David Albright, the nuclear physicist who heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, advocates a diplomatic solution to this conflict, but he, too, firmly believes that any deal must prohibit Iranian enrichment. "I don't generally agree with the Bush people," Albright said in a phone conversation today, "but I agree with them here."

Ultimately, the hope—the whole point of this sort of arms control—is that, once the rewards start flowing (diplomatic recognition, expanded trade and investment, and so forth), the Iranians will come to value the benefits of forgoing nukes and eventually give up the dream in exchange for a place in the community of nations.

The secret state
Cover story
Patrick Seale

One nation, American hawks believe, holds the key to subduing and pacifying a Middle East that is giving Washington a severe headache. But it is not Iraq, Iran, or even the increasingly turbulent Palestinian territories. It is a prickly, defiant and repressive state apparently in the grip of its security services: Syria.

Syria is the linchpin in the battle raging for the region. On one side of the conflict stand the United States and its Israeli ally. They bully their opponents, and are swift to resort to threats or brute force. Ranged against them is a motley anti-western alliance - the Tehran/Damascus/south Lebanon axis - with an extension to Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that, having won the Palestinian elections in January and formed a government, is now under international siege.

Four men represent this alliance: President Mahmoud Ahmad-inejad of Iran, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, head of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, and the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. None of these men is a saint and all have resorted to questionable tactics, but together they form the main resistance to US-Israeli hegemony over the region.

Big issues are at stake: whether the US will remain the unchallenged power in the Middle East, whether Israel can suppress the Palestinians by force and, most importantly, whether small powers can hold their own against a bellicose superpower.

Amid this chaos, Israeli and American strategists see Syria as the region's weak link. Bring the country to heel, runs their argument, and the whole Tehran/Damascus/Hezbollah/Hamas axis would collapse. An isolated Iran could then be forced to shut down its nuclear programme; Iraqi insurgents would be deprived of jihadi reinforcements; Hezbollah could be disarmed and Lebanon brought into the US-Israeli orbit; and Israel could make short work of Hamas.

Who Is Responsible? An Interview with

Fred Halliday*

with Danny Postel

It starts with Afghanistan. To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left, and to the history of the world, since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century

It seems to me that certain interventions in defense of rights are justified—Bosnia and Kosovo, to take two obvious examples, or the defense of the Kurds in Iraq in 1990-1991. The New Left Review and others on that wing of the Left attack not just these particular interventions, but the very concept of rights—and are consistent in doing so. My fundamental disagreement with the Review, and with Tariq, is really about this.

Having been in Iran, having seen the consolidation of Khomeini’s authoritarian regime, having stood on the streets of Tehran and seen 100,000 people shout “Death to liberalism!”, having been in the office of Iran’s main liberal paper when the Islamists came to close it down —a crucial moment in the consolidation of the Iranian regime—I was absolutely opposed to any support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which I regarded as a reactionary Islamist project. I had plenty of criticisms of the Afghan Communist regime, but I thought they should remain and reform, and there should be a negotiated withdrawal of the Soviet forces.

So the mere fact that imperialism was involved in the Kosovo intervention is not a reason to condemn the intervention—you have to have other criteria. It’s not that one is in favor of imperialism, but we have to problematize the issue of imperialism. So my disagreements with the New Left Review or with much of the U.S. left didn’t arise suddenly. And I haven’t flaked off to the right. They go back to a history of disagreements, and also to certain important theoretical disagreements.

I feel much happier with a copy of the U.N.D.P. Human Development Report than with the New Left Review. Or with the very courageous three annual editions of the Arab Human Development Report, which itemize in a statistical, perhaps over-quantified way, things like women’s access to education, women’s access to politics, treatment of minorities, freedom of speech, fair elections, and the like.

Danny Postel: “Bourgeois” liberties.

Fred Halliday: No, I don’t accept that category.

Danny Postel: I mean that in scare quotes: the crude, ultra-left way of dismissing such rights.

Let us be clear about it: the U.S. role in international medical and family-planning policy, its opposition to contraception and abortion, and its mishandling of the issue of AIDS—it’s criminally irresponsible and will lead to the deaths of many millions of people. George Bush should be indicted for mass murder because of his policies on AIDS. As should the Pope—both this one and the previous ones.

