Towards a New American Isolationism

By Walden Bello*, Focus on the Global South, September 5, 2008

(This essay originally appeared as the author’s commentary in Foreign Policy in Focus, Sept. 5, 2008.)

Despite the glitter that surrounded both the Olympics in Beijing and the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the messages coming to Asia from the two events were very different.

From Beijing, the message was, to put it in the words of one pundit, China has had a few bad centuries but is back on its feet.  From Denver, the word was that the world’s most powerful country has been on a desperate decade-long downspin that can only get worse if the Republicans keep the White House. 

For people in this part of the world, the weakening of US power is most evident elsewhere:  in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, where Washington is bogged down in unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; in Latin America, where the rebellion against neoliberalism and US meddling is in full swing; and, most recently, in Central Asia, where Washington and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been taught a painful lesson in overextension in Georgia.

The erosion of Washington’s position is less obvious in East Asia.  After all, the US continues to maintain over 300 military bases and facilities in the Western Pacific.  Over the last decade, it has established what amounts to a permanent troop presence in the Southern Philippines to make up for its giving up its two big military bases on Luzon Island in 1992.   And in Indonesia, the Pentagon has reestablished its close ties with the Indonesian military after several years of uncertainty, using the opportunity provided by relief operations during the tsunami of 2004. 

Erosion of US Power in East Asia

Nevertheless, the region—and Southeast Asia in particular—is probably more independent of the US today than at any other time in the last 60 years.  Economics is the reason.  Over the last two decades, several developments have eroded the US’s position. 

First of all, its drive to create the trans-Pacific free trade area known as the Asia Pacific Cooperation (APEC) failed.  APEC was meant to be a westward extension of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), and both were intended to serve as a geoeconomic counterweight to the European Union.  Japan, China, and the Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) countries, fearing US economic domination in the name of free trade, scuttled President Bill Clinton’s trans-Pacific dream at the APEC Summit in Osaka in 1995.  APEC summits continue to be held, but these are remembered more as times when heads of state don the host country’s national costume than as occasions for serious economic decisionmaking.

Second, the US effort to impose capital account and financial liberalization on the Asia Pacific economies as a key element of more thoroughgoing structural transformation backfired.  Capital account liberalization led to the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997-1998.  Instead of helping to shore up economies in crisis, Washington took advantage of the crisis to try to comprehensively transform the region’s economies along neoliberal lines.  As one of Clinton’s economic lieutenants saw it, “Most of these countries are going through a dark and deep tunnel…But on the other end there is going to be a significantly different Asia in which American firms have achieved a much deeper market penetration, much greater access.” 

The outcome proved to be different.  Malaysia imposed capital controls.  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was discredited, with the Thai government declaring its intention never to go back to the agency after paying off its loans in 2003 and the Indonesian government resolving to do the same thing in 2008.  While Washington and the IMF were able to kill Japan’s proposal for an Asian Monetary Fund (AMF) at the height of the crisis, the East Asian governments formed the “ASEAN Plus Three” financial mechanism that excludes the US and is likely to be the precursor of a full-blown regional financial agency.  Neoliberal transformation has stalled in Japan and most Southeast Asian countries, with possibly only South Korea continuing to travel along the free-market path desired by the US. 

 Moreover, to protect themselves against future speculative crises provoked by the movements of global finance capital spearheaded by US funds, the Asian governments have built up massive foreign exchange reserves, on which the US has become dependent for funds to prop up its massive military expenditures and the middle-class spending that for a long time served as an artificial barrier against recession.  With the unraveling of American financial institutions, the onset of recession, and the depreciation of the dollar, the US economy has become hostage to these countries’ decisions to continue to lend to Washington and Wall Street.

A third development that is not positive for the US is the region’s becoming increasingly dependent on the red-hot Chinese economic locomotive.  According to a United Nations report, China has been a “major engine of growth for most of the economies in the region.  The country’s imports accelerated even more than its exports, with a large proportion of them coming from the rest of Asia.”   In fact, Chinese demand is what pulled the Asia Pacific economies from the recession caused by the Asian financial crisis that the US tried to take advantage of.  China has not only surpassed the United States to become Japan’s main trading partner but Chinese demand has helped keep the world’s second-largest economy from falling back into recession. 

Conscious of its economic clout, China has moved to consolidate its position as East Asia’s new economic center via smart economic diplomacy.  In 2002, it convinced the ASEAN governments to create the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area that is scheduled to come into effect in 2010.  Japan has tried to catch up by offering ASEAN countries “economic partnership agreements.” Meanwhile, talks on a U.S.-Thailand free trade area have been frozen by popular opposition to Washington’s strident championing of the so-called intellectual property rights of its corporations.  All in all, there is a great deal of truth in the observation that the biggest beneficiary of the Bush administration’s imperial and corporate misadventures over the last decade has been China, which has kept itself from military entanglements and devoted itself singlemindedly to economic development.

Challenges Posed by China’s Ascent
The rise of China provides a number of very fundamental challenges to different key actors in East Asia.  
To Japan, the key challenge is to move from being effectively a vassal state of the United States in security matters to a mature relationship with China that would definitively leave behind five decades of aggression followed by six decades of serving as a springboard for US power projection onto the Asian mainland.  A definitive acceptance of responsibility for the atrocities committed by Japanese troops during the Second World War, including the infamous Nanjing Massacre, on the part of the Japanese people and their leaders is an indispensable step in this move towards a mature relationship between Asia’s leading economic powers.

For Southeast Asia, the challenge is how to avoid becoming an appendage of the Chinese economy.   

Chinese demand was, as mentioned earlier, an immense force lifting Southeast Asia’s economies from the depths of the Asian financial crisis.  However, China’s developing trade and investment relations with ASEAN have had some not pleasant aspects.

The experience of Thai vegetable and fruit producers owing to an “early harvest” free trade arrangement with Thailand earlier this decade is one of them.  Under the agreement, Thailand would export tropical fruits to China while winter fruits from China would be eligible for the zero-tariff deal.  The expectations of mutual benefit evaporated after a few months, however, with massive imports from China wiping out Thai producers of many fruits and vegetables such as garlic and red onions.

But the fear of many in Southeast Asia goes beyond having trade agreements with China that would yield unequal benefits. With land and energy relatively scarce in China, Chinese enterprises, with the blessings of the Chinese government, are seeking deals that would allow them to mine minerals and grow crops in Southeast Asian countries for exclusive export to the China market.  To take one example, in a deal with the Philippines, the Chinese Fuhua Group planned to invest $3.83 billion over five to seven years to develop 1 million hectares of land to grow high-yielding strains of corn, rice, and sorghum.   The Philippine government’s Departments of Environment and Agrarian Reform plan to identify “idle lands” that could be incorporated into the Chinese plantations.  This in a country where seven out of 10 farmers are landless!  This is a formula for real trouble. 

Some have been quick to call China’s international economic policies “imperialistic.”  It is, however, difficult to sustain this label since exploitative relations between China and other developing countries have not congealed structurally.  Economic trends where China emerges as a net beneficiary do not add up to imperialism.  Moreover, there is absent that element of force and coercion that accompanied the imposition of European and American economic power on weaker societies. 

Nevertheless, Southeast Asian governments need to balance their spontaneous feelings of South-South solidarity with cool-headed realism.  Countries like China, Brazil, and India,  are led by  developmentalist elites that are seeking to find their place in a new global capitalist order marked by the loosening of the economic hegemony of the old capitalist centers, that is, Japan, the US, and the European Union.  The pursuit of national economic interest, not regional cooperation for development, is their central concern. By uncritically signing trade and investment agreements or joining a regional formation anchored by these bigger, ambitious powers, smaller countries may simply end up being used economically, territorially, and politically to advance their regional and global agenda. 

Does this mean that a trade agreement and regional economic formation linking China and ASEAN is to be avoided at all costs?  No, it simply means the ASEAN governments must enter talks with China with eyes wide open and negotiate collectively, not as 10 separate governments.  They must make it clear to China that they do not desire a trade agreement based on free trade, such as the arrangements that the US, European Union, and Japan are pushing on them, but one where, as the weaker economies, the net benefits of the arrangement accrue to them, not China.  They must see to it that the terms of association must be carefully negotiated and that they work closely to offset the dominance of the central power. 

Yes, China’s relationship with Southeast Asia cannot be described as an exploitative one.  But unless considerations of equity are front and center in the negotiation of economic relationships between Beijing and its neighbors, the old structural patterns marking the relations between Southeast Asia and Europe, the United States, and Japan could easily be replicated.

The US-China Relationship
The most critical regional relationship, however, is between the US and China since the US is the most powerful power in East Asia and China the next most powerful.

In his stimulating book Adam Smith in Beijing, the eminent political economist Giovanni Arrighi of Johns Hopkins University writes that there are three alternative policies that the United States can adopt towards a China that is on the ascendant.

