? Because of those people, the "bleeding edge" of change that hip people enjoyed talking about 10 years ago has turned out to involve a lot of actual bleeding. The unsettling signs and portents of the late 1990s now strike us as the burps and tremors of a volcano that was about to blow. The decadent trivia of politics in those years -- the sex scandals, the debates over hairdos, the millionaires and billionaires seeking to buy themselves high offices, the extreme niche-marketing of issues that once led President Clinton to offer a White House initiative on child safety seats -- all these combine into a sort of barometer of our national blindness, and, as such, were truly historic -- because they represent a generalized failure of the futuristic hyperpower to see even the slightest distance into the actual future. Time and money wasted on such trivia could have been used instead to plan for the menaces sure to crop up in the wreckage of the Cold War. Those years could have been used to begin creating the new international institutions, treaties and alliances that would allow the United States to lead and stabilize the world without violating the tested principle of checks and balances. They might have been used to craft a new strategy for avoiding nuclear war that would have as much weight and urgency behind it as the old strategy had. To be fair, American leaders have tried, in various ways, to engage the future. President Clinton pulled Bosnia back from the brink of chaos. The first President Bush built a coalition to enforce the U.N. mandate to liberate Kuwait. More recently, George W. Bush offered a doctrine of preemptive action to replace the now-inadequate Cold War deterrence theory. But none of these efforts have so far proved compelling enough to mark a clear path forward. Along Big Think Boulevard, people have their doubts whether America's leaders, from either party, will be able to brace the public for what promises to be a long and often unpleasant engagement with our clouded future. There is, after all, a strong and deep vein of isolationism bred in the American character. If one day in the not-so-far-off tomorrow we find that we must choose, for example, between paying the costs of global leadership and paying the pensions of our burgeoning retiree class, isn't it likely that we will pull back -- whether or not there is an acceptable nation ready to step into the void? Again and again, I heard big thinkers draw a contrast between this era and another hugely historic period: the immediate aftermath of World War II. They noted the alacrity with which the Allies, seasoned by economic depression and catastrophic war, pivoted to comprehend and face the future. The war ended in 1945. The following year, Winston Churchill delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech warning of Soviet expansionism. The next year, 1947, George Kennan laid out the strategy of "containment" that was quickly embraced by a bipartisan consensus of Western leaders, and the massively expensive Marshall Plan was launched. By 1948, President Harry Truman had established the doctrine that would guide Western foreign policy through Democratic and Republican administrations for the next 40-plus years. And in 1949 NATO was created to implement that policy. Four years to reinvent the world. I got a lot of shrugs and groans when I asked if anyone perceives a similar vision and unity of purpose today. Mead chose to answer by quoting Churchill. "He said, You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing -- after exhausting all the other possibilities." THERE CAME A POINT IN THIS INVESTIGATION WHEN I NEEDED TO HEAR THE BRIGHT SIDE, if there was one, in meatier form than the empty campaign-season exhortations that were leading the morning newspapers. So I sought out Joshua Muravchik, whose specialty is studying the spread of democracy and freedom around the world. His little office is located at the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington's oldest and most influential think tanks, where Muravchik is a resident scholar. AEI occupies several floors of a nondescript Washington high-rise just off Big Think Boulevard -- a gray building on a gray street under gray skies the morning I visited. Muravchik is a neoconservative of the purest type, meaning that he started out some 40 years ago as a hawkish Democrat and today is a hawkish Republican. He is different from the classic conservatives of the GOP -- the "old-o-cons," as some call themselves. Neocons are more likely to eagerly seek out opportunities to change the world; old-o-cons are more likely to advise caution, on the theory that the world's biggest problem, namely human nature, is stubbornly resistant to change. Neocons in the Bush administration got much of the credit -- or blame, take your pick -- for the decision to invade Iraq. So when you meet a thinker of this sort, you might expect a fire-breather. Muravchik, however, turned out to be a genial fellow of winning humility. "You're asking big questions," he said right off the bat. "I'll probably get myself into trouble here." Then in he dove. Sure, he said, we're looking at a tricky and scary patch of history ahead. And yes, eventually, history will erode America's dominance. "Obviously, our time on top won't last forever. Everything comes to an end. But whether it lasts another 50 years or 500 years, I can't say. My guess is, this has a long way yet to go." He believes this because he sees a strong historical tide flowing in our direction. "For how many millennia was the world run by kings and warlords?" Muravchik asked. "And then the first elected democracy springs to life in 1776. It was a very imperfect democracy, a slave democracy, but still it contained this idea that people would elect a government temporarily and then a few years later elect a new one. "How many people participated? A small group: The entire political polity of the early United States was what -- a million people? From then to now is a blink of an eye in historical terms. But today, of the 192 countries in the world . . . 120 have elected governments." Granted, many of those are far from true democracies, but 89 qualify as "free" nations, Muravchik said, in which citizens elect their leaders and enjoy human rights guaranteed by the rule of law. "Not all of that was accomplished by the United States," he concluded, "but it began with the American model." This "remarkable triumph of American ideas" leaves him in the "long-run view . . . optimistic." The neocon had the same worry as the rest of the Big Think gang: that Americans, bloodied by Iraq, scorned by former allies, ill-served by squabbling leaders, will elect to pull back from a menacing world. "People could say: 'This is crazy! Bush bit off more than we could chew. We have a good life here . . . let's just batten down the hatches,' " Muravchik said. My mind drifted back to that evening in Rome, and my vision of the happy lives of the formerly dominant. "The withdrawal of American power would stir fears all over the world," Muravchik went on, puncturing my reverie. "It would create temptations, because the people who rule nations are very ambitious men. Some would act on those ambitions. The result would be lots of bloodshed, and at some point, we would be dragged back in." At that point, history suggests, things would look even worse than they do now. I came away from Big Think Boulevard having reached a few conclusions, for what they are worth. The end of history was a dream, lovely and fleeting. While we slumbered, the grass grew very tall. Now we have to cut it, and if there is an easy way to accomplish the job, no one knows what it is. And last: The very hope that such work would ever become easy -- the eternal but vain wish that history will level off into a broad and tranquil, sunlit meadow -- is a big part of the reason we're in such trouble. The most enticing dreams can be the most dangerous. David Von Drehle is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism
by R.A. Hettinga 20 Nov '04

