Behind Enemy Lines

Democracy is Fragile: Know Its Enemies Better
Bob Jensen at Trinity University
Modules as of May 5, 2006

Behind Enemy Lines: Know Your Enemy
New scholarship sheds light on Osama bin Laden's rhetoric, charisma and complex religious and political vision

White Guilt and the Western Past: Why is America so delicate with the enemy?

Question: How will George Bush really go down in history in the long run?

George Shultz: Father of the Bush Doctrine

Jean-Francois Revel

Pierre Rosanvallon

The overall effect of Mexican immigration on the U.S. economy is trivial
Where is the real danger of the Mexican gusher into the United States?

Wall Street is Rotten to the Core --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Fraud Conclusion --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm

Fraud Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

Other Links to Bob Jensen's documents

Behind Enemy Lines: Know Your Enemy
New scholarship sheds light on Osama bin Laden's rhetoric, charisma and complex religious and political vision

The function of propaganda, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "is not to make an objective study of the truth" but to incite. Bin Laden regards himself as an instigator. To build an effective case for his jihad, bin Laden distorts figures and facts, commits errors of omission and builds arguments upon theological logic that is widely repudiated. He is contradictory . . . Still, despite these knots and inconsistencies, bin Laden's message resonates with millions of Muslims, because the larger threads of his narrative are spun from reality. Lawrence reminds us of Madeleine Albright's 1996 exchange with Lesley Stahl on the human toll of sanctions against Iraq. (Stahl: "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima."
"Behind Enemy Lines," by Raffi Khatchadourian, The Nation, May 15, 2006 --- http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060515/khatchadourian

Since the end of the cold war, a new ideologue has joined the literary canon of American enemies. His full name is Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden. During a recent address, George W. Bush described bin Laden as one of history's "Evil Men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience," and one can find both truth and hyperbole in this assessment. Men like Hitler and Stalin wrought catastrophic ruin upon their societies and were responsible for the deaths of millions of people. So far, bin Laden has proved to be much less adept at mass murder and physical destruction. Nevertheless, he demands our attention, and for obvious reasons. Bin Laden leads a sophisticated global insurgency that is largely unseen, profoundly violent, hostile to Western values and full of rage and bloodlust. More important, he has come to personify a dark strand of modernity, one that fuses austere religious ideas from eighteenth-century Saudi Arabia with recent innovations in political Islam. He has drawn the United States into a worldwide conflict. He hopes to kill on an unimaginable scale.

For more than a decade, bin Laden has been unapologetic about his own struggle to correct "the great book of history," and he has carefully and lucidly described the specifics of his Kampf in a series of epistles, declarations and interviews. As far as it is known, bin Laden has never written a book, but that may be because he believes the most important book, the Koran, has already been written. Where Mein Kampf elevated the all-encompassing state (der totale Staat), and specifically the German nation, into the realm of the sacred, bin Laden seeks to bring the Islamic faith into the realm of the profane. The Koran, in his reading, is a revolutionary document. There is no need to hire calligraphers to give it the authenticity of ancient wisdom. It is already ancient and wise. Beside it, bin Laden's scattered pronouncements are meant to seem derivative, as if he were merely a clerical warrior interpreting the word of God. But that notion clouds bin Laden's real significance. In fact, he has a complex political vision that is highly coherent, uniquely contemporary and in many ways irreligious. And it is startling that only now, several years after 9/11, a number of new books give us the chance to inspect, firsthand and in detail, precisely what he has been saying.

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, an anthology of bin Laden's oral and written opinions edited by Bruce Lawrence, a professor of religion at Duke University, is among the best primary Al Qaeda resources available. It is divided into two dozen chapters that chronologically progress through what will probably be regarded as bin Laden's most important decade, 1994 to 2004. In his introduction, Lawrence explains the difficulty in assembling a collection of bin Laden's statements, which have been virtually unavailable to the public. "Occasional fragments are cited, and--much more rarely--a few speeches have been reproduced here and there in the press," he writes. "Yet official pressures have ensured that, for the most part, his voice has been tacitly censored, as if to hear it clearly and without cuts or interruption would be too dangerous." In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the White House urged newspapers and TV networks to refrain from publishing unedited Al Qaeda statements or videos, and for the most part they have complied. Chief among the government's concerns was that bin Laden might transmit coded messages to his operatives (a dubious claim offered without any real evidence) or, as then NBC News president Neal Shapiro pointed out, that he could "arouse anti-American sentiment getting twenty minutes of air time to spew hatred and urge his followers to kill Americans."