The first is an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.  In this strategy, China is seen as a strategic threat or, as the 2002 National Security Strategy Paper of the Bush administration puts it euphemistically, a “strategic competitor.”  The US response would be to “dissuade China” from its military ambitions by giving a high profile to the massive American military presence in the Western Pacific, strengthening the bilateral agreements with US allies that sustain this trans-Pacific garrison state, and building up defense cooperation with India, Asia’s other big power.  Needless to say, this response misconstrues the nature of the Chinese challenge, which is an economic rather than a strategic one.  And needless to say as well, this response would be disastrous for the whole world.

A second strategy is not to directly confront China as the US confronted the old Soviet Union but to put into motion balance of power politics, wherein China is weakened indirectly.  Arrighi quotes James Pinkerton, a protagonist of this approach:

Instead of confronting directly the rising Asian powers, the United States should play them off each other.  As the Latin expression tertium gaudens—the happy third—reminds us, rather than getting in the middle of every fight, sometimes it is better “to hold the coats of those who do.”  For the US national interest, “a better Asia would be one in which China, India, Japan, and possibly another ‘tiger’ or two contend with each other for power while we enjoy the happy luxury of third party by-standing.” |

Needless to say, this strategy would also have terrible consequences for the region.

A third strategy, one that Arrighi identifies with two old faces from the 20th century, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, does not see China as a revisionist power but as one that wants to join the global status quo.  The appropriate response for Washington is to accept China as part of the elite of the global state system and work with it in pursuit of international stability, in the same way that Britain, the hegemon of the 19th century, cooperated and made way for the United States, the hegemon of the 20th century.  

Arrighi prefers the third strategy.  Indeed, though still in essence conservative in that it seeks to preserve the global status quo, this is by far a preferable American response.  It is, however, the least likely to be adopted.  The problem is that imperial America is not like imperial Britain.  The US is ideologically an expansionist missionary democracy that will find it difficult to accept a No. 2 status without provoking a reactionary populist reaction among key segments of its population.  Aside from its powerful corporate and strategic drives, providing leadership in the messianic enterprise of remaking the world along the lines of a liberal or neoliberal Lockean democracy is a fundamental driving force of US hegemony.

Civil Society, China, and America
This conundrum inevitably leads to a discussion of how civil society, both in Asia and globally, ought to respond to the erosion of US hegemony and the ascent of China.  In the best of all possible worlds, the US and China could be supporters of the effort to create a new world order built on peace, justice, and popular sovereignty.  Unfortunately, we live in a less than ideal world 

With respect to China, the task of civil society is to pressure it, as it intensifies its engagement with the world, to resist the temptation of following the destructive imperial path trodden by Europe and the United States.  It is also to push it to move away from the fossil-fuel intensive, consumption-oriented path of development pioneered by the West to one that is more ecologically sustainable and sensitive to equity issues.  This will not be easy.  Nevertheless, there are signs of hope, one of them being the rethinking of the direction of China’s development that is going on among China’s leaders. One can only agree with Arrighi when he says:

If the reorientation succeeds in reviving and consolidating China’s traditions of self-centered market-based development, accumulation without dispossession, mobilization of human rather than non-human resources, and government through mass participation in shaping policies, then the chances are that China will be in a position to contribute decisively to the emergence of a commonwealth of civilizations truly respectful of differences.  But, if the reorientation fails, China may well turn into a new epicenter of social and political chaos that will facilitate Northern attempts to reestablish a crumbling global dominance. 

With the Chinese leadership’s great concern for legitimacy both internally and internationally, one cannot say that the failure of the proponents of reorientation is a foregone conclusion.  This is why pressure from international civil society for a change in economic strategy, for pro-environment policies, for the expansion of democratic rights, and for equitable relations with the developing countries must be kept up.

Towards a New American Isolationism
Blunting Washington’s innately hegemonic thrust will be much more difficult.  Difficult but not impossible. 

Perhaps the best strategy for civil society at this point is not so much to rely on appeals to American ideals but to continually point to the very high costs of intervention, in terms of soldiers killed, money spent, domestic strife, and credibility lost, to consistently campaign against any temptation for US forces to intervene on whatever grounds.  Part of this strategy must be pressure for the removal of the US military bases from Asia and the Pacific and the neutralizing of the bilateral treaties between the US and a number of Asian countries.  Aside from being the pillars for Washington’s containment of China, these institutions are the main factors that prevent China and other East Asian countries from evolving a more mature relationship. 

More broadly, the aim of civil society mobilization both in Asia and globally should be to encourage a new American isolationism. Barack Obama is definitely preferable to John McCain, but the world does not need a new American internationalism, this time of the liberal and “soft power variety.”  We should not tolerate a policy of withdrawing troops from Iraq, only to send them to Afghanistan in the name of defending human rights. We do not want in place of military confrontation, an aggressive diplomatic isolation of Iran led by a Democratic elite that is uncritical, as Obama is, of Israel.  We do not want an obsession with the Middle East to be replaced with an obsession with destabilizing Hugo Chavez and restoring US influence in Latin America.  And we should worry when Bill Clinton says, as he did during the Democratic Party convention, that one of Obama’s objectives will be to “restore American leadership in the world.”  Asia does not need or want American leadership.

What Asia, like the rest of the world, needs is a vacation from a messianic United States, and a few decades of a withdrawn, self absorbed, isolationist America, paying attention to its domestic troubles and deterred by the high costs of the continued pursuit of hegemony globally, would be good for the region, good for everybody. 
   
The Asia Pacific region, in sum, is pregnant with both dangers and possibilities, and there is, if anything, great indeterminacy, a great element of contingency on where we’re heading.  In times like this, when the possible and the impossible hang in a fine balance, it is important to remember the advice of that great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci about balancing the pessimism of the intellect with the optimism of the will.

* Walden Bello is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.  He is the author of, among other books, Dilemmas of Domination: TheUnmaking of the American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).

A Very Capitalist Disaster: Naomi Klein’s Take on the Neoliberal Saga

A critical review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007)

Walden Bello*, Republished from Focus on the Global South website.

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism is very impressive indeed. This is, however, not immediately evident, a sense that is confirmed by Joseph Stiglitz’ review of the book. Even before I read it, I was certain that the Nobel laureate would highlight Klein’s attempt to make a connection between the electric shock experiments performed by the notorious McGill University psychologist Ewen Cameron who was on contract with the CIA and the economic shock approach developed by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.

And indeed, he does, in the course of writing a typical New York Times Book Review piece that dares not evince too much enthusiasm for a book that comes from left field lest it provoke the ever-alert watchdogs of the right to question one’s credentials. Stiglitz, in fact, suggests that Klein’s analysis might be infected with conspiracy theory with his very first sentence: “[T]here are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein.” The Nobel laureate does have some positive things to say about the book, but he neutralizes this by dropping the line that Klein “is not an academic and must not be judged as one.” As for Klein’s central concept of “disaster capitalism,” it is mentioned once but otherwise ignored. It all adds up to damning with faint praise.

The New York school of publishing says that you win or lose your audience in the first few pages, but whatever their reason for bringing the Cameron experiments up front and strongly implying a link between the genesis of Cameron’s shock treatment and the Chicago School approach to economic policymaking, it is bad judgment on the part of Klein and her editors. What is transparently intended mainly as a dramatic device risks achieving its opposite. Conspiracy theory buffs will be elated but not the critical, discerning audience the book is aimed at.

Towering Work

Which is a pity since, despite this initial fumble, The Shock Doctrine recovers to emerge as a towering work, one that brilliantly follows neoliberalism’s march from marginal theology to universal policy. Klein combines the journalist’s eye for the arresting detail, the analyst’s ability to spot, surface, and dissect deeper trends, and a talent for telling a spell-binding story to prove once again that a masterful journalist can often illuminate social realities far better than the best-trained economist or political scientist.

With her ability to combine no-stones-left-unturned investigative reporting with in-depth social analysis, Klein is her generation’s David Halberstam, her Shock Doctrine and an earlier book No Logo being on par with The Best and the Brightest and War in a Time of Peace. There is one difference, though: Klein is unashamedly a woman of the left, and this is where her analysis derives both its power and its passion.

The Shock Doctrine traces neoliberalism’s rise to dominance to a program set up in the mid-fifties to enable Chilean students to imbibe the radical free-market doctrine being propagated by Milton Friedman and his associates at the University of Chicago, then an oasis of radical free-market thinking in a world dominated by Keynesianism in the United States and Europe and “developmentalism” or desarrollismo in Latin America, with their pragmatic compromises between the state and the market, labor and management, trade and development.

Los Chicago Boys

The opportunity for neoliberalism to come in from the cold arrived in the early seventies, when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the revolutionary government of President Salvador Allende in Chile and invited the “Chicago Boys” that had been waiting in the wings for years to manage the economy. With the population stunned by the coup, the “Chicago Boys” went about the task of swiftly dismantling the Keynesian and developmentalist compromises that underpinned one of Latin America’s most advanced industrial economies.