20 Nov '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <http://www.techcentralstation.com/111904H.html> TCS: Tech Central Station - Ryan H. Sager Rethinking Libertarian Minimalism By Ryan Sager Published 11/19/2004 Libertarians need to get serious about foreign policy. That's the proposition I put forward earlier this week on my blog, Miscellaneous Objections, as part of a broader discussion of the future of libertarianism, and it has drawn a number of interesting -- and often heated -- responses. Questions of foreign policy have always been difficult for those of us who espouse a philosophy of limited government domestically, and they have only grown more difficult, though at the same time more critical, since September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, instead of reassessing their minimalist instincts when it comes to intervention abroad, many in the institutional centers of the libertarian movement -- principally at the Cato Institute and, to a lesser extent, at Reason magazine -- have remained mired in a pre-9/11 mindset. Here, I would like to address some of the key arguments people are making against both the need for a coherent (or at least vaguely cohesive) libertarian foreign policy and the premise that one doesn't exist already. "We're libertarians, we don't need to agree on anything." The most common response to any call for libertarians to rethink their stances on foreign policy is that there's no reason that libertarians should all have to agree on one approach. True enough, if libertarianism is a debating club. But that sort of thinking is a bit facile if libertarians hope to have any impact on politics and public policy. And we should want that. We are not powerless. This year, a Rasmussen survey estimated that libertarians make up roughly 10% of the electorate -- and that's just self-identified libertarians. People who share libertarian beliefs in small government and social tolerance likely make up another 10%-20% of the electorate. In a 50-50 political landscape -- or even a 51-48 landscape -- that's real power. When libertarians are so united on domestic issues (taxes, Social Security, spending, drug laws, gay marriage, etc.), is it not worth it to begin a serious debate about what libertarians believe about foreign policy and what ideas we can offer in the War on Terror? Foreign policy, with the focus right now on the war in Iraq, is the primary issue that dilutes the libertarian voting bloc. Since similar issue are likely to define the next few federal elections -- at the very least -- libertarians are going to have to reach a rough consensus of some kind. Otherwise, their votes will perpetually be split between the two parties, lessening their leverage with regard to each. Libertarianism can, of course, continue to exist in such a state. But it would enjoy less sway within its traditional home, the Republican Party, while at the same time never making a full move to the Democratic Party. That's why, for those of us who believe in a muscular foreign policy -- or at least a more-than-minimal one -- it is worth engaging our libertarian friends, to at least see how far apart we are. What will not work is the current attitude in some libertarian circles that the focus can be kept on domestic issues -- where we agree with each other and have more experience -- while the national debate passes by us. "What exactly do you mean by 'serious'?" The first response of libertarians accused of not being "serious" about foreign policy is to suspect they are really being called wimps for not supporting the war in Iraq. The question of Iraq is inextricable from this debate, but it is not central. People of good will and good judgment disagreed about the Iraq invasion before it happened, and we all have our various assessments of how it has turned out so far. The question now, however, is how are libertarians dealing with the Iraq issue as it stands today? There is a strong temptation for them to say, "Hey, it's not our problem." But that's obviously not very helpful. Nonetheless, that would be a fairly accurate description of the output of the Cato Institute foreign-policy staff since the war started. * On Dec. 13, 2003 -- after the March 2003 invasion -- Cato published a policy analysis titled, "Iraq: The Wrong War." ("We told you so!") * On Jan. 5, 2004, Cato published, "Can Iraq Be Democratic?" (Cato's answer: "No.") * This June, Cato published the book, "Exiting Iraq." The book calls for a withdrawal date from Iraq of -- wait for it -- Jan. 31, 2005. (That's a little over two months from now.) * Since the start of the war, Cato has also called for the United States to withdraw all troops from the Gulf region -- even suggesting that we reverse the long-standing policy of deploying a carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf. (Talk about a surrender. But at least terrorists have never taken Western withdrawal as a sign of weakness and an invitation to further attacks -- oh, wait.) Now, libertarians are free to get all touchy when people think of them as less-than-serious when it comes to defense issues, but there's a reason their opinions are written off almost completely in this area, and have been for some time, by anyone even in proximity to power. And anyone who thinks that libertarian opinions on these matters are not written off in the rest of the Republican Party -- well, they're either out of touch, or they're not paying attention. So, "serious," in this context, means forward-looking (not fixated on recrimination), based in a plausible reality (with at least some eye to political considerations) and with some appreciation of the nature of the terrorist threat (eschewing the appearance of retreat). By and large, libertarians, under this definition at least, have been anything but serious when it comes to foreign policy lately. "Libertarians don't have anything constructive to offer in the War on Terror." The strangest thing about this argument is that libertarians are the ones making it. Basically, some say, any war -- on terror, in Afghanistan, in Iraq -- costs money and curtails civil liberties. The job of libertarians, then, is simply to whine about spending and assist the ACLU in opposing the governmental bad guys at home. Now, don't get me wrong, libertarians do have an important roll to play in opposing the infringements on civil liberties that the Bush administration seems to think are allowed for in the Constitution somewhere (they're not, trust me, I've read it). But libertarians, limiting themselves to the sidelines like this, are really doing themselves -- and not to sound too grand, but the country -- a disservice. Libertarianism, in and of itself, does not in any way limit its adherents to a minimalist approach to foreign policy -- i.e. using the least amount of force possible to respond only to the most imminent of threats. While aggressively pursuing empire or invading any country that looks at America funny would certainly not be in accordance with libertarian or classical liberal thinking, there is otherwise quite a bit of flexibility to be had. Pro-war and anti-war libertarians don't have to get together on Iraq in retrospect. It's not going to happen, and there's not much to be gained by rearguing the last two years. But they should think about how they could congeal going forward. If anti-war libertarians are as serious about fighting the War on Terror as those who favored the war, they're going to have to come up with a lot better than the John Kerry-esque line that we need to turn our attention back to finding Osama bin Laden and fighting al Qaeda. Bin Laden is one man whose capture would be nice -- very, very nice -- but likely of little strategic import. And, well, we have been fighting al Qaeda aggressively; we could always kill more of them, but that's more of a truism than a policy proposal. So, where can libertarians agree and what can they offer? Where libertarians have a natural advantage, due to their quirky politics, is in being able to think creatively and take a step back from the partisan battles that define much of our public discourse. * Libertarians could dedicate some of their intellectual firepower to supporting intelligence reform, for instance, and the strengthening of our human assets in the Middle East and the Arab world generally. * Libertarians could delve into questions of nation-building -- all the better to help us disentangle ourselves from where we're entangled more quickly. What are the prerequisites of a free society? How can they be fostered? How can we turn over power to the people we've liberated? For instance, Cato has put out a few policy papers on how Iraq can set up a monetary system and deal with its debt; that's a start. * Libertarians could also turn their attentions to the question of how we can help the Arab world liberalize on its own. Charles Paul Freund at Reason has written extensively on the power of Western culture to bring openness and modernity to Arabs hungry for change. Libertarians were knee-deep during the Cold War in efforts to sneak Western, democratic and free-market ideas into Eastern Europe -- something for which the peoples of those countries are deeply grateful today. Why now, with the West facing the threat of Islamofascism and millions of Arabs and others suffering under it, are libertarians suddenly so afraid to look outward? Libertarians could be spearheading an effort like that during the Cold War to translate and transmit classics of liberal thought, bringing them to democratic-minded people trapped in repressive societies. They could be working to help these people get access to the Internet and to American radio and television broadcasts. They could be pushing for funding of pro-democracy movements. And they could be spearheading a push for an American free-trade initiative to bring economic opportunity to developing Arab nations. These are, admittedly, just the most rudimentary of thoughts about the way forward for libertarians. We need to see where we're divided and see where we can find common ground. What won't work, however, is a continued attachment to minimalism in terms of our foreign-policy thinking. Libertarians need more than that. Ryan Sager edits the blog Miscellaneous Objections. He can be reached at editor(a)rhsager.com. - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1308 iQA/AwUBQaAWFsPxH8jf3ohaEQIOgwCfQD37PLr+CE/OS0cvj6ZdLXSDyAMAoNld QnWvITrmgwh1O4llT1ix+5l6 =o+ze -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Long Live Free Fallujah!