So I’m not enamored of the U.S. policies in principle. Since the ’60s I have worked on various aspects of the socialist and anti-imperialist project. I’ve lived and worked in a number of Third-World revolutionary countries. I did my thesis on the only Arab Communist state, South Yemen. I’ve lived in Cuba. I’ve been in Iraq. I’ve been in Afghanistan. I’ve been in Syria. I’ve been in Libya. I was in Nasser’s Egypt and Ben Bella’s Algeria. I’ve had quite a consistent interest in these states, and not just when things are going well, but also when things are going badly. I think there’s a lot to reflect on when it comes to solidarity with the Third World. I think solidarity is necessary. It’s an obligation. I don’t think it’s a deflection from domestic tasks. But I think that solidarity should be complex, not simple. One should not accept at face value what people who are struggling say: they may well be committing atrocities of their own. At the extreme end you have the PKK, the Shining Path, the Khmer Rouge and so forth. They may often be involved in inter-ethnic conflicts where they use a progressivist language to conceal what is in fact chauvinism towards another community. It goes for both Israelis and Palestinians. It goes for the IRA in Northern Ireland. It goes for the Armenians and the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh, and other cases. So solidarity should not be taken at face value. Solidarity should be critical of what people say and do, while also being guided by the longer-term evaluation of people’s interests and rights and material social progress. It also involves knowing about these countries. In so much “solidarity” work these days, people don't want to know what's actually going on in Third World countries.

There are all sorts of intellectuals who criticize the New York Times and the London newspapers and the BBC for stereotyping and essentializing the Third World, which is correct to do. But why don’t they ever critique the Third World press? Why don’t they ever critique the chauvinism of the Islamists and the politicians in the Middle East? Why do they turn Al Jazeera—which I’ve appeared on —into some new saintly voice, when actually it’s a highly manipulative instrument of an authoritarian state? Let’s try and universalize our own allegedly universal principles. And this seems to me a place to start.

Fred Halliday: I respond to it by saying that it’s a very parochial argument, and inconsistent with internationalism. If women are being denied their rights in Afghanistan, if innocent civilians are being killed by both the Israelis and the Palestinians, don’t we, as citizens of the world, as citizens of countries which are signatories to the U.N. conventions, as people with an international moral conscience—don’t we have a responsibility both to speak and to act? Morality does not stop at the frontier’s edge. These principles are universal. It doesn’t mean that we do it without thinking, without listening. This is a curious contradiction: solidarity can become very parochial when it’s only about one side rather than the even-handed application of principles to all sides.

Look at Iran. Iran’s constitution enjoins it to give support to struggling Muslims around the world. And it does support the Palestinians. But in Chechnya it supports the Russians. In Nagorno-Karabakh it supports the Armenians, even though the Azeris are Shiites. In Kashmir it supports the Indians. In Sinjiang, it supports China. So Iran does not allow purely cultural or religious solidarity to determine its foreign policy. The same goes for the other states, for whom trade and military advantage, and inter-ethnic rivalry with each other, are just as important.

Huntington’s thesis, it should be noted, is very popular with Islamists, as it is with Hindu nationalists and radical Shintoists in Japan.

A colleague of mine put it very well the other day. He’s a young British guy who studies China. He said, “What’s all this stuff about clash of civilizations? It’s very simple. You go to the library. You read the books. You read the history. You learn the language. You go and live in those countries. And on the basis of that, you understand them.” That’s what we should be doing, and getting away from all this meta-stuff. It doesn’t get us anywhere.

Maxime Rodinson was a French Marxist Orientalist of working-class, Jewish origin. Among other things, he studied ancient Semitic languages, and for many years, taught ancient Semitic languages and archeology in Paris. He wrote a number of major books. One was a biography of the prophet Mohammed, a very astute interpretation. It was used throughout the Arab world as a textbook for many years, until 1999, when in Cairo, the Islamists objected to it being used as a textbook. The President of Egypt himself intervened to call on the university to ban it, on the grounds that it was insulting to Islam, because it talked about trade routes, and it talked about the influence of Christianity and Judaism on Islam, because it applies psychoanalysis to the Prophet, and so forth. The second major book he wrote was called Islam and Capitalism, which is an engagement with Max Weber’s argument that there was something wrong with Islam which had prevented it from being capitalist and believing in economic development and profit. Rodinson showed that this was absolutely incorrect in terms of the ways in which Muslim economies had developed in the Arab world, in Iran, in South Asia, over centuries, but also that doctrinally there was absolutely no objection, including no objection to the taking of interest.

