November 09, 2004
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IN an urgent phone call to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, US Secretary of State Colin Powell proffered the following diagnosis of the mental state of senior members of the Bush administration: "They're f---ing crazies."

Now these intellectually challenged characters have been given four more years to run the world – thanks to a rush to the ballot box by millions of Christian fundamentalists convinced that the earth and all its creatures were created in a process of divine mechanics that began at 9am on Monday, October 23, 4004BC – and who support Israel because of evangelical prophecies involving a rapidly approaching apocalypse.

Well, now that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, what further madness might we expect? Here are a few non-biblical prophecies.

First of all, the f---ing crazies will show Powell, the sanest member of the administration, the door. Or he'll head for it himself on a voluntary basis. Whether the crazies' Donald Rumsfeld goes with him is all but irrelevant, given that it's safe to prophesise a huge promotion for Paul Wolfowitz.

This will lead to enthusiastic escalation in the Iraq war. No longer embarrassed by 100,000 dead civilians, the collateral damage will be unconstrained, as George W. Bush, no more Mr Nice Guy, celebrates his second honeymoon by making missiles rain from the heavens like confetti. The US will attempt to impose democracy on Iraq even if it has to kill many of the voters. And that's not the only tactic that will lead the Middle East and the wider world closer to the Armageddon eagerly awaited by the religious Right.

Here, for example, is my prophecy for Iran. Having poked a stick into that theocratic ants nest, and choosing to ignore the attempts of Old Europe to negotiate and mitigate, Washington will give a wink and a nod to Tel Aviv to bomb anything that might be a nuclear facility.

The Israelis have done this before, quite successfully. Don't be surprised if there's a degree of what's known in the trade as plausible deniability, even a bit of tsk-tsking from the White House when the Israelis do the deed.

Hoping to benefit from the death of Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon will make as much mischief as possible in the mourning period. Apart from the vexed question of where the Palestinians will be allowed to bury their leader, Sharon will hope that the transfer of power will be as messy as possible. As usual the Bush administration will cut Sharon an immense amount of slack.

Before we leave the axis of evil, let us not forget North Korea. Washington's continued provocations will keep the North's nasty regime at a fever pitch of paranoia, thus providing George W. and the boys with the excuse to wipe out the place. The UN? It might voice the odd protest as the Bush juggernaut gains speed, but it will be utterly ignored. The UN is regarded as an irritating impediment to US hegemony and Washington wants it to join the League of Nations in the dustbin of history.

Of course, the Chinese won't be too impressed with any attack on North Korea but the most ardent of the neo-cons want to take Beijing on as well. Hence the missile defence system. Beijing knows that its main purpose is to make life difficult for the Chinese. So, apart from triggering a new arms race in our region – indeed, a new cold war – there's the grim possibility that the same intellectual giants that gave us the war in Iraq will start encouraging the most irrational elements in Taiwan.

Domestic prophecies for the US? The widespread looting from libraries of liberal literature by the religious Right, further bans on the teaching of evolution and a war against Roe v Wade via a restacked Supreme Court. And that's just for openers.

October 29, 2004

George Bush is overturning two centuries of US diplomacy. This is what is at stake, says Arthur Schlesinger.

War haunts America. There is no immunity for wartime presidents. In 1952, the unpopularity of the Korean War led President Truman to withdraw from the contest. In 1968, the Vietnam War drove President Johnson from office. The swift victory of President Bush the Elder in the first Iraq war was of small benefit when he was defeated for re-election in 1992.

On the other hand, President Nixon running against George McGovern - like Senator Kerry, a decorated war hero turned into a war critic - scored a smashing triumph in 1972.

President Bush the Younger categorically defends his launching of the second Iraq war. He has no doubt about the rightness of his course or the brilliance of his team.

President Kennedy dismissed the CIA advisers who led him into the Bay of Pigs. Despite the Pentagon's build-up of Ahmed Chalabi, despite torture and Abu Ghraib, despite the incompetence of postwar planning, despite the collapse of his reasons for looking on Iraq as a clear and present danger to the US, President Bush has dismissed few senior officials.