by R.A. Hettinga 20 Nov '04

20 Nov '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <http://www.techcentralstation.com/111804H.html> Tech Central Station Long Live Free Fallujah! By Stephen Schwartz Published 11/19/2004 With the liberation of Fallujah and the fall of the jihadist regime in the town, it is apparent that American media intend to keep their story on message: the message being that the U.S. military operation there has failed and that Fallujans, and Iraqis in general, still hate the intervention forces. At the same time, other reports tell a more significant and eloquent story: the jihadists had set up a Taliban-style dictatorship, in which women who did not cover their entire bodies, people listening to music, and members of spiritual Sufi orders -- that is, ordinary Fallujans -- were subject to torture and execution. The Fallujans have learned the same lesson the Shias learned before them, and the Afghans before them: U.S. boots on Muslim soil may be onerous, but American military action is preferable to the unspeakably vicious criminality of Islamist extremists financed, recruited, and otherwise encouraged by Wahhabism, the state religion in Saudi Arabia. When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge almost 30 years ago, Western media reported it as the liberation of a city. Noam Chomsky hailed the forced evacuation of Cambodian towns as a noble social experiment. But many journalists were soon forced to record the truth about Khmer Rouge cruelty. It took longer for Western, and especially American media, to stop glamorizing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Stalinist guerrillas in El Salvador, and to admit that the masses of people in those countries rejected their claims to represent them. An editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where I worked, on the day after Violeta Chamorro (remember her?) won election in Managua in 1990, told me, "Nicaragua is no longer a news story for us." I asked, "is that because there will be no more violence?" He said, "No, it's because the U.S. is no longer a target." I am sure he meant "a target of our reporting." Since the Vietnam era, American journalists seem to operate by an ethic reversing the infamous slogan of antiwar demonstrators, who chant "media lies, people die." Much more accurate would be to say "people die, media lies." American media lied about Vietnam, telling us the Communists won the Tet offensive when they were defeated -- and when, by the way, the recapture of the traditional capital city of Hue disclosed that the Communists had rounded up and executed some 6,000 people. American media lied about Central America, as noted; American media still lie about Cuba, portraying the Castro regime, which has driven the average standard of living of the people drastically down, as the most progressive in Latin America. Much of American media lied about the wars in Yugoslavia, depicting Slobodan Milosevic, early on, as a reformer in the style of Gorbachev. They continued by "explaining" Serbian aggression against Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians by the alleged wholesale collaboration of the victims' great-grandparents with the Nazis. Presumably, the 1,100 children killed in the siege of Sarajevo were all members of a Bosnian Waffen SS division about which much propagandistic ink has been spilled over the years. And they repeated ad nauseam the false charge that equal atrocities were committed on all sides, when the great majority of mass murders, rapes, deportations, and expulsions were carried out by the Serbs. Where the ink of lies is spilled, the blood of victims soon follows. Media liars are sharks; they gather at the smell of blood. And in this deadly cycle of untruths, Iraq has set new standards for media mendacity. President Bush and his team are reviled because the Iraq war was described by one adviser as a "cakewalk;" well, the conquest of Baghdad was a cakewalk, remember? Then the administration was defamed because the Iraqis did not strew roses in the path of our service personnel. Terrorism suddenly became "insurgency" and "resistance," with the veteran fabricators of The New York Times -- who lied about Stalin's famine in the 1930s and on numerous occasions thereafter -- adopting the propaganda vocabulary of al-Jazeera. Strangely, throughout the Iraqi struggle, Western media have joined Western politicians in a reluctance to name the "foreign fighters" in Fallujah as what they are -- mostly Wahhabis, and mainly Saudis. Those who monitor Arab media know this to be true because when jihadists die in Fallujah, their photographs and biographies appeared in newspapers south of the Iraq-Saudi border. Western media "analysts" added to the fog of disinformation by alleging that the Shia rebels of Moqtada ul-Sadr would join the Wahhabis in Fallujah. But Islamic media around the world began to produce curious items: Moqtada ul-Sadr issued an order for the execution of any Wahhabis caught infiltrating the Shia holy cities; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in turn, supervised the beheading of an Iraqi Shia accused of spying for the Americans. Top Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a fatwa saying that anybody who obstructed the U.S.-sponsored elections in Iraq is destined for eternal fire. And the 26 leading Wahhabi radicals in Saudi Arabia published an open letter to the Iraqis calling for stiffened resistance in Fallujah and forbidding any cooperation with the U.S. forces. Little of this was reported in or digested by American media, which stuck to their story: Americans bad, terrorists in Iraq good. Most Western journalists seem to have fled Fallujah as the fighting there heated up. But news is now trickling out of the liberated city, and it is fascinating to read. The London Times on Monday, November 15, described Fallujah as "terrorized" by the jihadists, who posted notices ordering death sentences on walls and poles throughout the streets. "Mutilated bodies dumped on Fallujah's bombed out streets today painted a harrowing picture of eight months of rebel rule," it began. The characteristically arbitrary, if not insane tone of Wahhabi/Taliban "governance" was clearly in evidence: An order dated November 1 "gives vendors three days to remove nine market stalls from outside the city's library or face execution. The pretext given is that the rebels wanted to convert the building into a headquarters for the 'Mujahidin Advisory Council' through which they ran the city." Orders to conform to Wahhabi "virtue" were backed up by graphic examples: "An Arab woman, in a violet nightdress, lay in a post-mortem embrace with a male corpse in the middle of the street. Both bodies had died from bullets to the headB Many of the residents who emerged from the ruins welcomed the U.S. marines, despite the massive destruction their firepower had inflicted on their city. A man in his sixties, half-naked and his underwear stained with blood from shrapnel wounds, cursed the insurgents as he greeted the advancing marines on Saturday night. "'I wish the Americans had come here the very first day and not waited eight months,' he said, trembling. Nearby, a mosque courtyard had been used as a weapons store by the militants. Another elderly man, who did not want his name used for fear the rebels would one day return and restore their draconian rule, said he was detained by the militants last Tuesday and held for four days before being freedB 'It was horrible,' he told an Agence France-Presse reporter. 'We suffered from the bombings. Innocent people died or were wounded by the bombings. But we were happy you did what you did because Fallujah had been suffocated by the Mujahidin. Anyone considered suspicious would be slaughtered. We would see unknown corpses around the city all the time.'" The account continues, "Even residents who regard themselves as observant Muslims lived in fear because they did not share the puritan brand of Sunni Islam that the insurgents enforced. One devotee of a Sufi sect, followers of a mystical form of worship deemed heretical by the hardliners, told how he and other members of his order had lived in terror inside their homes for fear of retribution. "'It was a very hard life. We couldn't move. We could not work,' said the man sporting the white robe and skullcap prescribed by his faith. 'If they had any issue with a person, they would kill him or throw him in jail.'" There are, perhaps, some Western Islamophobic ideologues who, from the safety of their suburban homes, would love to tell these Muslim victims of terrorism that their torment was their own fault for not changing or altering their traditional Islamic faith. Some people have no shame. But sooner or later Americans will understand what Iraqis are learning: that our troops went there to free Islam, not to destroy it; that in a choice between American supervision and Taliban atrocities, the ordinary Sunnis and the mystical Sufis and the majority Shias will opt for our help. Meanwhile, the body count is encouraging: in Fallujah, 38 Americans and five Iraqi regulars lost; 1,200 terrorists killed. Long live free Fallujah! - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1308 iQA/AwUBQaAWGcPxH8jf3ohaEQLEZwCg/hZmOyHaSGuXFi8V4NjrZ/z56jMAoNIr VTeUa8N59DnMG+AbQJHAAV7t =0kV3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[osint] Group to launch terrorist database