You have to remember that before 1967, certainly in Europe, virtually everyone on the Left was pro-Israel. Then there was a kind of flip after 1967: with the Cold War and so forth, more people became pro-Palestinian, and many denied Israel’s right to exist. In the last eight to ten years, we’ve gone backwards. I’m hearing arguments from both the Israeli and Arab sides which I thought we’d got over. The level and tone of polemic in the U.S. and in Europe on the Palestine question has degenerated enormously since the collapse of Camp David and the rise of the second Intifada. I find that much of the stuff put out in the name of Palestine is so irresponsible and sometimes racist. I also find the degree of anger and the one-sidedness of Israelis, and from pro-Israel people in the West, very disturbing.

For example, the way in which Rumsfeld and his friends exaggerated the Iraqi threat—that was just a replay of threat exaggeration in the Cold War, including saying we were tied. It was a rerun of the threat inflation of the ’70s and ’80s.

So I realized that the Cold War continues to dominate our thinking. There are what I call three dustbins which still exercise their hold on us. We cannot understand the contemporary world if we don’t see the degree to which the legacy of the past — above all, the Cold War — still affects thinking about politics in the contemporary world.

The three dustbins include, very crudely, the legacy of communism, which includes dreadful inter-ethnic conflicts, some of which are frozen but some of which are certainly not, and which are going to continue in Central Asia. They’re hopefully frozen in the Balkans, though we don’t yet know, and not frozen in the Horn of Africa for long. Another consequence of Communism’s collapse is in the uncontrolled spread of nuclear materials around the former Soviet Empire. The creation not of democratic or liberal states, but of highly corrupt and manipulative states in many cases, including Russia itself: we don’t know where Russia is going. There’s a very deep and dangerous resentment at the popular level about the West, about America, about Europe, which could, in the long run, transfer into quite dangerous foreign policies. So Communism left a dustbin, even as it collapsed as a state system.

The U.S. dustbin—the Western dustbin—is a faith in the efficacy of the market, which was the great ideological battering ram against Communism. One would have thought, looking at what’s happened in, say, most of Latin America or in many other countries, that there would be serious questions about the Washington consensus.

There is the continued legacy after the end of the Cold War of the groups of murderers and brigands who the U.S. set up to fight Communism, particularly in the period of the Reagan doctrine. In Southern Africa —in Angola and Mozambique—these people still have enormous social and political influence. In the case of Afghanistan or the Middle East, the use of right-wing Islamism against Communism in the ’70s and ’80s has sown a terrible harvest. And let’s start not with Al Qaeda but with what happened in Saudi Arabia. Faced with the Arab socialist revolutions in Egypt and Yemen in the ’50s and ’60s, the Saudis promoted Islamic education: universities which taught only Islamic law, Islamic thinking. And they trained people who are completely incapable of having a job in a modern society, and who have a paranoid and completely uneducated world view. They are a recruiting ground for bin Laden and his people. Bin Laden is the illegitimate child of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The anti-globalization movement has taken over a critique of capitalism without, to a minimal degree, reflecting on what actually happened in the 20th century. You can’t denounce capitalism in the name of a radical alternative without thinking about what happened when we tried a radical alternative.

What alternatives might there be, Fred? If the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary model is dead, and actually existing Third Worldism, i.e. the anti-globalization movement, is deeply flawed, as you suggest, what’s left? Is social democratic tinkering the only available path left? What other models are there for the Third World today?

One response is to be comparative and to say that in every major developed country, there are divisions which combine ethnic and social factors, and also generational factors, and are spatially configured within major cities, which lead not only to exclusion and resentment and lack of employment but lack of employability, because if you don’t have the skills and the work discipline, and are generally marginalized and isolated, things will periodically explode. It’s true in Britain. It’s true in Germany. And now in France. It’s part of this broader problem of the changing nature of industrial society. If there were ten million new jobs in the car industry or in traditional smokestack industries in these countries every year, or in the coal mines, the problem wouldn’t arise to the same degree.

The shame is not doing the work. The shame is not listening to other people. The shame is not saying what you think. The shame is running after fashions of Left or Right. The shame is wasting your time in a kind of public, theatrical pugilism of the kind which too many of my British friends in the United States seem to have fallen into.