The longevity of these official pressures became apparent in November when Lawrence was invited to discuss his book on CNN. One of the network's evening anchors, Carol Lin, began the segment by assuring viewers that "respected media" censored bin Laden. Then, after confusing Lawrence with another author, she testily asked, "Well, but aren't these messages dangerous? I mean, you are essentially making Osama bin Laden the possibility of a bestseller." Lin's curt skepticism echoed a much more intense debate over a similar anthology, the Al Qaeda Reader, which is scheduled for publication by Doubleday in 2007 and which attracted a fusillade of hysterical criticism from conservative media for helping "to promote Al Qaeda's evil." When the anthology was announced last year, a National Review columnist accused Doubleday of going "too far" and acting "naive at best, harmful at worst." The New York Post, in tones even more shrill, called for legal action against the publishing house. Its editorial writers effectively tarred Doubleday's parent company, Bertelsmann, as treasonous and then, in a strange rhetorical gesture, doubted that anyone would read the book anyway: "Yeah, right," the Post noted, "Americans are just clamoring to have the Bearded Butcher and his Egyptian sidekick, Dr. Death, spew their venom at the United States."

. . .

Bin Laden formally declared war on the United States in 1996 and again in 1998, when he and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian Islamist, joined several other militants to sign a charter titled "World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders." The declaration was arguably Al Qaeda's most direct and forceful plea. Crafted as religious dictum, it urged every Muslim to kill American citizens and military personnel in the service of a grand defensive battle. In clean, scriptural language, it described a universe thrown into turmoil by two competing forces, good and evil, and within that universe a just society under mortal threat:

Ever since God made the Arabian Peninsula flat, created the desert in it and surrounded it with seas, it has never suffered such a calamity as these Crusader hordes that have spread through it like locusts, consuming its wealth and destroying its fertility. All this at a time when nations have joined forces against the Muslims as if fighting over a bowl of food.

The infested and defiled Arabian landscape, the subjugated and abused Muslim peoples--these are the two most important images in bin Laden's rhetorical arsenal. He employs them frequently. They fit into his theological apologia for large-scale violence. More important, they convey a sense of primal urgency that extends beyond religious obligation; bin Laden's message here is about raw communal survival. As Carl von Clausewitz noted, "Where no enemy is to be found, there is no want of courage to oppose him." Hitler recognized this. He, too, spoke of a society--the German Volk--that was "broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world." In fact, one can find expressions of civilizational crisis among many modern revolutionary and millenarian groups. Aum Shinrikyo sectarians, the Shining Path and early anarchists have all demonstrated such thinking. In Anarchism and Other Essays, published in 1910, Emma Goldman observed that a terrorist's "very being must throb with the pain, the sorrow, the despair millions of people are daily made to endure" before setting out to commit violence that, by comparison, is but "a drop in the ocean." In many ways, this same murder-drenched social calculus is what has propelled bin Laden onto the battlefield of global jihad.

It is not surprising, then, to find in bin Laden's writings and speeches a detailed portfolio of human suffering. In recruitment videos, he speaks of such matters with tears in his eyes. In the 1998 World Islamic Front charter, he began with the following indictment: "Firstly, for over seven years America has occupied the holiest parts of the Islamic lands." This is a reference to US troops then stationed in Saudi Arabia, home to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. For bin Laden, this "occupation" represented not just a religious affront but an imperial gambit, a base from which Washington projected "excessive aggression" upon the Middle East and forced Muslims to reside in "paper mini-states" that have been folded and twisted to the will of non-Muslim enemies. Exhibit A of this aggression is Iraq. He notes that during the 1990s United Nations sanctions, along with their strongest advocate, the United States, caused the death of more than a million Iraqi children (a more accurate assessment puts the figure at around 500,000, a number that hardly needed inflating), and that the United States would soon attempt to "repeat these horrific massacres" against the Iraqi people. Finally, he discusses America's relationship with Israel. Bin Laden never makes clear which side he believes is dominant in that relationship, but it is no mystery that he regards it as a hostile alliance. Elsewhere, he is more specific, citing, for instance, Palestinian refugees or the 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath, when Israeli air raids into southern Lebanon killed more than 100 civilians taking shelter at a UN compound.