by R.A. Hettinga 20 Nov '04

20 Nov '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 - --- begin forwarded text To: "Bruce Tefft" <btefft(a)community-research.com> Thread-Index: AcTNAwGu+++zgK7aQ5yfqJWprtY+xAAFRDpg From: "Bruce Tefft" <btefft(a)community-research.com> Mailing-List: list osint(a)yahoogroups.com; contact osint-owner(a)yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list osint(a)yahoogroups.com Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:42:54 -0500 Subject: [osint] Group to launch terrorist database Reply-To: osint(a)yahoogroups.com Wednesday, November 17, 2004 Group to launch terrorist database BY Diane Frank Published on Nov. 17, 2004 National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism "DHS plans info hub" [FCW.com, April 7, 2004] "DHS debuts info portal" [FCW.com, April 19, 2004] A new system with detailed historical information on terrorism could become the first stop for first responders and other government officials developing strategies to prevent incidents nationwide, experts said Wednesday. The Terrorism Knowledge Base is the latest Web-based resource from the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a nonprofit organization in Oklahoma City. The institute developed three solutions, which also include the Lessons Learned Information System and the Responder Knowledge Base, with funding from the Justice and Homeland Security departments. This system provides open-source, unclassified information on international and domestic terrorism, pulling information from a database of terrorist incident information maintained since 1968 by Rand, nonprofit research organization. It also incorporates links to original court documents pertaining to suspected terrorists. The institute's analysis tools collect this information and allow officials to compare and sort the information. A wizard tool takes users through a step-by-step process to find the information they want. The Rand database had not been available to the public or much of government until now, and it provides information about groups, individuals, incidents, tactics and other issues that can provide critical context when developing a prevention and response strategy, said James Ellis, research and program coordinator for the project at the institute. "A lot of people, when they're doing that kind of planning, they're always trying to think hypothetically, theoretically, what might terrorists do," Ellis said. "That's fine, but why don't we look at what they actually have done over the last several decades, and use that to be able to have real-world data to support them." Using open-source terrorist information from public and private sources is one of the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission, said Lloyd Salvetti, a former officer with the CIA and a consultant to the commission. It is an important complimentary resource for the intelligence community and first responders, he said. For first responders at the federal, state and local levels of government, the systems fill a void by providing information in a resource that even those who are not technology-savvy can use, said Suzanne Mencer, director of DHS' Office for Domestic Preparedness. "Whenever you can look at historically what has occurred in a particular area, that gives you some indication of the potential for what may occur in the future," she said. "This is an indicator, ... one tool in the toolbox for the investigator, for the academic, or anyone that is in the decision-making process." http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/1115/web-terrordata-11-17-04.asp - ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM - --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> - -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, discuss-osint(a)yahoogroups.com. - -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor bisoldi(a)intellnet.org http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint(a)yahoogroups.com Subscribe: osint-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: osint-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: osint-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ - --- end forwarded text - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1308 iQA/AwUBQZwlkcPxH8jf3ohaEQKroQCg82xMvgzE8iKa4nFBQhLz38DRfu4AoLZ5 4NuZU7TrbohtCbgKEXX3Td0E =QZG7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: bulk to order
by Carlos Alberto Teixeira 20 Nov '04

20 Nov '04

Dear Mr. Uche. Internal Medicine (Harrison) - not available Anatomy and Physiology (Keith & Moore) - not available Principles of Biology (Lehringer) - not available Please check http://www.amazon.com And, just for your information, you sent your message to totally wrong recipients. Wish you best of luck. - c.a.t. www.iis.com.br/~cat ----- Original Message ----- From: "pascal uche" <libraryoflosuniversiti(a)fastermail.com> To: <cypherpunks(a)minder.net> Cc: <bug-glibc(a)gnu.org> Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 8:07 AM Subject: bulk to order > dear sir/madam > my name is pascal uche, > i just want to know the prices of this medical book,s bellow and there > shipment cost to nigeria with DHL courier service,the book,s are at bellow > brunna and sudath test book of medical surgical nursing > intenal medicin by harison > keith more anatomy and physiology > lehninger principles of biology > and i will like u to also indecate for me more intreting medical book,s u > have on ur store, > thank u and i will be waitin for ur reply ASAP > > PASCAL UCHE > -- > _______________________________________________ > Get your free email from http://fastermail.com > > Powered by Outblaze

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[osint] NSA director could be in line for CIA deputy director post
by R.A. Hettinga 20 Nov '04

20 Nov '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 - --- begin forwarded text To: osint(a)yahoogroups.com User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 From: "gwen831" <DnNet628(a)netscape.net> Mailing-List: list osint(a)yahoogroups.com; contact osint-owner(a)yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list osint(a)yahoogroups.com Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:45:18 -0000 Subject: [osint] NSA director could be in line for CIA deputy director post Reply-To: osint(a)yahoogroups.com http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1104/111704g1.htm GovExec.com DAILY BRIEFING November 17, 2004 NSA director could be in line for CIA deputy director post By George Cahlink gcahlink(a)govexec.com The Central Intelligence Agency has been rocked in recent weeks by changes brought by new director Porter Goss, and the shake-up could continue with the appointment of a tough deputy director. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Goss was considering naming National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen Michael Hayden to the agency's No. 2 slot. John McLaughlin, who served as acting CIA director this summer, recently announced his retirement from the deputy director post. Hayden has been one of NSA's most visible, powerful and, in some quarters, controversial directors, as he has fought to reorganize the signals intelligence agency. If he were tapped for the CIA slot, he'd likely bring the same aggressive management style to the beleaguered agency. Goss served as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence before being nominated for the CIA job in August. In that position, he conducted oversight of the NSA and worked closely with Hayden to increase the agency's budget. Hayden, who is NSA's longest-serving director, has been relentless in pushing change at the intelligence agency since taking over in March 1999. He's asked longtime agency workers to retire to make way for new hires, outsourced information technology work, expanded the pool of contractors, raised the agency's profile, and consolidated leadership ranks. Few would argue that changes were not needed at an agency with a veteran workforce trained and computer systems designed for the Cold War. James Bamford, author of two best-selling books on the NSA, credits Hayden with continuing to let veteran workers go even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The people they had were people they did not need," said Bamford, who noted that the agency had a surplus of Soviet analysts and linguists but too few Middle East experts. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Boyd, now head of Business Executives for National Security, who served with Hayden, said, "He sold needed reforms to those with oversight and resources. He's presided over a transition there from an institution geared toward the Cold War into one for a new world with different technology." Some NSA veterans however, have protested Hayden's moves. "Coming to a place and telling a large group of well-qualified professionals they need be cleaned out is not the way to change an agency," said Michael Lavin, who worked at the agency from 1947 to 1993, first as an analyst and later as a policymaker and spokesman. NSA veterans with obsolete skills should be retrained to prevent the loss of corporate memory, Lavin argued. Hayden earned praise for his efforts to expand the NSA's contracting base and upgrade the agency's aging computer systems. In 2001, the agency inked a $2 billion outsourcing deal with an industry team, led by Computer Sciences Corp., to upgrade and run the agency's computer operations over the next 10 years. Congress, however, has not been happy with how the agency tracked its spending. In 2004, the NSA lost its independent spending authority, and its budget is now managed by Defense undersecretaries. Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert with the Federation of American Scientists, noted that Hayden is one of the few intelligence managers to escape blame for Sept. 11. "Everyone has been down on the CIA," he said, "but NSA came through almost completely unscathed." - ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything. http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM - --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> - -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, discuss-osint(a)yahoogroups.com. - -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor bisoldi(a)intellnet.org http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint(a)yahoogroups.com Subscribe: osint-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: osint-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: osint-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ - --- end forwarded text - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1308 iQA/AwUBQZ9PcMPxH8jf3ohaEQK8BACgm/szNVus6K4hMs2QjovuLi8gAVIAoLPk ej+MqbixbWbBSP0oa9WxXFQc =hesR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Stephen Moore: A Tax-Ban No Brainer
by R.A. Hettinga 19 Nov '04

19 Nov '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/moore/moore20041119…> The National Review November 19, 2004, 11:21 a.m. A Tax-Ban No Brainer Congress should keep the Internet-tax ban in place. Today the House of Representatives will vote to extend the ban on Internet taxation through November of 2007. Keeping cyberspace tax free has long been a goal of anti-big-government and pro-technology forces in Washington. This bill, led by Chris Cox in the House and John McCain and George Allen in the Senate has significant opposition from tax-eater lobbying groups on Capitol Hill, especially state and local governments who hope that the World Wide Web will be their next great cash cow. The Senate enacted the bill earlier this week; the House should follow suit, and keep the Internet-tax ban in place. President Bush strongly supports this legislation. So, if the House does its job, next week this pro-taxpayer legislation will be the law of the land. The new law will mean no taxes on Internet access, unless you use dial up and pay the telephone tax (which should be eliminated as well). It also means no tax on Internet sales. In other words, the Internet will be a genuine tax-, regulation-, and tariff-free zone. A tax on the Internet would do real damage to the U.S. economy. Economic growth in recent years has been propelled by the technology sector, which has made a big-time rally after the implosion of 2000-01, when the NASDAQ fell from 5,000 to 1,500. The argument against the ban on the Internet tax is that states and localities need the money and that Internet purchases are eroding the tax base of city hall and state governments. This is preposterous. The states and localities are now awash in cash. For example, my home state of Virginia has a $1 billion state-tax surplus. The same rosy fiscal picture is true in local governments across the nation. A new Cato Institute study finds that states and localities have already doubled their tax collections over the past twelve years, even without tapping into the new frontier of the digital economy. Governors and mayors should now be aggressively cutting taxes, not finding sneaky new ways to add to their coffers. The policy that Congress is about to adopt is simply a continuation of the federal law that has been in place for the past six years. Since 1998 Congress has wisely declared the Internet a tax-free zone by establishing a moratorium on Internet-access charges. An "access charge" is essentially a toll on using the Internet. The idea was to prevent the government from causing infant crib death of this new consumer technology. After all, as Justice John Marshall once observed, "the power to tax is the power to destroy." By all accounts, the Internet-tax moratorium has been a resounding success. In 1985, about one in six American families and businesses had access to the web; now, three in four do. Moreover, e-commerce is the new frontier of business enterprise. International Data Corporation recently estimated that the Internet economy in 2003 reached $2.8 trillion. In the U.S. alone, e-commerce accounted for $500 billion in business activity and employed 2.3 million Americans. The Internet sector of the economy is growing at 12 percent per year compounded. E-commerce, in short, is to the early 21st century what the steam engine was to early-20th-century economic development. Meanwhile, the telecommunications sector of the economy now stands ready to invest billions to upgrade the nation's communications networks and make high-speed (or broadband) Internet access available to all American homes and small businesses, as it is for large corporations today. All of this is to say, if ever a public policy has worked precisely as hoped, it is the Internet-tax moratorium. Moreover, if the Republicans in Congress really wants to keep tax relief a centerpiece of their domestic agenda, keeping the IRS and state tax collectors away from the Internet is critical. By some estimates, a tax on Internet access could cost families up to $150 a year. If purchases on the Internet were also taxed, these costs could double or triple. There is only one problem with the bill that Congress will vote on today. It does not make the Internet a tax-free zone permanently. Also, it seems that if we want a regime of "tax fairness" and a level playing field, all forms of Internet access, whether dial-up or wireless, should be immunized from state, local, and federal taxation. While Sen. McCain's compromise does not meet all of these criteria, it brings us a lot closer to the ultimate goal. Congress today has a chance to ring the bell for liberty. The opportunity now exists to create, through the growth of the Internet economy, a massive global free-trade zone. Opponents of the Internet-tax ban argue that this bill will only put added pressure on all levels of government to lower taxes on "bricks and mortar" businesses. That's absolutely true - but I suspect most Americans would regard this as an added benefit of the Internet-tax ban. - Stephen Moore is president of the Club for Growth. - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1308 iQA/AwUBQZ6i/8PxH8jf3ohaEQJyOwCeKeNAAz7QCyiEng3wz8tLjuKQmZcAoLfG punAsHbRo/bldh6SnM2Qe0Hw =j/kW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Home Office stalls on weapons scanner health risks
by R.A. Hettinga 19 Nov '04