The recent report by Charles Duelfer, the top American arms inspector for Iraq, effectively destroyed what remains of the contention that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The second reason Bush gave was the alleged partnership between the secular Muslim Saddam Hussein and the Muslim fundamentalist Osama bin Laden. The Bush Administration put over this allegation so successfully that 42 per cent of the American people, according to an October poll, still believe that Saddam was personally involved in September 11.

But Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and Bush himself admitted that they had no hard evidence of the existence of the evil partnership.

The distinction between "pre-emptive" and "preventive" is worth preserving - it is the distinction between legality and illegality.

The third reason was the liberation of the people of Iraq from a monstrous tyrant. But Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defence and long-time advocate of the war on Iraq, said that liberation by itself was "not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk".

Two reasons having been shot from under him, the American President is left with a reason once deemed an inadequate justification for American kids to kill or be killed.

George Bush is unquestionably right when he says the world is a happier place now that Saddam is behind bars. But was it worth the price of more than 1000 American lives and heaven knows how many Iraqis?

The second Iraq war fits into Bush the Younger's strategy of "pre-emption". There is deliberate confusion here.

Preventive war has a bad reputation in Washington. It is not only due to imperial Japan's preventive strike at the American fleet in Pearl Harbour, but presidents Truman and Eisenhower explicitly rejected preventive war, and those recommending preventive war against the Soviet Union were generally derided as loonies.

So the Bush Administration replaced "preventive" by "pre-emptive". The distinction between "pre-emptive" and "preventive" is worth preserving - itis the distinction between legality and illegality.

"Pre-emptive" war refers to a direct, immediate, specific threat that must be met at once. In the words of a US Department of Defence manual, "an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent". "Preventive" war refers to potential, future and, therefore, speculative attacks.

"Daniel Webster wrote a very famous defence of anticipatory self-defence," Condoleezza Rice, Bush's National Security Adviser, informed the press. Rice, the former provost of Stanford, does not know her American history.

According to secretary of state Webster's "famous" 1841 statement, a pre-emptive reaction could be justified only on very narrow grounds - if the prospective attack showed "a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation". This was manifestly not the case with Iraq. It was not a pre-emptive war. It was a preventive war.

Preventive war rests on the premise that the preventer has accurate and reliable knowledge about the evil enemy's capabilities and intentions. It rests on the assumption of the perfectibility of the intelligence process. It rests therefore not on fact, but on prophecy. Yet history outwits all our certitudes.

This aphorism does not commend itself to the younger Bush. He is an unrepentant preventive warrior.

His re-election is far from certain; but he would take re-election as an endorsement of his first term and would probably see it as a national mandate to pursue his methods and goals during a second term.

Already, premonitory warnings against Iran are eerily reminiscent of those that preceded the preventive war against Iraq. He might take it as a national mandate to pursue the policy of truculent unilateralism. Already the Bush Administration's contempt for "old Europe", the UN and international institutions is hardly concealed.

Never in American history has the republic been so unpopular abroad, so mistrusted, feared, even hated.

President Bush is a militant idealist. He proposes to use America's military, economic and cultural power to spread "liberty". However, there are a lot of bad guys on the planet. Is the US obliged to eliminate them all? Does the US serve as the world's judge, jury and executioner?

As John Quincy Adams, perhaps America's greatest secretary of state, said, America, while sympathising with struggling peoples, "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy".

Should America seek out monsters, Adams continued, "the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force... She might become the dictatress of the world: she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit."

That is the significance, for America and the world, of the American presidential election.

Arthur Schlesinger was an adviser to President John F. Kennedy. His most recent book is War and the American Presidency. This article was first published in The Guardian, London.

These are the lessons of life. Always tinged with sadness and with only fleeting happiness.

We are herd animals. We're comfortable in herds of about seven or eight, and uncomfortable outside them. This is why work-groups of that size function so well; it's why seven or eight people is a good span of management control; it's why dinner parties of more than about eight tend to fragment.