With a Year Zero mentality akin to the Khmer Rouge, they forced Chile’s overnight transformation into the free-market “paradise” prescribed by Friedman, a believer in seeing crisis as an opportunity for radical restructuring. It was, however, a paradise that could be created only with massive repression–and an even greater dose of repression was necessary to radically liberalize neighboring Argentina, where tens of thousands were murdered and over a hundred thousand were tortured by a murderous military regime that gave a free hand to free-market radicals to restructure the economy.

Some of Klein’s most original insights are found in her chapters on Bolivia, Poland, China, and South Africa. Bolivia, under the tutelage of a younger “Doctor Shock”–Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs–showed that neoliberal measures could be imposed by a democratically elected government if it was willing to resort to emergency measures, like arresting and isolating labor leaders. Poland, also advised by Sachs, showed how democratic transitions could actually be an opportunity to deliver a system-transforming shock that included eliminating price controls overnight, slashing subsidies, and rapidly privatizing state enterprises to a population that was still dazed by the collapse of communism.

There was no democratic transition in China, but Deng Hsiao Ping and his allies used the Tiananmen Square massacre and its aftermath, when the population was confused and paralyzed, to decisively advance and consolidate the ambitious capitalist reform program they had begun in the late seventies. Neither in Poland nor in China were people who were tired of communism clamoring for the free market, Klein emphatically points out; they were demanding greater popular, democratic control over economic policy.

South Africa

South Africa provided yet another route to neoliberalism. Here there was an element of stealth, with white business interests taking advantage of the African National Congress’ (ANC) overwhelming focus on the politics of achieving Black majority rule to preserve their property rights and install a conservative macroeconomic regime. But not everything was that subtle: big capital made clear their intention to leave should socialist policies be introduced, conveying the prospect of economic destabilization.

In these circumstances, the white elite found a valuable ally in chief ANC negotiator and future South African President Thabo Mbeki, who convinced Nelson Mandela that what was needed to stabilize the new regime was “something bold, something shocking that would communicate, in the broad, dramatic strokes the market understood, that the ANC was ready to embrace the neoliberal Washington Consensus.”

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s contribution was to show that neoliberal programs antithetical to the interests of the majority could be imposed in a western democracy if one was ruthless enough to exploit certain situations. For Thatcher, the war with Argentina over the Falklands in 1982 was a heaven-sent opportunity to enlist jingoism in the service of a radical program, one of her tactics being to portray the labor unions as the “enemy within.” Thatcher’s tactics prefigured those of George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, when he and his crew exploited the hysterical state of the population to declare a “war on terror” that was meant to kick-start a new phase of the neoliberal enterprise that Klein labels “disaster capitalism.” But before we go into this, let us pause to assess Klein’s analysis so far.

Great but…

Klein’s account is superb, but it is not without its flaws. For one, Klein has too rosy a view of the Keynesian state that reigned in the United States and Europe and the developmental state that dominated the Southern Cone in the period from late nineteen forties to the mid-seventies. She writes that owing to developmental regimes, “[T]he Southern Cone began to look more like Europe and North America than the rest of Latin America or other parts of the Third World.”

Again, “Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and the Third World could actually be closed.”

That certainly was not what it felt like at the time. Indeed, if the neoliberals walked in from the wilderness, it was because they were perceived as presenting an alternative, albeit untested, to economic systems in crisis. In the United States, the period of rapid economic growth fuelled partly by the reconstruction of Japan and Europe gave way to a state of stagnation cum inflation that was a symptom of a deeper crisis, the growing gap between enormous productive capacity and limited consumption, leading to erosion of profitability that Marxists have called the crisis of overproduction. In Latin America, the leading critics of the developmental state were found on the left, who charged that the process of industrial import substitution presided over by the state was “agotado,” or exhausted, owing to a domestic market limited by a very unequal distribution of income.

In the United States and Britain, the experience of seeing their salaries and savings eroded by double digit inflation made the middle strata receptive to the Friedmanite message. In Chile, they were initially receptive to the left’s critique of the developmental state. But when the left came to power with a socialist project in 1970, the middle classes–fearing the rise of the poor, whom they called rotos, or “lowlifes”– turned on the left with a vengeance, with the middle-class-based Christian Democrats joining the right on an anti-communist platform that shrilly proclaimed a defense of private property, capitalism, and “liberty.”

Neoliberal Ascendancy

This leads us to the question of how the neoliberals came to power. This was not simply a matter of the elite using the military or manipulating democracy to impose a neoliberal program on a recalcitrant but stunned population, which is the image that Klein’s account—wittingly or unwittingly—projects. This was not the case even in Klein’s paradigmatic example, Chile. Neoliberalism’s coming to ascendancy there involved the elite and the military acting in concert with a counterrevolutionary middle-class mass base that controlled the streets, with Christian Democratic youth joining their more fascist brethren, Fatherland and Liberty, in intimidating and beating up partisans of the left.

I know, since as a PhD student doing a dissertation on the rise of the counterrevolution, I was nearly beaten up a couple of times by angry anti-Allende middle class youths who insisted I was a Cuban agent sent to destroy Chile by Fidel. Sure, the CIA played a critical role, but it was in support of an already heated counterrevolution with a middle-class base, a process that was reminiscent of Italy and Germany in the post-World War I period.

In other words, in practically every instance, neoliberalism found a middle class that was disenchanted with the Keynesian or developmental state or felt threatened by the left, or both.

The Construction of Hegemony

This is why to counter Stiglitz’ suggestion that she operates with a conspiracy paradigm, Klein’s instrumentalist account must be supplemented with David Harvey’s notion of the “construction of hegemony,” a process by which the elite creates a consensus among the subordinate classes in support of a neoliberal project that principally serves its interests. (David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005])

In the case of the UK, it was not so much the jingoistic atmosphere of the Falklands War as the ideological captivation of the middle class by a conservative leader adept at evoking the themes of freedom, the individual, and property that was the tipping point towards neoliberal reform. Thatcher was an expert at promoting what Harvey calls a “seductive possessive individualism” and she “forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of homeownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial opportunities.”

The construction of consent was the main avenue to hegemony in the United States, where neoliberals deftly connected their free market program to the agenda of a middle class-based coalition that was propelled by resentment against minorities that were allegedly coddled by liberal democrats and by an inflamed attachment to religious values that were seen as being under attack from the left. “Not for the first time,” says Harvey, speaking of the ascendancy of the Republicans under Reagan, “nor, it is feared, for the last time in history has a social group voted against its material, economic, and class interests for cultural, nationalist, and religious reasons.”

Even some blue-collar workers were in danger of being coopted: “Greater freedom and liberty of action in the labor market could be touted as a virtue for capital and labor alike, and here, too, it was not hard to integrate neo-liberal values into the ‘common sense’ of the work force.”

Neoliberalism, in fact, became so “commonsensical” that even where social democratic parties have come to power, displacing the traditional conservative parties of neoliberalism, as they have in Britain, Chile, and the United States, they have not dared to reassemble the interventionist liberal state and have made it a point to pay homage to the “magic of the market.” Indeed, it has not been conservatives but social democrats such as the Blairites in Britain, the Clintonites in the United States, and the Socialist-led Concertacion government in Chile, with their rhetoric about “market-oriented social policies,” that have consolidated the neoliberal economic regime.

Crisis of the Keynesian State

The book’s most important contribution is its theory of “disaster capitalism.” But to fully appreciate Klein’s insight, it is important to go back to the roots of the crisis of the Keynesian state and the developmental state in the 1970’s that she glosses over. This crisis, which paved the way for the neoliberal ascendancy, had its origins in what economists have called the crisis of overaccumulation or overproduction.

The golden period of postwar growth globally that skirted major crises for nearly 25 years was due to the massive creation of effective demand via rising wages for labor in the North, the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and the import-substituting industrialization in Latin America and other parts of the South. This dynamic period came to a close in the mid-seventies, with stagnation setting in, owing to global productive capacity outrunning global demand, which was constrained by continuing deep inequalities in income distribution.

According to the calculations of Angus Maddison, the premier expert on historical statistical trends, the annual rate of growth of global gross domestic product (GDP) fell from 4.9% in what is now regarded as the golden age of the post-World War II Bretton Woods system, 1950-73, to 3% in 1973-89, a drop of 39%.

These figures reflected the wrenching combination of stagnation and inflation in the North, the crisis of import substitution industrialization in the South, and erosion of profit margins all around. For global capital, neoliberal policies, which included redistribution of income towards the top via tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and an assault on organized labor, were one escape route from the crisis of overproduction. Another was corporate-driven globalization, which opened up markets in the developing world and moved capital from high-wage to low-wage areas.

Financialization

A third was what Robert Brenner and others have called “financialization,” or the channeling of investment towards financial speculation, where much greater returns were to be derived than in industry, where profits were largely stagnant.

Feverish speculation triggered the proliferation of novel sophisticated speculative instruments like derivatives that escaped monitoring and regulation. Finance capital also forced the elimination of capital controls, the result being the rapid globalization of speculative capital to take advantage of differentials in interest and foreign exchange rates in different capital markets.