Cosmopolitans

By Alan Ryan

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Norton, 196 pp., $23.95

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

by Amartya Sen

Norton, 215 pp., $24.95

Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership

by Martha C. Nussbaum

Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 487 pp., $35.00

The three books by leading philosophers under review share one theme: cosmopolitanism. Otherwise, they could hardly be more different. Anthony Appiah and Amartya Sen have written short, brisk, pointed essays on the perils of cultural isolation and narrowness. Martha Nussbaum has written a substantial philosophical treatise on the difficulties that recent fashions in political theory have put in the way of understanding the nature of justice for the mentally and physically disabled, foreigners, and animals.

The trouble with Islam, the European Union - and Francis Fukuyama
Roger Scruton
1 - 6 - 2006

Francis Fukuyama's historicism fails to accommodate two contemporary political realities and in the process misunderstands history itself, says Roger Scruton.

Francis Fukuyama has the gift of shining a cheerful American light on the mystical visions of the German romantics. He takes Hegel's apocalyptic idea of the end of history and, instead of standing it on its head as Marx did, strips off its funereal clothes and gives it a carnival suit of democratic values.

In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama takes his thesis that history has worked towards its end from Alexandre Kojève, who also associated it with a gesture of sarcastic welcome towards Nietzsche's "last man". Kojéve influenced a whole generation of French post-war intellectuals with his lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he injected into the bloated Hegelian body some strong shots of Nietzsche and Heidegger, making the moribund organism writhe in interesting torment.

The fact that he was a life-hating Russian at heart, a self-declared Stalinist, and a civil servant who played a leading behind-the-scenes role in establishing both the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the European Economic Community, should be borne in mind by all who wish to understand what Kojève was really up to in declaring the end of history.

This man was, in my view, a dangerous psychopath, who brought with him from Russia the same kind of nihilistic fervour that had inspired the Bolsheviks, and who took an exhilarated joy in the thought that everything around him was doomed

wishing meanwhile to create the kind of post-historical, universal and bureaucratic form of government that would extinguish all real human attachments and produce the only thing he really cared for: the last man, the loveless and lifeless homunculus which he knew in intimate detail since he knew it in himself.

It was thanks largely to Kojève and Jean Monnet that the European project took on its current form, of a rigid and unreformable bureaucracy, dedicated to extinguishing not only the national loyalties of the European people, but also the Christian culture and democratic institutions that had thrived in them. The European Union ought surely to show to everybody – to those who endorse it as much as those who view it with alarm – that the "end of history" is not a prediction but a project,

It is a project that is as disconnected from democracy as that other "end of history" project in which Kojève was raised, the project of communist revolution in which "the government of men gives way to the administration of things". Friedrich Engels's prediction was the only Marxist prediction that ever came true: under communism the government of men really did give way to the administration of things, since men became things.

its increasing tendency to prefer "group rights" over individual rights is setting it on a collision course with the Enlightenment (just the same collision course, in fact, that was taken by communism and fascism),

Set Europe and America side by side, as Fukuyama now does, and you will surely see a striking difference, between a place that has consciously espoused the "end of history" and a place which has consciously espoused nothing except itself. And in both places history goes on as "just one damn thing after another".

Fukuyama likens the Islamist terrorists to those already seen in our midst: Bolsheviks, extreme nationalists, Baader-Meinhof nihilists. All are in reaction against the modern world, in search of a pure and unalienated society – the society which, according to Sayyid Qutb, grows only "in the shade of the Qur'an". My response to this is: yes and no. Fukuyama attributes to Samuel Huntington the thesis that liberal democracy is downstream from Christianity, and that there is therefore no universal law of history according to which human societies everywhere tend, with growing economic mastery, in a liberal-democratic direction.

You can squeeze Islam into the process of universal history only if you overlook such facts as these: that the sharia does not recognise secular law; that it punishes apostasy with death; that it accords only "treaty" rights to Christians and Jews and no rights at all to pagans. Moreover it contains no intrinsic principle of reform, since "the gate of ijtihad (creative jurisprudence) is closed". For these reasons, it seems to me, Islamism is not merely a vast and growing problem for western democracies; it is also an insuperable problem for the universalist view of human history.