19 Nov '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/blunkett_xray_blank/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register B; Internet and Law B; Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs B; Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/blunkett_xray_blank/ Home Office stalls on weapons scanner health risks By John Lettice (john.lettice at theregister.co.uk) Published Thursday 18th November 2004 18:00 GMT Are your children being irradiated? Are you being irradiated? The UK Home Office seems unconcerned by the question, despite being responsible for at least one of the government organisations wielding the devices that might be doing the irradiating. Weapons scanners that use x-rays are now being tested by the Metropolitan Police and at Heathrow airport, and while the effect of a single scan will probably be negligible, the actual health risk will depend on the nature of the particular deployments, and on the individuals being scanned. So they should therefore not be deployed casually, without careful prior consideration, on the basis that they're 'harmless'. Earlier this week Norman Baker MP asked the Home Office the following parliamentary question: "To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what air kerma rate has been used to assess radiation doses associated with the use of the Rapiscan Secure 1000 apparatus." David Blunkett's (yes, him again, sorry about that) response was: "The information sought is not in the public domain." Which is not much of a response from a department deploying at least two Rapiscan 1000s, and with a unit offering them to police forces throughout the country. (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crimpol/police/scidev/news/items/xray2907.html) Nor is the answer true. (Air kerma, by the way, refers to the amount of radiation produced by a device.) Rapiscan 1000s are indeed mostly harmless, probably, depending. Technology of this sort has been used for baggage scanning for some time now, but more recently people-sized versions have been undergoing testing in the US and elsewhere in the world, and x-ray scanning is also being used in other, mobile and less controlled environments (e.g. scanning containers and trucks for stowaways). You can find some more about that here. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/heathrow_scanner_pilot/) One of the public domain sources of information about the effects of x-ray scanners, including the Rapiscan 1000, that David Blunkett says don't exist can be found here. (http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/03/briefing/3987b1_pres-report.pdf) A presidential report by the US National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements carried out for the Food and Drug Administration - very obscure, not. The document's very existence provides us with a small case study of how things work in government on either side of the pond. Both the US and the UK are proposing and using x-ray scanners on people, but in the US this involves a diligent process of measurement for potential hazards, while in the UK they just get haphazardly deployed. Both governments still repress us, but the US one is somehow more professional about how it starts off, while the UK one regularly gives the appearance of not being able to find its arse with both hands. Back, however, to the document, the measurements and the risks. The dose of radiation delivered by a scan, which the NCRP team measured in the range 0.04 B5Sv - 0.05 B5Sv, is not terrifying by the radiation standards the US uses. Negligible Individual Dose (NID) over a year is defined as 10 B5Sv, which is the effective dose deemed acceptable for a single source, while ANSI approved a standard in 2002 defining an acceptable dose per scan as being 0.1 B5Sv or less. This would mean that a security scanner would have to deliver 2,500 scans of an individual annually at 0.1 B5Sv per scan in order to reach the US administrative control level of 0.25 mSv. For an airport security scanner, even operating at a rather higher level, you'd probably have to be living in it to achieve that kind of level. But it's not necessarily going to be the only source of radiation you're exposed to, nor will all of these sources necessarily operate at such low levels. Cumulative dosage will be higher from scanners you have to pass several times every day (say, a weapons scanner at a school), and you'll be exposed at the hospital, at the dentist, and maybe there will be high exposures you don't know about. The NCRP speaks of proposals for concealed scanners, and mobile scannners that could check vehicles (which we covered in our earlier piece), while just today UK Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke was proposing to give schools powers to search pupils for weapons, and to "have arrangements with their local police forces to undertake snap searches if they thought knives were on school premises". What kind of equipment did you have in mind they bring with them when they do that, Charles? - From our reading of the FDA report, it seems unlikely that the level of exposure via the Rapiscan at Heathrow would present a health risk to most people, nor is the Met's happy deployment of x-ray machines for area stop and searches an obvious hazard to anything other than liberty and race relations. However in both cases what goes for most people may not go for particular individuals, so it's extremely important that the operators make the position vis a vis radiation absolutely clear, and that subjects have an absolute right to decline the kind offer of an x-ray scan. The consequences of more widespread deployments are far more difficult to quantify. If fixed scanners became sufficiently common for it to be possible to be exposed several times a day, then the risks would climb, and it would be less possible (it's not exactly easy at the moment) for people too know what their cumulative dose was. Concealed scanners would make that impossible, and high dose vehicle and/or concealed scanners would throw the sums out entirely. Reported doses from a cargo scan test in 2001, for example, ranged from 0.1 B5Sv to 100 B5Sv, depending on positioning in the compartment. The US annual dose limit set by the NCRP is 1 mSv, excluding exposures from natural background and medical care, while the suggested exposure from a single site is 25 per cent of annual dose, or no single source under one control delivering more than 0.25 mSv annually. It recommends the latter being the one set for security screening such as airport scanners, and that it cover multiple checkpoints at a given (say) airport. We commend the report as essential reading for Home Secretaries who might need to bone up on the potential risks associated with equipment their departments are deploying. They could of course just carry on giving MPs dumb and obstructive answers, but it's not clever, and in some cases it's the sort of thing people might think of as negligent. Ask a focus group, David. B. - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1308 iQA/AwUBQZ6K6cPxH8jf3ohaEQIDBwCgqyVMif7+rhxP4RaqseORKnCxNZgAniAJ WvJrvj9VdVetp2xD1IOMRmRJ =L1az -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Drivers License Security Hole
by John Young 19 Nov '04

19 Nov '04

The American Assocation of Motor Vehicle Administrators has prepared a series of studies on security of drivers license data, and not least sharing it with law enforcement. Access to some of the docs are supposed to be limited to members but R. notes that the security is illusory, so the docs can be accessed until the hole is closed (see the last appendix for LE access to data): ----- http://www.aamva.org/IDSecurity/index.asp AAMVA determined the need for a comprehensive framework of minimum requirements with enhanced recommendations to improve the quality, reliability, uniformity and security of the driver licensing process in North America. As a result, AAMVA compiled and produced its DL/ID Security Framework: A Package of Decisions Based on Best Practices, Standards, Specifications and Recommendations to Enhance Drivers License Administration and Identification Security. This document is currently available to the AAMVA membership only. Members will be required to present their AAMVA user ID and password to access the framework. -----

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A Less-Visible Role For the Fed Chief: Freeing Up Markets
by R.A. Hettinga 19 Nov '04