These volatile movements, the result of capital’s liberation from the fetters of the post-war Bretton Woods financial system, was one source of instability. What was fundamentally problematic with speculative finance, however, was that it boiled down to an effort to squeeze more “value” out of already created value instead of creating new value since the latter option was precluded by the problem of overproduction in the real economy. But the divergence between momentary financial indicators like stock prices and real values can only proceed to a point before reality bites back and enforces a “correction,” like the recent collapse of stocks tied up in myriad Byzantine ways to overvalued subprime mortgages. Corrections or crises have become more frequent in the neoliberal era, with one Brookings study counting about 100 over the last 30 years.

At any rate, neoliberal policies, globalization, and financialization, while restoring and strengthening elite power by redistributing income from the bottom to the top, have not been effective in reinvigorating global capital accumulation. Its actual record, Harvey points out, “turns out to be nothing short of dismal.” Aggregate annual global growth rates came to 1.4% in the 1980s and 1.1% in the 1990s, compared to 3.5% in the 1960s and 2.4% in the 1970s.

Disaster Capitalism

It is this fundamental failure of finance-driven capitalism to reignite vigorous capital accumulation that allows us to fully appreciate Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism and David Harvey’s closely related notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” Both may be seen as the latest desperate effort of an increasingly sputtering capitalist machine’s effort to surmount the persistent and deepening crisis of overproduction.

In the last few years, stagnation or weak growth has marked most areas of the world economy, with the exception of China and India. U.S. growth has been higher than that of sclerotic Europe, but it has been largely illusory, being largely the result of middle-class spending fuelled by massive credit from China and East Asia. China has to lend to the United States to keep up demand for its cheap-labor based export-industrial sector, but the expansion of its production has itself contributed mightily to the overcapacity, overproduction, and shrinking profitability plaguing the whole global system. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recognized that the world is skating on thin ice, which could break should American consumers rein in their debt-driven spending, as they now seem to be doing.

In its efforts to surmount the crisis, capitalism has increasingly supplemented, if not supplanted accumulation through production with accumulation through dispossession, or the expropriation of already created wealth or sources of wealth akin to the process of primitive accumulation that marked early capitalism in the 14th to the 17th centuries. Accumulation by dispossession involves an acceleration of the privatization and commodification of the commons, which includes not only land but also the environment and knowledge. Millions of peasants and indigenous peoples are displaced from the soil as private property supplants common property or communal regimes, often with the active support of institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Seeds, the end-result of eons of interaction between nature and human communities, are now privatized through mechanisms such as the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs), which has also dampened technological development in the South owing to fear of infringing on the patents of northern corporations.

Contracting Out the War on Terror

A key mechanism for accumulation by dispossession is the accelerated privatization of hitherto public or state assets, which is what disaster capitalism is all about. Disaster capitalism is the Bush administration’s central contribution to neoliberalism. Its key feature is the parceling out to the private sector of the “core” functions of security, defense, and infrastructure that Adam Smith himself thought had to be left to the state. Through the “war on terror,” Klein writes, the Bush administration brought about:

“The creation of the disaster capitalism complex—a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalization and the dot-com booms had left off. Just as the Internet launched the dot-com bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble…It was the pinnacle of the counter-revolution launched by Friedman. For decades, the market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.”

In the disaster capitalism paradigm, the state serves as the engine of capital accumulation— that is, it raises capital via taxes, then transfers it to private contractors that take over its core functions, from defense to incarceration to the provision of infrastructure. Security provision becomes the new growth industry, incorporating but going beyond the old military-industrial complex. Disaster, either of the natural kind like Katrina or the socially created kind like Iraq, is seen as opportunity in several ways. It creates demand for a commodity, that is, for security or reconstruction. By taking advantage of natural disasters, it provides the opportunity to alter the physical landscape and “add value” to it, by sweeping away “value-deprived” poor communities and converting the land to upscale commercial or residential real estate, as in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Finally, as in Iraq, war becomes the instrument to erase the old interventionist state and create from scratch the ideal neoliberal government whose key function is to delegate its own functions to private contractors, like the engineering firm Bechtel or the notorious private security firm Blackwater. “In Iraq,” Klein writes, “there was not a single governmental function that was considered so “core” that it could not be handed to a contractor, preferably one who provided the Republican Party with financial contributions or Christian footsoldiers during elections campaigns. The usual Bush motto governed all aspects of the foreign forces’ involvement in Iraq: if a task could be performed by a private entity, it must be.”

The problem, of course, is that disaster capitalism is so brazenly anti-people that even dressed up in the rhetoric of freedom, entrepreneurship, and efficiency, it cannot win over people in the way early neoliberal ideology was able to captivate the middle classes in the era of Reagan and Thatcher. Reading Klein’s chilling account, one wonders how Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, could not have realized that the decrees he made which had the effect of making Iraqi youth a surplus population in a society where the state functioned mainly to enrich foreign contractors would turn them into insurgents. Disaster capitalism and accumulation by dispossession represent a capitalist order that no longer seeks ideological hegemony but seeks to impose itself through pure force. This is not sustainable.

Klein’s last chapter, which looks at the vast and varied global movement that has risen against what French thinkers call “savage capitalism” shows that, as Gramsci noted, nothing can remain hegemonic for long without legitimacy. People have become both more hopeful and more savvy: they will not be easily subjected to another neoliberal shock.

Klein Past versus Klein Present

So here’s the inevitable question: which is the better book, No Logo or The Shock Doctrine? This is not an easy choice, but I would land on the side of No Logo.

Let me explain. The critical edge, analytical sharpness, and passion of No Logo are to be found in The Shock Doctrine as well. But there is something different about the writing. In a review I did for Yes! in 2001, I wrote: “No Logo is compelling, but it’s not an easy read. Reading Klein is like serving alongside a skilled commander who relentlessly probes the enemy’s many defenses to locate the principal point of vulnerability. And just when the reader thinks Klein has identified the key to the defense, she reveals that this is only one episode in unraveling the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. This is deconstructive writing at its best, the product of a first-rate, restless mind that is not satisfied with drawing a solitary insight or two from her material.”

Reading The Shock Doctrine is a different experience. You don’t need to work. You’re like a tourist being guided on a well-lit path where there are few surprises.

I much prefer the discourse of No Logo, and I certainly do not relish being subjected at the very beginning to a literary shock treatment that has no other purpose but to prod me to read further. That flaw—and the change in style–I prefer to attribute not so much to the Toronto-based Klein but to the New York School of publishing, which, like Hollywood, much prefers an in-your-face approach to a more allusive, more indirect, less predictable but ultimately more enlightening discourse.

*Walden Bello is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. Bello is also a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based institute Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman. He is the author of Walden Bello Presents Ho Chi Minh (London: Verso, 2007), Dilemmas of Domination (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005) and Deglobalization (London: Zed, 2002).

Further Resources:

After Shock: Interview with Naomi Klein

A World Occupied by Profit: Interview with Naomi Klein

Watch a video interview with Naomi Klein and a short video on The Shock Doctrine

Northeast Summit: On the Map, On the Mind

This forthcoming summit follows up on the panel ‘Northeast India - On the Map, Off the Mind’ at the Summit of the Powerless in New Delhi, India, 2006.

Visit the summit website!

The focus of this summit in Guwahati will be to examine and critically discuss what keeps the Northeast “off” the mind. TEHELKA seeks to look for a crucial, alternate, neutral space to bring the front running minds of all relevant groups to a common table; to generate a common fount of thought; to spark the will to look for creative and humane ways out of the historic and tragic mess that many parts of the Northeast have become; to concretely work towards peace and a positively integrated society in the entire region.

The discussions will be on:

POLICIES FOR THE NORTHEAST - TAKING STOCK
Northeast India, beautiful, multi-cultured and layered with history as it is, is also now a region in roil. The reasons for this roil are complex and deep; some issues are internal and territorial while others are collectively deep rooted issues of political identity and social history. Very often Central policies have magnified these divides. Fractures that appeared 60 years ago have been left to widen. It is critical to confront some of these gaps, before they drift apart irreconcilably.

SECURITY AND MILITARIZATION - THE AFSPA, SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVE MECHANISMS
The region is under high national security for 2 ostensible reasons:
a) its strategic international borders.
b) to contain and quell internal unrest.

What is the future of the people of the Northeast? Is there an alternate road to peace and reconciliation? Can we actively work towards repealing the AFSPA? Can there be a vocabulary other than that of violence to achieve real peace and security? Can the historic shift be triggered by public thought and public question?

DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES & FUND FLOW -SENSITIZED, INCLUSIVE AND EQUITABLE FUTURE
Recently development is being fuelled at great velocity in the region, with huge amounts of money being channeled through various agencies. The Look East policy is a favourite flag. However the kind of development and the haste with which it is being implemented could prove unfit for this vulnerable region. It is crucial to ensure that the future is crafted with a secure eye on morality: social, political, ecological and economic. It may also be an opportune time to rethink borders and work towards economic and cultural interflow in the South Asia region.