Fukuyama is wrong to believe that Hegel was the first historicist philosopher. He was preceded by Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) and Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Ibn Khaldun made the useful point that historical processes are not governed by culture and knowledge only, but also by the will to reproduce. This will, he believed, dwindles as people become habituated to luxury, and dynasties therefore rise and fall according to a quasi-biological logic.

Much that we attribute to history we ought rather to attribute to biology – including aggression, territorial expansion and maybe even scapegoating, racism and the all-pervading emotion that Nietzsche called ressentiment.

Christ taught us to overcome those things, and paid the price for doing so. Maybe it is the long-term effect of his sacrifice that so much of European history looks like a process of steady emancipation from the grim realities of species life. But that only tends to confirm the thesis that Fukuyama attributes to Huntington: that the march of history towards liberal democracy is a local achievement of Christian culture.

The English countryside

Cloud cuckoo land?

The fact is that we have so lost the habit of religion, that we no longer know how to deal with it. We can no longer rely on the old-fashioned rule of common courtesy, which says that you must treat religion (whether your own or another’s) with respect, and neither laugh at its icons nor blaspheme against its gods. Courtesy is a dwindling commodity in modern societies, and besides, in our growing scepticism, we have assumed that religion is no more than a superficial gloss on life, as easy for a Muslim to discard as it is for someone brought up in the dwindling faith of Europe.

The United States and the open society: a response to Gara LaMarche
In his openDemocracy essay The crisis of democracy in America Gara LaMarche claims that the abuses of the political process by the right are so widespread and incorrigible as to amount to a breakdown of the open society. I don’t think LaMarche has given us proof either that this is so, or that the abuses, when they occur, are the result exclusively or even primarily of right-wing machinations.

At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of "resentment politics," other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them.

Scruton: The free market is a necessary part of any stable community, and the arguments for maintaining it as the core of economic life were unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. Hayek developed the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence of "spontaneous order", as the means to produce and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality.

The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.)

I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.

Scruton: My point was simply to emphasize that the most important obligations governing our lives as social and political beings -- including those to family, country and state -- are non-contractual and precede the capacity for rational choice. By referring to them as "transcendent" I meant to emphasize that they transcend any capacity to rationalise them in contractual or negotiable terms. They have an absolute and immovable character that we must acknowledge if we are to understand our social and political condition. The refusal of people on the left to make this acknowledgement stems from their inability to accept external authority in any form, and from their deep down belief that all power is usurpation, unless wielded by themselves.

It is part of the blindness of the left-wing worldview that it cannot perceive authority but only power. People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists. In those communities all kinds of people had authority -- teachers, pastors, judges, heads of local societies, and so on. But only some of them had power, and almost none of them were either able or willing to oppress their fellows.

But I suppose I am more of a paleo than a neo-conservative, since I believe that the conservative position is rooted in cultural rather than economic factors, and that the single-minded pursuit of competitive markets is just as much a threat to social order as the single-minded pursuit of equality.

You cannot put Hayek's theory of the common law, Kant's theory of republican government, or Hegel's theory of civil society into slogans.

To aim also to persuade is commendable, and for this reason it is necessary for a political thinker to learn how to write. Marx solved this problem, unfortunately, but then so did Burke. Good writing affects the minds of the literary elite, and ideas in the minds of that elite will eventually filter down, to the point where some slick but ignorant journalist will find the slogans that correspond, at his level of mental life,

Mr Blair has shown no disposition to recognize that his authority has been conferred on him by institutions that he is duty-bound to respect. His frivolous attitude to constitution, procedure and the dignities of office has done something to undermine not just his own authority, but the authority of government as such.

I think conservatives should study the ideas and arguments that prevail on the left. There is always something to learn from these arguments, if only which way the wind of resentment is now blowing.

Lydia as always puts the matter clearly, arguing that paths should happen and not be imposed. Maybe, if she were more theoretical, she should add that paths ought to emerge by 'an invisible hand', and not by planning -- and then the analogy with Hayek's theory of the market becomes instantly clear. But I want to insert a qualification, which is this. Conservatism, as I understand it, is really about 'prescriptive right'. In English law a path over which no-one has asserted a right of closure for twenty years becomes a prescriptive right of way. Thereafter it is public property, and cannot be closed except by compulsory purchase (the much abused procedure that Roman Law and American Law call 'eminent domain'). Prescriptive rights are important because they protect the marks of settlement, and settled communities live with a shared sense of home, and a shared body of loyalties. It is from and to the settled community that conservatism tends. Although their environment arose by an invisible hand the members of such a community seek thereafter to protect it, and to keep in place those things that create and sustain the image and the reality of their dwelling together. That is what planning law is, or ought to be, about -- namely, giving local communities the right to determine, within limits, the shape, function and appearance of their public space.