19 Nov '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This is a really good article, with a lot of useful financial history. Also note the following: >"It is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for >honest dealings and a quality product," he wrote in Ms. Rand's >"Objectivist" newsletter in 1963. Regulation, he said, undermines this >"superlatively moral system" by replacing competition for reputation with >force. "At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which >characterizes all regulation lies a gun." Cheers, RAH - ------- <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110081981338978661,00.html> The Wall Street Journal November 19, 2004 PAGE ONE The Deregulator A Less-Visible Role For the Fed Chief: Freeing Up Markets Greenspan Blessed Mergers And Blocked Regulation; Using the 1800s as a Model Is Modern Finance Too Risky? By GREG IP Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL November 19, 2004; Page A1 WASHINGTON -- As Alan Greenspan approaches his last year as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he continues to draw praise for his most visible job: steering the economy by raising and lowering interest rates. But behind the scenes, the 78-year-old economist has had a big impact on American life in an entirely different role: pushing the government to stay out of financial markets. Consider what happened in 2002, when Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein proposed new rules to govern how traders buy and sell contracts to deliver energy through financial instruments known as derivatives. Her move came after Enron Corp. and others helped send electricity prices soaring in California by manipulating that market. When she telephoned Mr. Greenspan for support, he declined, telling her the proposal threatened the multitrillion dollar derivatives industry, which he considers an important stabilizing force that diffuses financial risk. Mr. Greenspan persuaded other Bush-appointed regulators to join him in a critical letter that Sen. Feinstein's opponents wielded as a weapon on the Senate floor. The bill was narrowly defeated on a procedural motion. Sen. Feinstein reintroduced the proposal a number of times and at least twice Mr. Greenspan rallied fellow regulators to oppose it. "I believe it would have passed without his opposition," Sen. Feinstein says. In addition to thwarting the post-Enron impulse to regulate derivatives, Mr. Greenspan has helped remove Depression-era barriers between the banking and securities industries and has blessed mergers creating banking behemoths. He has implored regulators to keep their hands off hedge funds and other markets that are replacing banks as financiers of American business. Although the Fed is a major bank regulator, it has become a less intrusive one under Mr. Greenspan. Behind this advocacy is a passionate belief that freely functioning financial markets are better than government regulators -- and even central bankers -- at protecting the economy from booms and busts. Mr. Greenspan once read that a B-2 "stealth" bomber would crash without a computer that continuously adjusted its wing flaps. In conversations, he compares markets to the B-2's computer: They continuously redistribute risk so the economy can absorb shocks. The result is a paradoxical position for one of the world's most influential civil servants: He would prefer that the state play virtually no role in the economy. His ideal is the pre-Civil War period when the federal government was so invisible it didn't even issue a national currency. In reality, Mr. Greenspan sometimes tailors that radical position to suit the demands of his job -- such as dealing with the near-collapse of hedge fund Long Term Capital Management -- as well as the political requirements of surviving in Washington. But, on balance, his views have been powerfully influential in deregulating markets at a crucial time in their history when they are increasing in size, complexity, and the number of ways in which they interact with everyday people. With Mr. Greenspan's term set to end in January 2006, an important question is whether his successor will carry on this less visible role. Critics say his hands-off regulatory philosophy has made the Fed a less effective watchdog, citing complicity by Fed-regulated banks in recent corporate scandals. His intellectual opponents also argue that some regulation is necessary to moderate the risks inherent in modern finance. Mr. Greenspan first articulated many of his views in the 1960s when he was part of the intellectual circle surrounding libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. If businesses were solely responsible for their own reputation, he said at the time, they would do whatever necessary to maintain it or ultimately fail. "It is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product," he wrote in Ms. Rand's "Objectivist" newsletter in 1963. Regulation, he said, undermines this "superlatively moral system" by replacing competition for reputation with force. "At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun." His language has moderated but he still admires the laissez-faire capitalism of the mid-19th century. At that time, competition, not regulation, kept financial markets honest. Banks, for example, issued their own currency whose value fluctuated with the issuer's reputation. Mr. Greenspan believes the 19th-century economy was inherently stable because of the gold standard, a system in which currencies were exchanged for fixed amounts of gold both within the U.S. and across international borders. Countries that borrowed too much would hear from anxious foreign lenders demanding to be repaid in gold. To prevent that, banks would raise interest rates, encouraging lenders to stay put. Borrowing, which was now more expensive, would abate. In Mr. Greenspan's view, this self-correcting economy was undermined by cumulative government intrusions. The first was the creation of a national currency and national banking system in 1863 whose flaws, he believes, contributed to periodic financial panics in following decades. In 1913, the very organization in which he made his name, the Federal Reserve, was created. As the lender of last resort, the Fed could prop up failing banks, reducing the incentive for bankers and businessmen to act prudently. Market discipline weakened further when the government created federal deposit insurance in 1933, making depositors less concerned about the reputation of the bank to which they entrusted their money. That was compounded when the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1933. "A kind of vicious circle of government replacement of market oversight [was] clearly set in motion," he said in a May 2001 speech. Mr. Greenspan has a complicated way of reconciling his job with his economic theories. In an ideal world, he believes, there would be a gold standard and no central bank. But the end of the gold standard and creation of the Fed weakened market discipline. That created a need for government intervention the Fed chairman must do his best to fulfill. Few things are more important to Mr. Greenspan than keeping the government's hands off financial markets. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, among others, used to argue to Mr. Greenspan that governments should sometimes use regulation to moderate risks that stem from the complexity of modern markets. Mr. Greenspan was willing to tolerate occasional hiccups to encourage innovations that allow markets to operate more efficiently. MARKET FORCES Key moments in the history of intervention in U.S. financial markets. 1791: Alexander Hamilton starts the first Bank of the United States. Dissolved in 1811. 1816: Second Bank of the United States chartered. Charter lapses in 1836 1863: National Bank Act, national currency issued 1907: Financial panic ends with intervention organized by J. Pierpont Morgan 1913: Federal Reserve formed 1933: Federal deposit insurance introduced 1933: Glass-Steagall Act bars combinations of banks, securities companies 1972: Financial derivatives first traded in Chicago futures markets 1978: States begin to allow interstate banking 1980: Monetary Control Act deregulates interest rates 1981: Over-the-counter derivatives are born with first currency "swap" 1987: Fed gives banks permission to sell bonds 1987: Fed slashes interest rates after stock- market crash 1995: Treasury, Fed bail out Mexico 1996: Fed significantly increases banks' ability to deal in securities 1998: Fed arranges rescue of Long Term Capital Management 1999: Glass-Steagall fully repealed 2000: Deregulated status of most derivatives entrenched in law 2001: Enron collapses 2004: SEC votes to register hedge funds Source: WSJ research To those in the Rubin Treasury, this clash became known as the "wooden tennis rackets" debate. Mr. Rubin's notion, that governments should constrain markets, "was like saying tennis was a better game with wooden rackets," says Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University and previously Mr. Rubin's deputy and successor at the Treasury. Mr. Greenspan would prefer rackets made with advanced alloys that delivered better shots even if they were occasionally wild. Mr. Greenspan has long disparaged government-imposed limits on mergers. He came to the Fed an avowed opponent of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that established barriers between the banking and securities industries. The act was inspired by the belief that bank stock speculation helped cause the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression; subsequent study casts doubt on this. The act split J.P. Morgan & Co. into two firms whose successors today are J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley. Mr. Greenspan, as a director