For queries related to the Summit:

Geetan Batra, E-mail: geetan@tehelka.com and events@tehelka.com

Unembedded in Iraq: From Bechtel’s broken water pumps to the battle of Fallujah, Dahr Jamail’s upcoming new book tells the story of the occupation through Iraq’s eyes.

Immediately after the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, U.S. forces raided a secondary school and detained 16 children for having a “pro-Saddam Hussein demonstration.”

By Dahr Jamail, The Indypendent, October 7, 2007

From Bechtel’s broken water pumps to the battle of Fallujah, Dahr Jamail’s upcoming new book tells the story of the occupation through Iraq’s eyes.

Now a reknowned war correspondent, Dahr Jamail was working in 2003 as a freelance writer and a mountain guide in Alaska’s Denali National Park while the mainstream media was hyping the invasion of Iraq.

“I had done all the usual actions of attempting to speak up and effect change at home — calling and writing Senators/Congresspeople, attending teach-ins, spreading information,” Jamail said in a Dec. 2004 interview with antiwar.com. “I knew then that the minds of the American public had been misled by the corporate media who mindlessly supported the objectives of the Bush regime, and [that] reporting the true effects of the invasion/occupation on the Iraqi people and U.S. soldiers was what I needed to do.”

Jamail, a fourth-generation Lebanese American, saved his money, bought a ticket to Iraq, and began posting frontline dispatches on his blog, dahrjamailiraq.com. As the insurgency expanded and the mainstream media retreated into well-guarded enclaves, his unembedded coverage brought to life everything from the day-to-day struggles of Iraqis living under occupation to the U.S. atrocities in the first Battle of Fallujah.

The following excerpts are from Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, a synthesis of Jamail’s reporting from 2003-2005, which will be released by Haymarket Books on Oct. 15, 2007.

STAGE-MANAGED LIBERATION

Writing from Baghdad in early December of 2003, Dahr Jamail described two street scenes typical of life under the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority.

Roughly 500 people, who conveniently lined up on the street in front of the journalist-filled Palestine Hotel, were preparing to march the few blocks toward Firdos Square. Out in front was a line of young children, roughly ten years of age, carrying small bouquets of flowers. Following them were two drummers and a very bad trumpet player who blew the same terrible song over and over as the procession made its way down the street. Many in the crowd carried banners that read, “Thank You CPA for Freeing Iraq,” and others of similar content, while armed guards buffered the small group from the public. As they marched past concrete blast barriers that had “Troops Out Now” and “America go home!” spray-painted in red in English on them, the tiny procession wasn’t too convincing to the few onlookers who were present. (This was the first of many stage-managed “demonstrations” I was to witness in occupied Iraq.)

Walking back to our hotel, we passed a small, decrepit petrol station with two lines of cars stretching as far as we could see, waiting for gas. There was a separate line for black-marketers, who were lined up with their jerrycans and plastic jugs awaiting their chance. The black market was burgeoning. Those who could afford the extra cost were less willing to wait in the ever-lengthening lines as the gas crisis worsened.

The blackmarketers took their plastic jugs to the petrol stations, filled them, walked down the street a few meters and used siphons and plastic funnels to pour gas into the empty tanks of those able to pay a little extra. Everyone from small children to elderly men on crutches was doing this. Meanwhile short-tempered Iraqis were jamming their cars toward the pumps, some having slept overnight in their cars in order to keep their place in line.

“And the Americans try to tell us this war was not about our oil,” yelled a man while pushing his car. He agreed to talk with us as long as we stayed out of his way. “Even under that bastard Saddam we never had benzene [gasoline] shortages!” I’d seen these lines all over Baghdad. Gas lines were so thick in some areas that traffic would often get choked down to a single lane, further aggravating the already impossible chaos of Baghdad’s auto congestion.

BECHTEL LEAVES IRAQIS HIGH AND DRY

Barely a week after the fall of Baghdad, on April 17, 2003, the San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation was awarded a “cost-plus-fixed-fee” contract worth up to $680 million for reconstruction projects in Iraq. Its mandate included rebuilding Iraq’s much-needed water-treatment plants. In January 2004, Jamail ventured south of Baghdad to investigate Bechtel’s work on the water infrastructure.

A man in a village in southern Iraq demonstrates how Bechtel left his village without access to clean water.

The first city we came upon was Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad. We pulled off the paved highway onto a bumpy road. Leaving a growing plume of dust behind us, we slowly approached a crumbling farmhouse situated amid vegetable fields and date palms.

An old man with a weathered face that bore the attrition of exhaustion met us in front of his home. His first words to us were a plea for help — for drinking water, for some work, for anything that could ease his struggle. As we spoke with him, he walked us to a scrappy water pump that sat lifeless near an empty container.

A rubber hose cracked from the blistering sun was coiled limply on the dirt, near a hole that he said he tried to fill with water with his pump whenever their two hours of electricity appeared. Essentially, they had no electricity, and what little water they did get was loaded with salt from the region, and left those who used it sick with nausea, diarrhea, kidney stones, cramps and cholera.

Besides apprising us of the desperate water situation, the old man asked us if we could help him find his cousin. “We just want to know if he’s dead so we can bury the body.” In a village just outside of Hilla, several men told a similar story. There was no running water to speak of and barely two to four hours of electricity per day, during which they tried to run their feeble pumps to draw contaminated water from a polluted stream for their families to use. An old man named Hussin Hamsa Nagem bemoaned, “We are all sick with stomach problems and kidney stones. Our crops are dying.”

Later that afternoon, at another small village between Hilla and Najaf, we found that fifteen hundred people had no other source of drinking water than the dirty stream that trickled by their homes. Most people in the village suffered from dysentery, many had developed kidney stones, and a huge number had cholera.

After spending a night in Najaf, we visited yet another village on the outskirts of the city. Here, the people had taken an initiative and collected funds from each house in order to install new pipes. But in the absence of regular electricity and water from the Najaf center, their initiative could bear no fruit.

The villagers had dug a large hole in the ground, where they tapped into already existing pipes to siphon water. At night, when there was a supply of electricity, water from the tapped pipes collected in the dirt hole. The morning of our visit, we watched the operation. Children stood around as women collected what little bit of dirty water remained in the bottom of the hole.

Here, too, waterborne diseases such as dysentery and cholera, plus nausea, diarrhea, and kidney stones, were widespread. Women had to walk half a mile down to a stream to collect water for their homes.

In the same stream other women had to do their water-related chores, like dishes and laundry. Eight children from the village had been killed when attempting to cross the busy highway on their way to a nearby factory in order to retrieve clean water. Some children had even drowned in this stream while collecting water.

Mr. Mehdi was the engineer and assistant manager at the Najaf water distribution center. With help from the ICRC and the Spanish Army, the center had initiated some of the rebuilding on its own. Mehdi told me Bechtel had begun working on the Arzaga Water Project to help bring water into the city center of Najaf. He said Bechtel had started the previous month, painting buildings, cleaning and repairing storage tanks, and repairing and replacing sand filters. This was the only project Mehdi knew of that Bechtel had been working on in Najaf. He told us, “Bechtel is repairing some water facilities, but not improving the electricity any, which is also their responsibility. Their work has not produced any more clean water than what we already had. Bechtel has not spoken with us, or promised to help us do anything else.” There had been no work on desalinization, which was critical in the area, nor any other purification processes.

I asked Mehdi how successful Bechtel had been in restoring electrical service to his water facility. “At least thirty percent of Najaf doesn’t have clean water because of lack of electricity,” he said. Najaf has a population of roughly 600,000 people.

Bechtel had claimed it would have the Najaf sewage treatment plant fully restored and functioning by June 2004. (When I was in Iraq from April through June 2004, the treatment plant was still not functioning anywhere near capacity.)

FALLUJAH UNDER SIEGE

Following the deaths of four Blackwater mercenaries in Fallujah on March 31, 2004, U.S. forces besieged the city. Reports of hundreds of civilians being killed helped spark joint Sunni and Shiite revolts that nearly overwhelmed the U.S. occupation. Facing an international outcry, Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer, III announced on April 9 “a unilateral suspension of offensive operations in Fallujah.” The following day, Jamail and other journalists joined a humanitarian-aid convoy to Fallujah to find a city still under attack.

According to residents and doctors in Falluja, U.S. military snipers were killing so many people and shooting so often that residents were forced to turn a soccer field into a cemetery.

Fallujah seemed devoid of all people other than groups of mujahedeen who stood on every other street corner. Most residents had either evacuated or chosen to hide in their homes. The marines had occupied the northeastern edge of Fallujah, but most of the town was occupied by local Sunni as well as Shi’ite members of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army, who had come in from Baghdad and the south.