. . .

The function of propaganda, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "is not to make an objective study of the truth" but to incite. Bin Laden regards himself as an instigator. To build an effective case for his jihad, bin Laden distorts figures and facts, commits errors of omission and builds arguments upon theological logic that is widely repudiated. He is contradictory. In one breath, he is able to claim: "Many people in the West are good and gentle people. I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system which makes nations slaves of the United States." In another, he says that "the American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government," and therefore, "the American people are not innocent." As he tells it, the jihadi movement brought down the Soviet Union entirely on its own in the mountains of Afghanistan (apparently without any lift from the $3 billion in US aid provided through Pakistan and other countries). He overlooks the nationalist dimension of certain conflicts, like the one in Chechnya, which he maintains are primarily about Islam. He ignores regions where America has sided with Muslims, such as Kosovo. When all but 500 US troops finally left Saudi Arabia in 2003, he quietly dropped this grievance from his rhetoric.

. . .

Still, despite these knots and inconsistencies, bin Laden's message resonates with millions of Muslims, because the larger threads of his narrative are spun from reality. Lawrence reminds us of Madeleine Albright's 1996 exchange with Lesley Stahl on the human toll of sanctions against Iraq. (Stahl: "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima." Albright: "We think the price is worth it.") More broadly, Lawrence notes, the umma has been attacked by Western countries in one form or another for two centuries, "from the first French invasion of Egypt in the last years of the 18th century and the seizure of the Maghreb in the 19th century, the British grab for Egypt and the Italian for Libya, the carve-up of the whole Middle East by Britain and France at the end of World War One" and so on to the present. "All the lines of intrusion and violence historically run in one direction." This is partly why, in a study conducted last October across the Arab world by the University of Maryland and Zogby International, more than half the respondents said they found some form of legitimacy in bin Laden's pronouncements. (Thirty-five percent said they sympathized with him for "standing up" to the United States; 19 percent said they sympathized with his position on various Muslim causes.) Very few Arabs said they wanted to live in an authoritarian theocracy like the Taliban's Afghanistan, and few agreed with Al Qaeda's methods. But tellingly, bin Laden rarely says much about the society he wishes to construct, and he is always careful to describe Al Qaeda's violence as "a reaction to events in our land." If anything, he is a canny politician who knows his audience.

In fact, those who have spent the most time studying bin Laden appear to nurture a cautious respect for what he has been able to achieve. "Not since Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser galvanized the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s with his vision of Arab nationalism married to socialism has an Arab political figure had as much impact on the world," writes Peter Bergen in The Osama bin Laden I Know, an "oral history" of bin Laden's life. The book is a prismatic biography of Al Qaeda's leader assembled from jihadi documents--some never before quoted in English--and from the testimony of militants, journalists, relatives and teachers who knew him personally. Bergen, a former CNN producer, conducted more than fifty of the interviews, and his story unfolds with the ease and vividness of a TV documentary. After several pages, the book's myriad accounts--not all of them in agreement, and many deeply biased--begin to form a composite portrait that is among the most honest we have. Bergen is explicit about his project: to peer behind the multiple layers of propaganda that have obscured bin Laden's actions. He hopes, among other things, to get a fix on the development of bin Laden's worldview, the depth of his influence, the precise nature of his demands and, perhaps most interesting, how he has been living these many years.

. . .

There is a hint of hindsight to these pronouncements, and while Congressional researchers in their recent government study "Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology" are willing to take Adl at his word, Bergen seems more skeptical. He points out that another aspect of bin Laden's persona is his impulsiveness, a trait he has demonstrated throughout his career as a militant. "September 11 showed that al Qaeda could attack the United States itself," Bergen writes, "but it turned out to be something of a kamikaze mission for bin Laden's organization, as the American response to the attacks was to decimate al Qaeda and destroy its Taliban partners." As a result, bin Laden's organization was forced to adapt. In November 2002, Al Qaeda's top leadership reportedly convened a meeting in northern Iran, where members recognized that they could no longer function within their existing hierarchy. After much discussion, they decided to become even more decentralized, according to a team of West Point scholars in their paper "Harmony and Disharmony," an analysis of the Defense Department's massive database of primary Al Qaeda documents. Meanwhile, as the organization shifted in structure, Abu Jandal explains, a much more profound development occurred. "Al Qaeda became an ideology," he says, and "what effected this transformation from an armed group into an ideology is the United States."