This does not mean transferring massive powers to the state or the bureaucrats, but rather giving each person some influence over the shared environment. Steve Burton gives some good references here, and Mike Blowhard is surely absolutely right about the destructive nature of American zoning laws, which effectively disaggregate the city, sending all its many functions in different directions, and destroying its organic life. Jane Jacobs made this point years ago (The Death and Life of American Cities), and it has been embellished recently by James Howard Kunstler, Leon Krier, Nikos Sallingaros and others.

Town planning and architectural aesthetics are of great interest to conservatives, it seems to me, since they illustrate the dialectical relation between individual freedom and prescriptive right. The classical tradition in architecture is a telling illustration of what we mean or ought to mean by authority, and why authoritative counsels provide genial solutions to problems of coordination that are hard to solve in any other way. (Look at Asher Benjamin’s Pattern Book published in and for the use of Boston in 1839, and you will see why it is that Boston has so many parts that people wish to preserve from the developers.) It is worth reflecting on the question why modernist architects tend to be conceited leftists, like Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry and Richard Rogers (the Labour Party's official advisor on town planning, whose most important contribution to the field is the Centre Beaubourg that converted a much loved and entirely settled part of Paris into a postmodernist playground).

Yet the Civil War, the one episode deemed widely or even universally representative seems – the more we learn about it – to have had little or nothing to do with broader movements in Europe and the world, or with other divisions and conflicts of its day. Rather, it looks increasingly like a uniquely Spanish event, rooted in quarrels peculiar to Spain, and unintelligible except in a strictly Spanish context. Foreigners who, at the time, saw it as their war, were deluded by propaganda – whether they were German or Italian “volunteers” against Bolshevism, or Catholic “crusaders” against atheism and secularism, or freedom-loving fighters against Fascism, or anti-Communist capitalists or anarchists, or anti-Stalinist Troskyists, or anti-Trotskyist Stalinists.

Ad hoc coalitions fought the war, drawn together by a mixture of accident and advantage, with little ideological consistency. Those on the side commonly called “national” included huge numbers of German and Italian “volunteers” and Moroccan recruits, attracted, like their modern counterparts – the Gastarbeiters and “illegals” who now swarm across the Strait – by rates of pay unattainable in Africa. So while the Nationalists proclaimed a “crusade” and reconquista, implicitly invoking bygone holy wars, the Republicans sang, with perhaps greater justification, their anthem, “We Are Fighting against Moors”. The money that paid for the “national” effort came, meanwhile, in large part, from US and other foreign investors. Meanwhile, if the Nationalists were not genuinely national, not all Republicans fought on the side called “Republican”. General Queipo de Llana, the loud-mouthed boss of wartime Seville, was actually a freemason – a member of an organization Franco loathed and clericalists decried – and ended his incendiary broadcasts with the cry, “Long live the Republic!”. My uncle Ramón was a Republican through and through, but fought on the same side as Franco because, he said, he “could not bear to rape a nun, burn a church or kill a priest”. No simple Left–Right cleavage divided the sides. Until the war stimulated recruitment, fortified identities, and demonized foes, there were virtually no Fascists and few Communists in Spain.

for the next two-and-a-half centuries of Spanish history, when, according to the standard account, Spain was confined in paranoid isolation, puzzled, like so many stage madmen, at other peoples’ madness. The “Tibet of the West” excluded the Enlightenment, resisted the influence of the French Revolution, revived the Inquisition, spurned industrialization, postponed aggiornamento, practised mañanismo, perpetuated the siesta, maintained the mantilla, clung to clericalism, sniffed at science. Painters, poets and novelists spread a fantastic image of Spain, where swart Gypsies and heavily moustachioed bandidos inhabited Moorish ruins. The country became the only Western victim of Orientalism, as though historical accident had washed Spain up on the wrong shore of the Mediterranean. Africa, alternatively, “began at the Pyrenees”.