There seemed to be separate groups of mujahedeen in charge of different parts of the city and the various roads in and out of it. Between the clearly marked territories of the mujahedeen and the marines was a no-man’s-land. Sounds of sporadic gunfire, warplanes and bombs were punctuated by an electrically charged silence, a push-pull of frenetic deadly action followed by more of the dreadful, anticipatory silence.

We rolled toward the one small clinic where we were to deliver our medical supplies. The small clinic was managed by Maki al-Nazzal, who was hired just four days ago. He was not a doctor. The other makeshift clinic in Fallujah was in a mechanic’s garage. He had barely slept in the past week, nor had any of the doctors at the small clinic. Originally, the clinic had just three doctors, but since the U.S. military bombed one of the hospitals and were currently sniping at people as they attempted to enter or exit the main hospital, effectively there were only these two small clinics treating the entire city.

The boxes of medical supplies we brought into the clinic were torn open immediately by the desperate doctors. A woman entered, slapping her chest and face, and wailing as her husband carried in the dying body of her little boy. Blood was trickling off one of his arms, which dangled out of his father’s arms. Thus began my witnessing of an endless stream of women and children who had been shot by the U.S. soldiers and were now being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front, and weeping family members carrying in their wounded.

One eighteen-year-old girl had been shot through the neck. She was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amid her muffled moaning. Flies dodged the working hands of doctors to return to the patches of her vomit that stained her black abaya.

Her younger brother, a small child of ten with a gunshot wound in his head from a marine sniper, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life while family members cried behind me. “The Americans cut our electricity days ago, so we cannot vacuum the vomit from his throat,” a furious doctor told me. They were both loaded into an ambulance and rushed toward Baghdad, only to die en route.

Another small child lay on a blood-spattered bed, also shot by a sniper. The boy’s grandmother lay nearby, shot as she was attempting to carry children from their home and flee the city. She lay on a bed dying, still clutching a bloodied white surrender flag. Hundreds of families were trapped in their homes, terrorized by U.S. snipers shooting from rooftops and the minarets of mosques whenever they saw someone move past a window.

Blood bags were being kept in a food refrigerator, warmed under running water before being given to patients. There were no anesthetics. The lights went out as the generator ran dry of fuel, so the doctors, who had been working for days on end, worked by light provided by men holding up cigarette lighters or flashlights as the sun set. Needless to say, there was no air-conditioning inside the steamy “clinic.”

One victim of the U.S. military aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children, carried by weeping family members.

Those who had not been hit by bombs from warplanes had been shot by U.S. snipers. The one functioning ambulance left at this clinic sat outside with bullet holes in the sides and a small group of shots right on the driver side of the windshield. The driver, his head bandaged from being grazed by the bullet of a sniper, refused to go collect any more of the dead and wounded.

Standing near the ambulance in frustration, Maki told us, “They [U.S. soldiers] shot the ambulance and they shot the driver after they checked his car, inspected his car, and knew that he was carrying nothing. Then they shot him. And then they shot the ambulance.

… The stream of patients slowed to a sporadic influx as night fell. Maki sat with me as we shared cigarettes in a small office in the rear of the clinic. “For all my life, I believed in American democracy,” he told me with an exhausted voice. “For 47 years, I had accepted the illusion of Europe and the United States being good for the world, the carriers of democracy and freedom. Now I see that it took me 47 years to wake up to the horrible truth. They are not here to bring anything like democracy or freedom.”

According to residents and doctors in Falluja, U.S. military snipers were killing so many people and shooting so often that residents were forced to turn a soccer field into a cemetery.

SHOOT FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS NEVER

Shortly after the first Battle of Fallujah, Jamail returned to Baghdad to find a people being ground down by the war.

Seventeen-year-old Amir was crying during much of the interview. “We were coming home from work, and were shot so many times,” he said with deep anguish and frustration. “Walid told me to leave the car because he was hurt and needed help.”

Bodies in a cooler at the morgue of Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital. Even before the Jan. 30, 2005 elections, morgues across the capital city were filled to capacity on nearly a daily basis.

Walid Mohammed Abrahim was a carpenter, and Amir worked as his apprentice. On May 13, U.S. troops occupying an Iraqi police station in the al-Adhamiya district of Baghdad gunned down their small car as they traveled home after a long day of work. “I still can’t believe Walid is killed,” whimpered Amir, crying inside the home of Abrahim’s brother. “He is like my brother, he was so decent and honest. So many people are killed because of their crazy, haphazard shooting.” U.S. troops riddled the car with more than 25 bullets.

While they were driving past an Iraqi police station, a resistance fighter fired upon the station from a building on nearly the opposite end of the station from their car. But, being the closest moving object, Walid and Amir were the most convenient suspected targets.

Abrahim’s brother, Khalid Mohammed Abrahim, was beside himself with grief. “All my brother was doing was coming home from work.” He explained that his brother was a kind man, with no involvement in the resistance, and did not even own a weapon. “Why has my brother been killed? They searched his car and knew he was innocent. All we seek is for God to give us patience to deal with such conditions.” Later that afternoon, I went to the home of an Iraqi policeman who had been at the station that night and who agreed to confirm the incident on condition of anonymity. He said Mr. Abrahim had passed the police station on his way home to Adhamiya at 2:00 a.m.

Due to much celebratory gunfire earlier in the night, following the Iraqi soccer team’s victory over Saudi Arabia, which earned them a trip to the Olympics, U.S. soldiers had occupied the police station in the district. The police report of the incident stated that Abrahim’s car was shot 29 times, with Abrahim suffering two gunshots in the head and five in the chest. Another policeman who was at the station when the incident occurred, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that when several men attempted to pull Abrahim from the car, U.S. troops opened fire on them. “This is the usual policy of the Americans. They always shoot first, because there is nobody to punish them for their mistakes.”

“It was the Americans who shot Mr. Abrahim, and not Iraqi police, because none of us were even allowed on the roof,” he stated firmly, before adding that he personally had between 150 to 200 files of incidents in which U.S. occupation forces had killed innocent Iraqis, and that several other Iraqi policemen at his station had a similar number.

US/Indo Nuclear Agreement: Derailing a Deal

Noam Chomsky*, AlterNet, October 7, 2007

NUCLEAR-armed states are criminal states. They have a legal obligation, confirmed by the World Court, to live up to Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which calls on them to carry out good-faith negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely. None of the nuclear states has lived up to it.The United States is a leading violator, especially the Bush administration, which even has stated that it isn’t subject to Article 6.

On July 27, Washington entered into an agreement with India that guts the central part of the NPT, though there remains substantial opposition in both countries. India, like Israel and Pakistan (but unlike Iran), is not an NPT signatory, and has developed nuclear weapons outside the treaty. With this new agreement, the Bush administration effectively endorses and facilitates this outlaw behaviour. The agreement violates US law, and bypasses the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the 45 nations that have established strict rules to lessen the danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, observes that the agreement doesn’t bar further Indian nuclear testing and, “incredibly, … commits Washington to help New Delhi secure fuel supplies from other countries even if India resumes testing.” It also permits India to “free up its limited domestic supplies for bomb production.” All these steps are in direct violation of international nonproliferation agreements.

The Indo-US agreement is likely to prompt others to break the rules as well. Pakistan is reported to be building a plutonium production reactor for nuclear weapons, apparently beginning a more advanced phase of weapons design. Israel, the regional nuclear superpower, has been lobbying Congress for privileges similar to India’s, and has approached the Nuclear Suppliers Group with requests for exemption from its rules. Now France, Russia and Australia have moved to pursue nuclear deals with India, as China has with Pakistan - hardly a surprise, once the global superpower has opened the door.

The Indo-US deal mixes military and commercial motives. Nuclear weapons specialist Gary Milhollin noted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s testimony to Congress that the agreement was “crafted with the private sector firmly in mind,” particularly aircraft and reactors and, Milhollin stresses, military aircraft. By undermining the barriers against nuclear war, he adds, the agreement not only increases regional tensions but also “may hasten the day when a nuclear explosion destroys an American city.” Washington’s message is that “export controls are less important to the United States than money” - that is, profits for US corporations - whatever the potential threat. Kimball points out that the United States is granting India “terms of nuclear trade more favourable than those for states that have assumed all the obligations and responsibilities” of the NPT. In most of the world, few can fail to see the cynicism. Washington rewards allies and clients that ignore the NPT rules entirely, while threatening war against Iran, which is not known to have violated the NPT, despite extreme provocation: The United States has occupied two of Iran’s neighbours and openly sought to overthrow the Iranian regime since it broke free of US control in 1979.

Over the past few years, India and Pakistan have made strides towards easing the tensions between the two countries. People-to-people contacts have increased and the governments are in discussion over the many outstanding issues that divide the two states. Those promising developments may well be reversed by the Indo-US nuclear deal. One of the means to build confidence throughout the region was the creation of a natural gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan into India. The “peace pipeline” would have tied the region together and opened the possibilities for further peaceful integration.