Continued in article

"White Guilt and the Western Past: Why is America so delicate with the enemy?" by Shelby Steele, The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2006 --- http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008318

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Why this new minimalism in war? It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.

They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.

The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.

Continued in article

Question: How will George Bush really go down in history in the long run?

Answer:
Certainly there is wide diversity among experts such that there is no accepted answer to this question.

"Dissident President: George W. Bush has the courage to speak out for freedom.," by Natan Sharansky, The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2006 --- http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008281

There are two distinct marks of a dissident. First, dissidents are fired by ideas and stay true to them no matter the consequences. Second, they generally believe that betraying those ideas would constitute the greatest of moral failures. Give up, they say to themselves, and evil will triumph. Stand firm, and they can give hope to others and help change the world.

Political leaders make the rarest of dissidents. In a democracy, a leader's lifeline is the electorate's pulse. Failure to be in tune with public sentiment can cripple any administration and undermine any political agenda. Moreover, democratic leaders, for whom compromise is critical to effective governance, hardly ever see any issue in Manichaean terms. In their world, nearly everything is colored in shades of gray.

That is why President George W. Bush is such an exception. He is a man fired by a deep belief in the universal appeal of freedom, its transformative power, and its critical connection to international peace and stability. Even the fiercest critics of these ideas would surely admit that Mr. Bush has championed them both before and after his re-election, both when he was riding high in the polls and now that his popularity has plummeted, when criticism has come from longstanding opponents and from erstwhile supporters.

With a dogged determination that any dissident can appreciate, Mr. Bush, faced with overwhelming opposition, stands his ideological ground, motivated in large measure by what appears to be a refusal to countenance moral failure.

I myself have not been uncritical of Mr. Bush. Like my teacher, Andrei Sakharov, I agree with the president that promoting democracy is critical for international security. But I believe that too much focus has been placed on holding quick elections, while too little attention has been paid to help build free societies by protecting those freedoms--of conscience, speech, press, religion, etc.--that lie at democracy's core.

I believe that such a mistaken approach is one of the reasons why a terrorist organization such as Hamas could come to power through ostensibly democratic means in a Palestinian society long ruled by fear and intimidation.

I also believe that not enough effort has been made to turn the policy of promoting democracy into a bipartisan effort. The enemies of freedom must know that the commitment of the world's lone superpower to help expand freedom beyond its borders will not depend on the results of the next election.

Just as success in winning past global conflicts depended on forging a broad coalition that stretched across party and ideological lines, success in using the advance of democracy to win the war on terror will depend on building and maintaining a wide consensus of support. Yet despite these criticisms, I recognize that I have the luxury of criticizing Mr. Bush's democracy agenda only because there is a democracy agenda in the first place. A policy that for years had been nothing more than the esoteric subject of occasional academic debate is now the focal point of American statecraft.

For decades, a "realism" based on a myopic perception of international stability prevailed in the policy-making debate. For a brief period during the Cold War, the realist policy of accommodating Soviet tyranny was replaced with a policy that confronted that tyranny and made democracy and human rights inside the Soviet Union a litmus test for superpower relations.

The enormous success of such a policy in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end did not stop most policy makers from continuing to advocate an approach to international stability that was based on coddling "friendly" dictators and refusing to support the aspirations of oppressed peoples to be free.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. It seemed as though that horrific day had made it clear that the price for supporting "friendly" dictators throughout the Middle East was the creation of the world's largest breeding ground of terrorism. A new political course had to be charted.

Today, we are in the midst of a great struggle between the forces of terror and the forces of freedom. The greatest weapon that the free world possesses in this struggle is the awesome power of its ideas.

The Bush Doctrine, based on a recognition of the dangers posed by non-democratic regimes and on committing the United States to support the advance of democracy, offers hope to many dissident voices struggling to bring democracy to their own countries. The democratic earthquake it has helped unleash, even with all the dangers its tremors entail, offers the promise of a more peaceful world.

Yet with each passing day, new voices are added to the chorus of that doctrine's opponents, and the circle of its supporters grows ever smaller. Critics rail against every step on the new and difficult road on which the United States has embarked. Yet in pointing out the many pitfalls which have not been avoided and those which still can be, those critics would be wise to remember that the alternative road leads to the continued oppression of hundreds of millions of people and the continued festering of the pathologies that led to 9/11.