There was never really any truth in this picture.

Terrific lessons here, of myth and alignments.

By applying the technique of the Annals of Confucius – recounting horrors in an unimpassioned tone – he has produced a moving masterpiece of the indictment of war.

Spain became, in the eyes of beholders, a laboratory of struggle between Fascism and Communism, totalitarianism and democracy. In retrospect, the significance of the war seems to have grown even wider since those days; no longer just a representative and prophetic place of its time, the Spain of 1936–9 has become a cockpit in which universal truths were tried. At the highest level of generalization, the war generates reflections on human values and boundless problems of morals and memories. Antony Beevor illustrates this fact in the last words of his new history:

The Spanish Civil War is, however, best remembered in entirely human terms: the clash of beliefs, the ferocity, the generosity and selfishness, the hypocrisy of diplomats and ministers, the betrayal of ideals and political manoeuvres and, above all, bravery and self-sacrifice of those who fought on both sides. But history, which is never tidy, must always end with questions. Conclusions are much too convenient.

We are not just animals; we are also persons, and persons are the kind of thing that can be praised and blamed, held to account, assigned responsibilities. Persons are subjects, and also objects; they are self-conscious, engage in practical reasoning, and so on. Those facts are not empirical. But they have huge implications concerning the nature of our experience. They also contain a pointer to what I mean by ?right feeling? ? namely, the feeling that leads towards personal fulfilment. I remain convinced that there can be a trans-cultural account of this, and that it will depend on an a priori theory of human nature ? what Kant called ?a philosophical anthropology.?

Ultimately wars become whatever myth makes them out to be: what people believe generates consequences and becomes a kind of truth. Thousands of foreign volunteers poured into Spain thinking that they were taking part in the defence of the international working class, “uniting the human race”. About 17,000 died. At least 5,000 Spaniards died as volunteers for Hitler in Russia, thinking they were continuing an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Though the experiences on both sides were disillusioning, many participants and onlookers forged new sympathies and realized that the real global struggle would not be of Left against Right, but of democracy versus the rest.

“Liberal” is a word other languages borrowed from Spanish, yet even the most educated readers outside Spain still know virtually nothing about the Spanish contribution to the origins of liberalism. Spain was one of the first countries in the world to have a genuinely democratic franchise but you would never learn that from most general studies of the subject. Little reference is made to Spain even in connection with areas of nineteenth-century European experience in which Spain’s share is well known – such as Romanticism, urbanization, reforms in public health and criminal law, the rise of socialism and anarchism, and the conflicts of absolutists against constitutionalists or of centralizers against particularists.

Native informers and the making of the American empire

Lacking internal support or external legitimacy, writes Hamid Dabashi*, the US empire now banks on a pedigree of comprador intellectuals, homeless minds and guns for hire

President George W Bush and Senator John Kerry, at one point the public debate came down to a comparison between the competing notions of an empire with no hegemony (for President Bush) versus a hegemony with no empire (for Senator Kerry). The issue remained moot, rather tangential and academic to the debate, and unresolved with the re-election of President Bush.

To be sure, such historians as Niall Ferguson have in fact sought to theorise the historical domains of the emerging US empire. In his Colossus: The Price of American Empire (2004), Niall Ferguson has fortuitously called the American empire "the imperialism of anti-imperialism,"

Hardt and Antonio Negri had even before the cataclysmic events of 9/11/2001 articulated a sustained theoretical position in their now classical text Empire (2000), arguing that the classical case of imperialism had now mutated into an imperial mode of domination, corresponding to cultural, social, and economic globalisation, a mode that is in fact rooted in American constitutionalism.

Eric Hobsbawm wrote (2005) to the classical book of V G Kiernan, America, The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (1978), he argued that so far as the Anglo-American notions of their imperial missions were concerned, "the rest of humanity was only a raw material, clay to be moulded by the potter's hand. This assumption of superiority may be called a legacy of British insularity, magnified by America's size and wealth" (xvi).

Meanwhile, Americans like Chalmers Johnson, in a magnificent book called The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of Republic (2004), were in fact providing thoroughly documented and yet mournful eulogies to the decline and demise of the American republic and the rise of a predatory empire from its ashes.