The pipeline, and the hope it offers, might become a casualty of the Indo-US agreement, which Washington sees as a measure to isolate its Iranian enemy by offering India nuclear power in exchange for Iranian gas - though in fact India would gain only a fraction of what Iran could provide.

The Indo-US deal continues the pattern of Washington’s taking every measure to isolate Iran. In 2006, the US Congress passed the Hyde Act, which specifically demanded that the US government “secure India’s full and active participation in United States efforts to dissuade, isolate, and if necessary, sanction and contain Iran for its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”

It is noteworthy that the great majority of Americans - and Iranians - favour converting the entire region to a nuclear-weapons free zone, including Iran and Israel. One may also recall that UN Security Council Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, to which Washington regularly appealed when seeking justification for its invasion of Iraq, calls for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery.”

Clearly, ways to mitigate current crises aren’t lacking.

This Indo-US agreement richly deserves to be derailed. The threat of nuclear war is extremely serious, and growing, and part of the reason is that the nuclear states - led by the United States - simply refuse to live up to their obligations or are significantly violating them, this latest effort being another step toward disaster.

The US Congress gets a chance to weigh in on this deal after the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group vet it. Perhaps Congress, reflecting a citizenry fed up with nuclear gamesmanship, can reject the agreement. A better way to go forward is to pursue the need for global nuclear disarmament, recognising that the very survival of the species is at stake.

Noam Chomsky’s most recent book is Interventions, a collection of his commentary pieces distributed by The New York Times Syndicate. Chomsky is Emeritus Professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. USA.

Shifting Targets: The US Administration’s plan for Iran

By Seymour M. Hersh*, The New Yorker, October 1, 2007

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary-that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians-have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has made it clear that the United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran. The State Department is working diligently along with the international community to address our broad range of concerns.” (The White House declined to comment.)

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002″-the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”

In a speech at the United Nations last week, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was defiant. He referred to America as an “aggressor” state, and said, “How can the incompetents who cannot even manage and control themselves rule humanity and arrange its affairs? Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God.” (The day before, at Columbia, he suggested that the facts of the Holocaust still needed to be determined.)

“A lot depends on how stupid the Iranians will be,” Brzezinski told me. “Will they cool off Ahmadinejad and tone down their language?” The Bush Administration, by charging that Iran was interfering in Iraq, was aiming “to paint it as ‘We’re responding to what is an intolerable situation,’ ” Brzezinski said. “This time, unlike the attack in Iraq, we’re going to play the victim. The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to overplay their hand.”

General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, in his report to Congress in September, buttressed the Administration’s case against Iran. “None of us, earlier this year, appreciated the extent of Iranian involvement in Iraq, something about which we and Iraq’s leaders all now have greater concern,” he said. Iran, Petraeus said, was fighting “a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.”

Iran has had a presence in Iraq for decades; the extent and the purpose of its current activities there are in dispute, however. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, when the Sunni-dominated Baath Party brutally oppressed the majority Shiites, Iran supported them. Many in the present Iraqi Shiite leadership, including prominent members of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, spent years in exile in Iran; last week, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Maliki said, according to the Washington Post, that Iraq’s relations with the Iranians had “improved to the point that they are not interfering in our internal affairs.” Iran is so entrenched in Iraqi Shiite circles that any “proxy war” could be as much through the Iraqi state as against it. The crux of the Bush Administration’s strategic dilemma is that its decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam has empowered Iran, and made it impossible to exclude Iran from the Iraqi political scene.

Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, who is an expert on Iran and Shiism, told me, “Between 2003 and 2006, the Iranians thought they were closest to the United States on the issue of Iraq.” The Iraqi Shia religious leadership encouraged Shiites to avoid confrontation with American soldiers and to participate in elections-believing that a one-man, one-vote election process could only result in a Shia-dominated government. Initially, the insurgency was mainly Sunni, especially Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Nasr told me that Iran’s policy since 2003 has been to provide funding, arms, and aid to several Shiite factions-including some in Maliki’s coalition. The problem, Nasr said, is that “once you put the arms on the ground you cannot control how they’re used later.”

In the Shiite view, the White House “only looks at Iran’s ties to Iraq in terms of security,” Nasr said. “Last year, over one million Iranians travelled to Iraq on pilgrimages, and there is more than a billion dollars a year in trading between the two countries. But the Americans act as if every Iranian inside Iraq were there to import weapons.”

Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran poses an imminent threat. In a recent essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force.” Podhoretz concluded, “I pray with all my heart” that President Bush “will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel.” Podhoretz recently told politico.com that he had met with the President for about forty-five minutes to urge him to take military action against Iran, and believed that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before leaving office. (Podhoretz, one of the founders of neoconservatism, is a strong backer of Rudolph Giuliani’s Presidential campaign, and his son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is a senior adviser to President Bush on national security.)

In early August, Army Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Times about an increase in attacks involving explosively formed penetrators, a type of lethal bomb that discharges a semi-molten copper slug that can rip through the armor of Humvees. The Times reported that U.S. intelligence and technical analyses indicated that Shiite militias had obtained the bombs from Iran. Odierno said that Iranians had been “surging support” over the past three or four months.

Questions remain, however, about the provenance of weapons in Iraq, especially given the rampant black market in arms. David Kay, a former C.I.A. adviser and the chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations, told me that his inspection team was astonished, in the aftermath of both Iraq wars, by “the huge amounts of arms” it found circulating among civilians and military personnel throughout the country. He recalled seeing stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators, as well as charges that had been recovered from unexploded American cluster bombs. Arms had also been supplied years ago by the Iranians to their Shiite allies in southern Iraq who had been persecuted by the Baath Party.

“I thought Petraeus went way beyond what Iran is doing inside Iraq today,” Kay said. “When the White House started its anti-Iran campaign, six months ago, I thought it was all craziness. Now it does look like there is some selective smuggling by Iran, but much of it has been in response to American pressure and American threats-more a ‘shot across the bow’ sort of thing, to let Washington know that it was not going to get away with its threats so freely. Iran is not giving the Iraqis the good stuff-the anti-aircraft missiles that can shoot down American planes and its advanced anti-tank weapons.”

Another element of the Administration’s case against Iran is the presence of Iranian agents in Iraq. General Petraeus, testifying before Congress, said that a commando faction of the Revolutionary Guards was seeking to turn its allies inside Iraq into a “Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests.” In August, Army Major General Rick Lynch, the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, told reporters in Baghdad that his troops were tracking some fifty Iranian men sent by the Revolutionary Guards who were training Shiite insurgents south of Baghdad. “We know they’re here and we target them as well,” he said.

Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me that “there are a lot of Iranians at any time inside Iraq, including those doing intelligence work and those doing humanitarian missions. It would be prudent for the Administration to produce more evidence of direct military training-or produce fighters captured in Iraq who had been trained in Iran.” He added, “It will be important for the Iraqi government to be able to state that they were unaware of this activity”; otherwise, given the intense relationship between the Iraqi Shiite leadership and Tehran, the Iranians could say that “they had been asked by the Iraqi government to train these people.” (In late August, American troops raided a Baghdad hotel and arrested a group of Iranians. They were a delegation from Iran’s energy ministry, and had been invited to Iraq by the Maliki government; they were later released.)

“If you want to attack, you have to prepare the groundwork, and you have to be prepared to show the evidence,” Clawson said. Adding to the complexity, he said, is a question that seems almost counterintuitive: “What is the attitude of Iraq going to be if we hit Iran? Such an attack could put a strain on the Iraqi government.”

A senior European diplomat, who works closely with American intelligence, told me that there is evidence that Iran has been making extensive preparation for an American bombing attack. “We know that the Iranians are strengthening their air-defense capabilities,” he said, “and we believe they will react asymmetrically-hitting targets in Europe and in Latin America.” There is also specific intelligence suggesting that Iran will be aided in these attacks by Hezbollah. “Hezbollah is capable, and they can do it,” the diplomat said.

In interviews with current and former officials, there were repeated complaints about the paucity of reliable information. A former high-level C.I.A. official said that the intelligence about who is doing what inside Iran “is so thin that nobody even wants his name on it. This is the problem.”

The difficulty of determining who is responsible for the chaos in Iraq can be seen in Basra, in the Shiite south, where British forces had earlier presided over a relatively secure area. Over the course of this year, however, the region became increasingly ungovernable, and by fall the British had retreated to fixed bases. A European official who has access to current intelligence told me that “there is a firm belief inside the American and U.K. intelligence community that Iran is supporting many of the groups in southern Iraq that are responsible for the deaths of British and American soldiers. Weapons and money are getting in from Iran. They have been able to penetrate many groups”-primarily the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias.

A June, 2007, report by the International Crisis Group found, however, that Basra’s renewed instability was mainly the result of “the systematic abuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias.” The report added that leading Iraqi politicians and officials “routinely invoke the threat of outside interference”-from bordering Iran-”to justify their behavior or evade responsibility for their failures.”