of J.P. Morgan in 1984, played a part in publishing that bank's anti-Glass-Steagall treatise, according to a book by historian Ron Chernow. The Fed took its first step toward undoing Glass-Steagall in 1987, a few months before Mr. Greenspan's arrival. It further loosened restrictions in 1996. Two years later it precipitated the act's demise by approving the merger of Citicorp, parent of the U.S.'s second-largest bank, and Travelers Group, a major insurance underwriter and securities dealer. The Fed's approval was conditional on Citigroup Inc. -- the merged company - -- later divesting businesses not permitted. But Citigroup correctly bet the law would change. The merger prodded Congress to repeal the remaining barriers a year later. "Greenspan pushed the envelope," says Kenneth Guenther, retired president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a small-bank trade group that at the time unsuccessfully sued the Fed for pre-empting Congress. Though Mr. Greenspan usually defers to his staff about regulatory matters, their recommendations have tended to track his laissez-faire approach. In his tenure, the Fed has approved the merger of every bank-holding company that has come before it except two. By contrast, his predecessor, Paul Volcker, scotched 10 mergers in an eight-year term. The U.S. now has three banking conglomerates with assets exceeding $1 trillion -- Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America Corp. Critics say these mergers concentrate financial risk too heavily in a few institutions. Mr. Greenspan argues that deregulation also produced a more stable financial system. His favorite example comes from the telecommunications sector. Telecom companies borrowed almost $1 trillion between 1998 and 2001, but while many failed, no major financial institution collapsed as a result. Stock and bondholders lost money but banks that arranged the financing used innovative methods to spread their risk. Some sold pieces of loans to other institutions, underwrote bond offerings or bought hedges in the new market for "credit derivatives," insurance policies against companies defaulting. "Even the largest corporate defaults in history -- WorldCom and Enron -- and the largest sovereign default in history -- Argentina -- have not significantly impaired the capital of any major U.S. financial intermediary," Mr. Greenspan said in a speech last month. Banks in the 1980s and early 1990s, by contrast, were crippled by bad loans to developing countries and real-estate developers. The resulting credit crunch hobbled the economy. When markets give way to crisis, Mr. Greenspan has reluctantly given way to government intervention. In December 1997, the Treasury wanted banks to roll over loans to South Korea to avert a global financial panic. Mr. Greenspan went along but told Treasury officials he wouldn't call the commercial banks himself, according to people involved in the effort. He argued it was inappropriate for a regulator to influence banks' lending practices. Instead, Mr. Rubin and then-New York Fed President William McDonough made the calls. Mr. McDonough says in an interview that as a former commercial banker, he could convey to the banks that restructuring the loans was in their own best interest. A bigger test came several months later, when the near-failure of hedge fund Long Term Capital Management threatened to halt trading in U.S. debt markets. Again, Mr. McDonough took the lead and brokered a buyout of the fund by its private creditors, including several Fed-regulated banks. While Mr. McDonough says he kept Mr. Greenspan informed, he didn't ask the Fed chief for approval. Testifying to Congress, Mr. Greenspan called the rescue one of "those rare occasions when otherwise highly effective markets seize up and ad hoc responses were required." The LTCM debacle was an embarrassment to the Fed -- which regulated some of the hedge fund's largest creditors -- but Mr. Greenspan didn't think it suggested the Fed needed to significantly beef up its oversight operations. "If we had to meet the standards that people think exist, we would have five times as many examiners," he said at a Fed meeting that September, transcripts show. "We would examine them to death, and they would not have any breathing room." The Fed didn't take public disciplinary action against LTCM's lenders. Congress was more worried about the economic risks inherent in hedge funds than the adequacy of the Fed's regulatory operations. In 1998, it asked the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, which included Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin, to suggest how -- if at all -- to regulate hedge funds and "leverage," large financial bets made with borrowed money. Mr. Rubin was open to increased regulatory oversight, say people involved in the process. Mr. Greenspan was not. He asked why government officials earning $80,000 or $100,000 would be any more likely to spot overly risky hedge-fund activities than the Wall Street experts, earning millions of dollars, who ran them, recalls Gary Gensler, the Treasury official who coordinated the group. Mr. Greenspan refused to endorse the most intrusive of the group's recommendations: expanding oversight over brokerage firms' unregulated affiliates. Mr. Greenspan has also been skeptical of the value of the Fed's many consumer-protection rules. The only vote he has lost on the seven-member Federal Reserve Board was a 4-3 decision in 1995 that required banks to change the way they calculate savings-deposit rates. Some on the board felt the way the rate was calculated was misleading to the public. Weeks later, after banks protested the cost of the change, the board voted unanimously to suspend its action and the proposal didn't take effect. In some ways, Mr. Greenspan has become less hostile to these kinds of rules. For example, he now sees some benefit to Fed-enforced laws that compel banks to do business in poor communities. Although banks have been implicated in recent financial scandals, the Fed has often been slow to take decisive action. Critics note that it was private litigants and Senate investigators who first brought to light evidence that Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase helped Enron hide its true financial state from shareholders. Both were eventually charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission and reached settlements with the SEC, Manhattan District Attorney and the Fed. Neither admitted or denied wrongdoing. The Fed "has changed its approach from being a cop on the beat to being a consultant at the elbow of major financial institutions," charges Tom Schlesinger, director of the Financial Markets Center, an often-critical Fed watchdog. The Fed's defenders say its main job is to ensure the soundness of the financial system, not to sniff out fraud. On that score, they note that the banking system has remained strong amid recent economic upheavals. The Fed has also revamped its supervisory procedures and has levied three of its four largest-ever penalties in the last year. Last year, SEC Chairman William Donaldson put hedge-fund regulation at the top of the regulatory agenda by proposing hedge funds register with his agency. The SEC wanted routine access to information and the right to examine hedge funds' operations to search for fraudulent behavior. Mr. Greenspan, who worked with Mr. Donaldson on Wall Street in the 1960s, became one of his leading opponents. He told senators last July that hedge funds provide essential market liquidity, meaning they are often willing to buy when everyone else is selling. Registration would scare them away, "to the significant detriment of our economy," while doing little to stop fraud, he said. Mr. Greenspan's opposition was manna to Mr. Donaldson's opponents. "With due deference to Chairman Greenspan and the tough job that he has, I cannot think of a time when he has been so clear," Paul Atkins, one of Mr. Donaldson's four fellow SEC commissioners, declared during the agency's debate last month. In an interview, Mr. Donaldson suggests he and Mr. Greenspan simply have different priorities. "I think it's a legitimate argument that they do provide liquidity," he says. But "how much fraud are you willing to tolerate for liquidity? And if you asked me that, I'd say, zero." On this rare occasion, Mr. Greenspan's side lost. The SEC voted 3-2 for Mr. Donaldson's proposal. But business groups hope to overturn the SEC's move and are mulling an appeal to Mr. Greenspan for written support. - -- - ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 1308 iQA/AwUBQZ4rhsPxH8jf3ohaEQIbfQCg7uv/AxxC8AtPNedy8fESfCrnVV0AoIuP XmjUFlNFC1PxGDrD44mhuuuw =3b77 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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