The shrinking Australian household is no longer robust enough to satisfy our herd instinct, which is why we have to look outside the domestic herd for groups to attach ourselves to - cooking classes, book clubs, sports associations, adult education courses. We like grazing with the herd in cafes and food halls. When all else fails, we can even herd electronically (as our kids are doing with a vengeance).

Being herd animals, we need leaders. When leaders are strong and visionary, we feel confident and powerful. When leaders are weak or cynical, or when they are clearly more interested in their own power than our wellbeing, we feel uneasy, disengaged and powerless. Leadership vacuums tend to be filled either by demagogues or by our own unbridled self-interest.

We are irrational creatures whose behaviour can rarely be explained by logic. We act on impulse; our brains are awash with hormones (more like glands than computers); we do things we say we'll never do; we sometimes disapprove of our own actions, but go ahead anyway.

Our moral codes are subjective and flexible: even the Golden Rule, which we claim to have enshrined in our moral system, is distorted, in practice, into something like "treat other people the way you think they'd probably treat you" - a virtual contradiction of the original idea.

The deepest of all our needs is the need to be taken seriously as individuals. The other things usually described as basic drives - sex, power, the need to belong - actually flow from that one, central need. If you doubt it, look at what happens when people feel as if they are not being taken seriously: they become angry, depressed, cynical, aggressive or petulant, to say nothing of plain unhappy.

There's rarely just one cause of unhappiness or of its more brutal cousin, depression. But, somewhere in there, you'll usually find a person who feels under-valued, unappreciated or misunderstood. Not being taken seriously - by your partner, your bank, politicians, your colleagues, your parents - feels like the ultimate insult. (Not being taken seriously by your children is merely par for the course.)

If this need is as fundamental as I believe it is, that may help to explain why so many people take themselves too seriously: "If other people won't take me seriously enough, I'll do the job myself." So one reason for giving people the recognition they crave is that you might rescue them from the lonely descent into hubris.

I've discovered that everyone's story is interesting: if you think you know someone who's boring, that just means you haven't got to know them well enough. I've also come to realise that everyone's story is tinged with sadness; happiness visits most of us but fleetingly.

I've learnt to despise intellectual arrogance, because it fails to acknowledge the genetic accident that makes some people less intelligent than others. I've learnt to be suspicious of people who've made a lot of money in a short time. Too often, it turns out that they've cut moral corners, exploited others, charged unconscionable prices for their goods or services, or simply been devious in their business dealings.

Poverty is a blight on society, but I have acquired the deepest respect for people who work long and hard and manage to live responsible, generous and fulfilling lives without ever achieving the kind of material prosperity that rich people take for granted.

I've also decided that the meaning of our lives is to be found in the quality of our personal relationships and nowhere else. We are all part of the same humanity. We learn our most valuable lessons from each other.

The message of terrorism is itself a weapon. We must work to defuse it.

Did you buy a paper? I asked my daughter. No, she said with a grimace and shudder. "I couldn't face it, I didn't want to read about it."

The "it", of course, was Beslan, and hundreds of children like my daughter's children, like your children, lying in that charnel-house of a gym. The first day of school, the crisp new uniforms, the songs and clasped hands, then terrible fear and death. A universal nightmare seemingly beyond scripting or imagining. But now that we have seen it again and again on 24-hour news, now that the plumes of smoke and the naked kids running are images scarred on our brains, what does it mean?

The danger, the real danger for professional politicians, professional journalists, professional know-alls everywhere, is not sensing the difference. So Boris Yeltsin was wrong to invade Chechnya a decade ago, and Vladimir Putin was wrong to play the hardest of hard men, and his crack troops cracked up. Wiser international counsels had better prevail.

So, fine: but also, so what? Human revulsion slams the door on expertise and reason. These could have been our children. Perhaps, one malign day, they will be our children. And if there is such evil, then perhaps there is also something called an international terrorist conspiracy.