Now that President Bush is increasingly alone in pushing for freedom, I can only hope that his dissident spirit will continue to persevere. For should that spirit break, evil will indeed triumph, and the consequences for our world would be disastrous.

Mr. Sharansky spent nine years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. A former deputy prime minister of Israel and currently a member of the Knesset, he is co-author, with Ron Dermer, of "The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror" (PublicAffairs, 2004).

"George Shultz: Father of the Bush Doctrine," Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2006; Page A8 ---

George P. Shultz was the secretary of state of the United States during the years that the Soviet Union was led, successively, by Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. During those years, 1982 to 1989, the United States was led by Ronald Reagan. At the end of our interview, as he was showing me out of his apartment, Mr. Shultz invited me to stop in the dining room. "I want you to see something," he said. We walked over to a table. "Have a look at that. It arrived in the mail the other day." It looked like a polished brass cylinder, open at either end. It was the 14th artillery shell from the 21-gun salute at Ronald Reagan's funeral in 2004. "Isn't that something?"

George Shultz is an intellectual, an MIT economist who in his career held two other cabinet posts, labor and Treasury, under Richard Nixon. And clearly he is awed by Ronald Reagan, the "actor" President, and the years he spent serving as Reagan's minister to the world. But I had come to San Francisco because I wanted to talk about the here and now. So did he. Above all, the Revolt of the Generals and the leaks out of the CIA. He's upset.

. . .

"I don't know how you define 'neoconservatism,'" he replied, "but I think it's associated with trying to spread open political systems and democracy. I recall President Reagan's Westminster speech in 1982 -- that communism would be consigned to 'the ash heap of history' and that freedom was the path ahead. And what happened? Between 1980 and 1990, the number of countries that were classified as 'free' or 'mostly free' increased by about 50%. Open political and economic systems have been gaining ground and there's a good reason for it. They work better. I don't know whether that's neoconservative or what it is, but I think it's what has been happening. I'm for it."

Still, the neocons have become joined, fairly or not, to the idea that the U.S. is determined to accomplish goals such as this through force. In his 1993 autobiography, "Turmoil and Tragedy," Mr. Shultz developed the idea of politics in the Cold War years as gardening, rather than an exercise in grand visions.

"I'm in favor of vision," he replies. "Ronald Reagan had vision. But gardening is something you have to do if you're going to be effective in foreign affairs . . . come around reasonably frequently and get rid of the weeds before they get too big." In any event, Mr. Shultz reminds me, the most useful lessons for dealing with a hostile world didn't emerge from his long years in diplomacy, but in labor, in the experience of collective bargaining: "You show me a union that will never strike, and I'll show you a union that isn't going to get anywhere. You show me a management that will never take a strike, and I'll show you a management that's going to get pushed around." Or nations: "Our basic problem is that the Iranians are convinced that they can do anything and there are no consequences."

Mr. Shultz returns to his core preoccupation, the reality of global terror: "The law-enforcement mentality is not going to do the job for us. You have to have a war mentality. You have to have an offense and defense; you have to be active about it." This diplomatic gardener is no shrinking violet.

"Jean-Francois Revel," The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2006; Page A14 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114661881639442179.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

As a rule, Europe has not been well-served by its public intellectuals. German philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi apologist; French writer Jean-Paul Sartre was famously soft on Stalin; German novelist Günter Grass opposed German reunification; Portuguese novelist José Saramago supported an aborted Communist coup d'etat, and . . . well, it's a long list.

But an exception was Jean-Francois Revel, the French political theorist and commentator who died last week at the age of 82. Like so many post-World War II members of Europe's intelligentsia, Revel started out as a man of the left. But unlike many of his contemporaries, it didn't take the collapse of the Berlin Wall for him to understand the menace of the Soviet Union. Nor was he reluctant to defend the U.S. and its values, including capitalism, against those who said the Cold War superpowers represented equivalent threats to world peace.

In books such as "The Totalitarian Temptation," "How Democracies Perish," "Democracy Against Itself" and "Anti-Americanism," Revel dissected the psychological weaknesses of liberal-democratic culture that made it dangerously prone to self-destruction. "The totalitarian phenomenon," he wrote in National Review in 2000, "is not to be understood without making allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or -- much more mysteriously -- to submit to it. Democracy will therefore always remain at risk."