Earlier this year, before the surge in U.S. troops, the American command in Baghdad changed what had been a confrontational policy in western Iraq, the Sunni heartland (and the base of the Baathist regime), and began working with the Sunni tribes, including some tied to the insurgency. Tribal leaders are now getting combat support as well as money, intelligence, and arms, ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Empowering Sunni forces may undermine efforts toward national reconciliation, however. Already, tens of thousands of Shiites have fled Anbar Province, many to Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, while Sunnis have been forced from their homes in Shiite communities. Vali Nasr, of Tufts, called the internal displacement of communities in Iraq a form of “ethnic cleansing.”

“The American policy of supporting the Sunnis in western Iraq is making the Shia leadership very nervous,” Nasr said. “The White House makes it seem as if the Shia were afraid only of Al Qaeda-but they are afraid of the Sunni tribesmen we are arming. The Shia attitude is ‘So what if you’re getting rid of Al Qaeda?’ The problem of Sunni resistance is still there. The Americans believe they can distinguish between good and bad insurgents, but the Shia don’t share that distinction. For the Shia, they are all one adversary.”

Nasr went on, “The United States is trying to fight on all sides-Sunni and Shia-and be friends with all sides.” In the Shiite view, “It’s clear that the United States cannot bring security to Iraq, because it is not doing everything necessary to bring stability. If they did, they would talk to anybody to achieve it-even Iran and Syria,” Nasr said. (Such engagement was a major recommendation of the Iraq Study Group.) “America cannot bring stability in Iraq by fighting Iran in Iraq.”

The revised bombing plan for a possible attack, with its tightened focus on counterterrorism, is gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon. The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply depots, and command and control facilities.

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out-for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need-even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”

A limited bombing attack of this sort “only makes sense if the intelligence is good,” the consultant said. If the targets are not clearly defined, the bombing “will start as limited, but then there will be an ‘escalation special.’ Planners will say that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria there. The goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the balls go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike planning.”

The surgical-strike plan has been shared with some of America’s allies, who have had mixed reactions to it. Israel’s military and political leaders were alarmed, believing, the consultant said, that it didn’t sufficiently target Iran’s nuclear facilities. The White House has been reassuring the Israeli government, the former senior official told me, that the more limited target list would still serve the goal of counter-proliferation by decapitating the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, who are believed to have direct control over the nuclear-research program. “Our theory is that if we do the attacks as planned it will accomplish two things,” the former senior official said.

An Israeli official said, “Our main focus has been the Iranian nuclear facilities, not because other things aren’t important. We’ve worked on missile technology and terrorism, but we see the Iranian nuclear issue as one that cuts across everything.” Iran, he added, does not need to develop an actual warhead to be a threat. “Our problems begin when they learn and master the nuclear fuel cycle and when they have the nuclear materials,” he said. There was, for example, the possibility of a “dirty bomb,” or of Iran’s passing materials to terrorist groups. “There is still time for diplomacy to have an impact, but not a lot,” the Israeli official said. “We believe the technological timetable is moving faster than the diplomatic timetable. And if diplomacy doesn’t work, as they say, all options are on the table.”

The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from the newly elected government of Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. A senior European official told me, “The British perception is that the Iranians are not making the progress they want to see in their nuclear-enrichment processing. All the intelligence community agree that Iran is providing critical assistance, training, and technology to a surprising number of terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, through Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, too.”

There were four possible responses to this Iranian activity, the European official said: to do nothing (”There would be no retaliation to the Iranians for their attacks; this would be sending the wrong signal”); to publicize the Iranian actions (”There is one great difficulty with this option-the widespread lack of faith in American intelligence assessments”); to attack the Iranians operating inside Iraq (”We’ve been taking action since last December, and it does have an effect”); or, finally, to attack inside Iran.

The European official continued, “A major air strike against Iran could well lead to a rallying around the flag there, but a very careful targeting of terrorist training camps might not.” His view, he said, was that “once the Iranians get a bloody nose they rethink things.” For example, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and Ali Larijani, two of Iran’s most influential political figures, “might go to the Supreme Leader and say, ‘The hard-line policies have got us into this mess. We must change our approach for the sake of the regime.’ ”

A retired American four-star general with close ties to the British military told me that there was another reason for Britain’s interest-shame over the failure of the Royal Navy to protect the sailors and Royal Marines who were seized by Iran on March 23rd, in the Persian Gulf. “The professional guys are saying that British honor is at stake, and if there’s another event like that in the water off Iran the British will hit back,” he said.

The revised bombing plan “could work-if it’s in response to an Iranian attack,” the retired four-star general said. “The British may want to do it to get even, but the more reasonable people are saying, ‘Let’s do it if the Iranians stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.’ It’s got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks.” There is, he added, “a widespread belief in London that Tony Blair’s government was sold a bill of goods by the White House in the buildup to the war against Iraq. So if somebody comes into Gordon Brown’s office and says, ‘We have this intelligence from America,’ Brown will ask, ‘Where did it come from? Have we verified it?’ The burden of proof is high.”

The French government shares the Administration’s sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear program, and believes that Iran will be able to produce a warhead within two years. France’s newly elected President, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a stir in late August when he warned that Iran could be attacked if it did not halt is nuclear program. Nonetheless, France has indicated to the White House that it has doubts about a limited strike, the former senior intelligence official told me. Many in the French government have concluded that the Bush Administration has exaggerated the extent of Iranian meddling inside Iraq; they believe, according to a European diplomat, that “the American problems in Iraq are due to their own mistakes, and now the Americans are trying to show some teeth. An American bombing will show only that the Bush Administration has its own agenda toward Iran.”

A European intelligence official made a similar point. “If you attack Iran,” he told me, “and do not label it as being against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it will strengthen the regime, and help to make the Islamic air in the Middle East thicker.”

Ahmadinejad, in his speech at the United Nations, said that Iran considered the dispute over its nuclear program “closed.” Iran would deal with it only through the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said, and had decided to “disregard unlawful and political impositions of the arrogant powers.” He added, in a press conference after the speech, “the decisions of the United States and France are not important.”

The director general of the I.A.E.A., Mohamed ElBaradei, has for years been in an often bitter public dispute with the Bush Administration; the agency’s most recent report found that Iran was far less proficient in enriching uranium than expected. A diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is based, said, “The Iranians are years away from making a bomb, as ElBaradei has said all along. Running three thousand centrifuges does not make a bomb.” The diplomat added, referring to hawks in the Bush Administration, “They don’t like ElBaradei, because they are in a state of denial. And now their negotiating policy has failed, and Iran is still enriching uranium and still making progress.”

The diplomat expressed the bitterness that has marked the I.A.E.A.’s dealings with the Bush Administration since the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “The White House’s claims were all a pack of lies, and Mohamed is dismissive of those lies,” the diplomat said.

Hans Blix, a former head of the I.A.E.A., questioned the Bush Administration’s commitment to diplomacy. “There are important cards that Washington could play; instead, they have three aircraft carriers sitting in the Persian Gulf,” he said. Speaking of Iran’s role in Iraq, Blix added, “My impression is that the United States has been trying to push up the accusations against Iran as a basis for a possible attack-as an excuse for jumping on them.”

The Iranian leadership is feeling the pressure. In the press conference after his U.N. speech, Ahmadinejad was asked about a possible attack. “They want to hurt us,” he said, “but, with the will of God, they won’t be able to do it.” According to a former State Department adviser on Iran, the Iranians complained, in diplomatic meetings in Baghdad with Ambassador Crocker, about a refusal by the Bush Administration to take advantage of their knowledge of the Iraqi political scene. The former adviser said, “They’ve been trying to convey to the United States that ‘We can help you in Iraq. Nobody knows Iraq better than us.’ ” Instead, the Iranians are preparing for an American attack.

The adviser said that he had heard from a source in Iran that the Revolutionary Guards have been telling religious leaders that they can stand up to an American attack. “The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American security,” the adviser said. “They are bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship-to signal the Americans that they can get close to them.” (I was told by the former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.)

“Do you think those crazies in Tehran are going to say, ‘Uncle Sam is here! We’d better stand down’? ” the former senior intelligence official said. “The reality is an attack will make things ten times warmer.”

Another recent incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension over intelligence. In July, the London Telegraph reported that what appeared to be an SA-7 shoulder-launched missile was fired at an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. The missile missed its mark. Months earlier, British commandos had intercepted a few truckloads of weapons, including one containing a working SA-7 missile, coming across the Iranian border. But there was no way of determining whether the missile fired at the C-130 had come from Iran-especially since SA-7s are available through black-market arms dealers.

Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incident-in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.

The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.”

*Seymour M. Hersh (born April 8, 1937 Chicago) is an American Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, DC. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

News and Update: See the world’s foreign military bases from outer space

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In March 2007, TNI revealed some of the human and environmental costs of the thousands of military bases in its report, Outposts of Empire: The case against foreign military bases. Now you can for the first time see the global reach of foreign military bases from outer space and then zoom in close for aerial shots of key