Scant evidence, in all rationality, still buttresses that belief. Arabs among the Beslan corpses? Maybe, but Putin would say that, wouldn't he? Join Mother Russia in its "full-scale" battle for democracy, truth and justice in the style and wake of Father Texas? Stroll on . . . but don't stroll through the smoking ruins of Grozny, don't open your history books too wide. There are no simplicities here except the ultimate simplicity of total horror. But that may be enough.

For the difficult, inescapable thing, watching those pictures, is an eery feeling of manipulation. Somebody planned this and reckoned the cameras would be there. Take a panning shot of Middle School No. 1, go in close on the gym, frame the fleeing children from handy rooftops and let's see plenty of greenery, let's make Beslan like downtown Smallville or Littlehampton. We seemed to look down on a leafy stage set for carnage; and someone knew we would be watching.

Perhaps, in another life, that someone might have found other uses for his talents: orchestrating US Republican conventions or the backdrops at election campaign launches. He could have been super spin doctor, feted and interviewed. But instead, in the service of Chechnya, he sat alone in a darkened room and thought hard.

What kind of outrage makes world news these days? Those early al-Qaeda bomb blasts in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi seem pretty outdated now to be honest, just big bangs with loads of dead, no pictures beyond more destruction. Who cares about blowing holes in ships or trains? The wonder of September 11 was the pictures, the twin towers toppling. Play it again, Sam. Osama had made No. 1.

How do you follow that? By seizing a Moscow theatre, maybe, by making a stage your stage. Putin couldn't pretend that wasn't happening; the curtain rose on his front doorstep. But the trouble was that the theatre doors were locked, that the cameras couldn't peer inside. You had to rely on imagination - on the thought that this could be Broadway or the West End - and it wasn't enough. You needed a brand-new wheeze.

Politicians and their intelligence advisers, of course, are always wittering on about WMD. They read Tom Clancy and multiply the threat because that's their particular obsession. It is what seems real to them. But why bother hitting Wall Street with high-tech trappings when there are so many easier pickings on offer?

Beslan, North Ossetia. What kind of dateline is that? An obscure town near the Chechen border. A suitable target for infiltration, no nuclear scientists required. Just take a school hostage and see what happens.

Hostage-taking on a grand scale means time, among other things: time for the camera teams to arrive, time for the crisis and pressure to build. Will Putin give in? He can't. It would be the end of him. So it will all come to slaughter and bitter tears. But he'll have to let CNN, BBC and the rest see what happens if he wants to make this terrorism international. And then the world will, too, see what we Chechens can do.

Someone, that someone, wrote the script. Someone with despair in his heart calculated how it would work out - and break from behind the borders of control that stop us seeing what happens inside Chechnya. Someone wanted to put his case on the international map. Mission accomplished.

And for his next trick? An old peoples' home, a nursery, a hospital? There is no limit to the targets that may be chosen by terrorists who expect to die but know that they will make a splash in the process. There is no limit to the soft touches that cannot be anticipated or defended. Frontiers are meaningless, because pictures have no frontier. Fear needs no visa.

Two bleak things follow. One is that - whether or not it exists on any organised level - we shall gradually come to identify a force called international terrorism, a force defined not by the co-ordination of its strikes or creeds but by the orchestration of its inhuman propaganda. I manipulate, therefore I exist.

The other thing is self-knowledge for media-makers and media-watchers. If the malignant message is itself a device, a weapon of mass hysteria, how do we defuse it? By a suppression that undermines free society, that gives terror its victory? Or by the realisation that we are not puppets, that we must see and explain for ourselves. That we have a duty of understanding.

September 8, 2004

We will never overcome terrorism if we ignore the context of even the most horrendous terrorist acts, writes Gwynne Dyer.

What would we do without Richard Perle, everybody's favourite American neo-conservative? It was he who came up some years ago with the notion that we must "decontextualise terrorism": that is, we must stop trying to understand the reasons that some groups turn to terrorism, and simply condemn and kill them. No grievance, no injury, no cause is great enough to justify the use of terrorism.

This would be an excellent principle if only we could apply it to all uses of violence for political ends - including the violence carried out by legal governments using far more lethal weapons than terrorists have access to, causing far more deaths.