Revel's judgments were not unfailing, and in retrospect he was overly pessimistic about the ability of Western democracies to muster the will and courage to defeat their existential enemies. But by sounding the right warnings about the nature of those enemies -- and the places where our defenses were weak -- he not only helped win the Cold War, but redeemed the reputation of public intellectuals everywhere. As they say in France, he was an "Immortal."

May 4, 2006 reply from Mac.Wright@vu.edu.au

Dear Bob,

I note your thoughts on the fragility of democracy.

I also note Dick Cheney's comments reported on the NY Times about Russian freedom.

Russia may not be free but it is a democracy, where for many elections the candidates are listed on the ballot with the last choice being "None-of-the-Above".

It is a sad reflection on politics and politicians generally that, if they could find him, Mr. None-of-the-Above would be able to form a government.

I fear that if the same ballot system was applied generally, Mr. None-of-the-Above would govern the world.

The Russian politicians, having realised the monster thay have created with Mr. None-of-the-Above are now moving to delete him from the ballot.

Kind regards,
Mac Wright

Pierre Rosanvallon

But there are thinkers who don’t really follow the standard scripts very well, and Pierre Rosanvallon is one them. Democracy Past and Future, the selection of his writings just published by Columbia University Press, provides a long overdue introduction to a figure who defies both sound bites and the familiar academic division of labor. Born in 1948, he spent much of the 1970s as a sort of thinker-in-residence for a major trade union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, for which he organized seminars and conferences seeking to create a non-Marxist “second left” within the Socialist Party. He emerged as a theoretical voice of the autogestion (self-management) movement. His continuing work on the problem of democracy was honored in 2001 when he became a professor at the Collège de France, where Rosanvallon lectures on the field he calls “the philosophical history of the political.”
Scott McLeMee, "We, the People...," Inside Higher Ed, May 10, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/05/10/mclemee

The overall effect of Mexican immigration on the U.S. economy is trivial
Where is the real danger of the Mexican gusher into the United States?

"Mexican Wave," by Stephen Haber, The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2006; Page A14 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114662536272642322.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep

What policy should America adopt toward illegal immigrants from Mexico? One view is that they drive down the wages of American workers, burden taxpayers and undermine the integrity of American culture. That view is embodied in the recent immigration bill passed by the House of Representatives: It seeks to seal off the border and treat immigrants who are already here as felons.

A second view is that Mexican immigrants increase the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. That view is embodied in draft legislation in the Senate that would make it possible for illegal immigrants who have been in the U.S. for more than five years to obtain a visa and eventually citizenship -- provided they learn English. The Senate bill also contains provisions for workers who have been here for less than five years to either obtain a green card or become a guest worker, after they return to Mexico and make the necessary applications.

Any serious attempt at reform needs to take account of facts regarding illegal immigrants that are often given a back seat to ideology by partisans on either side of the debate. Any serious attempt at immigration reform also needs to take account of facts about Mexico's fragile economy and democracy -- facts that both sides in the debate have tended to miss entirely. Indeed, most discussion about immigration reform implicitly assumes that its effects stop at the border. The truth is that our immigration policy is more consequential for what happens to Mexico's political and social stability than it is for America's economy or cultural integrity.

Those who favor a "soft line" on Mexican immigration often simultaneously argue that Mexican workers make American industry more internationally competitive and that Mexican workers do not reduce the wages of U.S.-born workers. Both statements could simultaneously be true if Mexican immigrants included large numbers of highly educated electrical engineers and molecular biologists who had a tremendously positive effect on American total factor productivity. But Mexican immigrants tend to have very low levels of education by U.S. standards; they also tend to cluster in industries that produce goods that do not enter into international trade, such as restaurant meals, home construction, landscaping and janitorial services.

The overall effect of Mexican immigration on the U.S. economy is trivial -- almost certainly less than one-tenth of 1% of GDP. Moreover, to the degree that Mexican immigration makes some industries more internationally competitive, it does so by reducing the wages of the U.S.-born workers in those industries. The reduction is not trivial. Careful research done by Harvard's George Borjas indicates that Mexican immigration has caused a 7% decline in the wages of U.S.-born high school dropouts, and a 1% decline in the wages of workers with only a high school diploma. Score one for the hard-liners on immigration.