Michael Mann in his Incoherent Empire (2003) or Robert D Kaplan in his Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (2005) pay particular--theoretical and factual--attention to the militarist dimensions of this empire.

given the way the US propaganda machinery is operating ever since 9/11, it seems (both domestically and internationally) to be completely contingent on a mode of momentary amnesia, a systematic loss of collective memory, a nefarious banking on the presumption that no one is watching, no one is counting, and no one is keeping a record of anything--that history is dead, as is memory, recollection, experience.

The trauma of 9/11 was far worse than Pearl Harbor, with which it is usually compared, because of the sheer magnitude of its spectacular and terrifying visuality. The Armageddon crumbling of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, more than anything else, staged the vulnerability of the principal imperial memento projecting the cause of the globalised capital--its titular totem poles, phallic symbols of its monumental potency. That vulnerability was too memorable to be allowed to be remembered.

Fabricating instantaneous enemies and moving targets, one on the trail of the other, thus became the principal modus operandi of the virtual empire. An empire lacking, in fact requiring an absence of, long term memory, and banking heavily on the intensity of short term memories that lasts only for about one to two years--one to two wars per one presidential election.

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), ordinarily points to legitimate concerns about the plight of Muslim women in the Islamic world and yet put that predicament squarely at the service of the US ideological psy-op, militarily stipulated in the US global warmongering.

"White men saving brown women from brown men," as the distinguished postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak puts it in her seminal essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: "We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect." Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.

of an empire and their cultural manifestations, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (2002), Amy Kaplan has demonstrated the link between domestic and foreign affairs in the manufacturing of such an imperial project. In this extraordinary work of literary investigation, Amy Kaplan demonstrates how at least since the middle of the nineteenth century and the commencement of successive wars with Mexico, Spain, Cuba and the Philippines, the US imperial expansionism is tightly connected with such domestic political issues as race, class, and gender.

* The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. Among his best- known books are Authority in Islam, Theology of Discontent, Truth and Narrative, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future, and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006). His forthcoming book Iran: A People Interrupted is scheduled for publication in 2006 by the New Press.

Commentary No. 186, June 1, 2006

"Whose Century is the 21st Century?"

The United States became the unquestioned hegemonic power in the period 1945-1970

There are basically three sets of answers to the question of what the world will look like in 2025. The first is that the United States will enjoy one last fling, a revival of power, and will continue to rule the roost in the absence of any serious military contender. The second is that China will displace the United States as the world's superpower. The third is that the world will become an arena of anarchic and relatively unpredictable multi-polar disorder. Let us examine the plausibility of each of these three predictions.

The last scenario is that of multi-polar anarchy and wild economic fluctuations. Given the inability of maintaining an old hegemonic power, the difficulty of establishing a new one, and the crisis in worldwide capital accumulation, this third scenario appears the most likely.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

The Wall Street Journal's Wirey John Harwood reports that 41 percent of voters will be senior citizens in 2040, according to the Census reports.

Fears of an Asian arms race
The civilian nuclear technology-sharing deal between the US and India is meeting growing opposition in both countries.
01-June-2006

Blix warns of WMD vicious circle

David Batty
Friday June 2, 2006

Hans Blix warned the "war on terror" is leading to another arns race. Photo: AP.

The US must abandon its "war on terror" to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, according to the former United Nations' chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix,.

The US foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes against any perceived weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat, its development of new types of nuclear weapons and the "Star Wars" missile defence shield risked fuelling a new global arms race, said Dr Blix.

The two-year investigation by the commission also called on all existing nuclear powers to refrain from developing new types of nuclear weapons. The Pentagon wants to build a new generation of nuclear bunker-busters and "mini-nukes", although US Congress has blocked the plans.

"In both these areas the US has the decisive leverage. If it takes the lead the world is likely to follow. If it does not take the lead, there could be more nuclear tests and new nuclear arms races."

The commission called on Iran to resume cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to allow inspection of its nuclear programme. It also said Iran, Egypt and Israel, which already has nuclear weapons, should commit to the Middle East being a nuclear free zone.

Who Divides Antiterror Money? That's a Secret

By DIANE CARDWELL and AL BAKER

The panel that guided the distribution of antiterrorism money is a shadow player in the war on terror.

has been edited into a moving, complicated movie that illuminates, with heartbreaking clarity, some of the human actuality of this long, confusing war.