I'd be quite happy, for instance, to "decontextualise" nuclear weapons, agreeing that there are no circumstances that could possibly justify their use, and if you want to start decontextualising things such as cluster bombs and napalm, that would be all right with me, too. But that was not what Perle meant at all.

Perle was speaking specifically about Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, and the point of "decontextualising" them was to make it unacceptable for people to point out that there is a connection between Palestinian terrorism and the fact that the Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for the past 37 years and lost much of their land to Jewish settlements.

Since the Palestinians have no regular armed forces, if we all agree that any resort by them to irregular violence is completely unpardonable and without justification, then there is absolutely nothing they can legitimately do to oppose overwhelming Israeli military force.

"Decontextualising terrorism" would neatly solve Israel's problem with the Palestinians - and it would also solve Russia's problem with the Chechen resistance, which is why Russian President Vladimir Putin was so quick to describe the rash of terrorist attacks in recent weeks, and above all the school massacre in Beslan last Friday, as "a direct intervention against Russia by international terrorism".

Not by Chechen terrorism, because that would focus attention on Russian behaviour in Chechnya, where Russia's main human rights organisation, Memorial, estimates that 3000 innocent people have been "disappeared" by the Russian occupation forces since 1999. No, this was an act of international terrorism (by crazy, fanatical Muslims who just hate everybody else), and nothing to do with Russian policies in Chechnya.

Indeed, the Russian security services quickly let it be known that 10 of the 20 militants killed in the school siege in Beslan were "citizens of the Arab world" and that the attack was the work of al-Qaeda.

And how did they know this, since it's unlikely that the dead attackers were carrying genuine identity documents on them? It turns out Russian security "experts" surmised it from the "facial structure" of the dead terrorists. (You know, that unique facial structure that always lets you pick out the Arabs in a crowd.) But that was where Putin wanted the finger to point.

Ever since September 11, countries such as Russia and Israel that face serious challenges from Muslims living under their rule have been trying to rebrand their local struggles as part of the "global war on terrorism". For those that succeed, the rewards can be great: a flood of money and weapons from Washington, plus an end to Western criticism over the methods they use to suppress their Muslim rebels.

Without September 11, Israel would never have got away with building its "security fence" so deep inside Palestinian territory, and Russia would face constant Western criticism over the atrocities committed by its troops in Chechnya.

Chechnya was a thorn in Russia's side - and the Russians were an almost unlimited curse for the Chechens - long before anybody had heard of Osama bin Laden.

The Chechens, less than a million strong even today, were the last of the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus to be conquered by the Russian empire in the 19th century, holding out for an entire generation.

When German troops neared the Caucasus in 1943, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to camps in Central Asia, fearing they would collaborate with the invaders - and half the Chechens died there before they were allowed to return home after the war. When the old Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Chechnya immediately declared independence, and successfully fought off a Russian attempt to reconquer it in 1994-96, although the fighting left tens of thousands dead and Grozny, the capital, in ruins.

That should have been the end of it, but Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya in 1999, just after Boris Yeltsin chose him as his successor. (The deal was that Putin could be Russia's president if he promised to protect Yeltsin from corruption charges after his retirement.) But the practically unknown Putin still had to persuade the Russians to vote for him in a more or less honest election, so he restarted the war in Chechnya to build his image as a strong man with Russian voters.

Five years later, Chechnya is a war-torn landscape patrolled by about 100,000 Russian soldiers, many thousands are dead, and the Chechen resistance is carrying out terrorist attacks in Russians cities.

There may be a few foreign volunteers from other Muslim countries involved in the struggle, but this is not part of some international terrorist conspiracy. It is not even a Russian-Chechen war, really. It is Putin's war, and you can't "decontextualise" that.

We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare: "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenceless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, which trains kindergarten children to become bombs, which fetishises death, which sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the US out of Iraq; they're forcing the US to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, love children, and love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death."Three years after September 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible, targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch Foreign Minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated on the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers". Three years after September 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalise terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion the American critic Paul Berman diagnosed after September 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.