Hard-liners, however, have it wrong about the social and cultural impact of immigration on the U.S. They tend to look at recent immigrants and decry their low levels of education, difficulties with the English language, and propensity to choose marriage partners from their own immigrant group. They tend to ignore that every other large-scale immigrant group in the history of the U.S. -- Poles, Italians, Irish, Eastern European Jews -- had many of the exact same social and cultural characteristics.

The impact of immigration on American culture is not determined by what immigrants do, but by what their children and grandchildren do. Here the evidence is unambiguous: The children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants assimilate and move up the income ladder. Meticulous research by James Smith at Rand demonstrates that second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans quickly overcome the educational deficit faced by their immigrant parents and grandparents. As a result, they do not constitute a permanent economic underclass; they have been steadily narrowing the income gap with native-born whites. Nor do they constitute a social and cultural group independent of mainstream America. The reason is clear: 80% of third-generation Mexican-Americans cannot speak Spanish. Score one for the soft-liners on immigration.

Both sides in the immigration debate have it wrong, however, when it comes to one core assumption -- that Mexican immigration is only a domestic policy issue. What we choose to do will have serious ramifications for Mexico.

To understand why, we need to take into account that the large-scale immigration of Mexicans to the U.S. is a recent phenomenon. Until the 1980s, Mexicans migrated to the U.S. at very modest rates -- on the order of 50,000 people per year. In the 1980s it surged to roughly 200,000 people per year, and in the 1990s it went through the roof, averaging 500,000 people per year. The reason is that the Mexican economy collapsed in the early 1980s, and since then Mexico's per capita GDP, adjusted for inflation, has grown at a staggeringly slow 0.7% per year, less than one-third the U.S. rate.

There is little reason to think that the Mexican economy will recover any time soon. Indeed, all of the fundamentals, most particularly the preference of foreign multinational companies to site new facilities in China instead of in Mexico, point toward continued slow growth.

What would happen to Mexico if we were to suddenly cut off the escape valve provided by immigration to the U.S.? Unemployment and underemployment, already major problems, would increase dramatically. Remissions from immigrants, which total some $18 billion per year and are the lifeblood of many rural communities, would dry up. The widespread frustration felt by the population caught between rising crime and diminished economic expectations -- which fuels the populist presidential campaign of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador -- would almost certainly become more acute. There is no scenario in which these developments would be positive for Mexican political and social stability. And there is no scenario in which a politically and socially unstable Mexico is in the interest of the U.S.

Mr. Haber, Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Science, and director of the Social Science History Institute, at Stanford University.

The real reason Mexican's are gushing into the United States
Time and again we've heard rumors Mexico would tackle corruption and improve its judicial system. Outside observers and Mexican reformers alike were elated in 2000 when Vicente Fox's National Action Party defeated the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which had held authoritarian control for 71 years. At last, it seemed possible Mexico would begin tackling its strangling bureaucracy, its rotten police, its corrupt labor unions (who did nothing for labor) and its anti-competitive environment. If Mexico made even modest progress in improving its citizens' lives, the gusher of illegal migration north would slow. But as Fredo Arias-King explained in a 2005 article for the National Interest, Mr. Fox proved a lousy new broom. Instead of sweeping out the PRI officials, Mr. Fox kept them on, even hiring operatives from his opponent's campaign to run the Finance Secretariat and his own office, and reaching back to a particularly unsavory PRI official with ties to a deadly extortion attempt in the 1970s as head of the Public Security Secretariat. As for members of Mr. Fox's party, the PAN, only 78 received jobs in the new administration.
Mona Charin, "Misery across the border," Washington Times, April 26, 2006 --- http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060425-085314-9699r.htm

And so the Mexican government lumbers into the 21st century tolerating drug running (even profiting from it if reports by some accounts), stifling competition for the benefit of a few favored companies and suppressing the rights of workers. As the Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy magazine noted: "Mexico ranks No. 1 in the world for disappearances of women, No. 2 for kidnappings for ransom (No. 1 of countries not at war), No. 2 for number of narco-cartels, and No. 3 for murders per capita." In 2004, 300,000 people rallied in Mexico City to protest kidnappings by criminal gangs, which not infrequently result in death to the captive even after ransom has been paid. The police solve less than 1 percent of these cases. And, as the article details, even when the criminals are jailed, they can easily buy their way out of prison "with collusion of prison officials."

    The World Economic Freedom Index says Mexico ranks 58th out of 123 nations in economic liberty (behind 10 other Latin American countries) and 88th in measures of legal structures and property rights.

    So it is hardly surprising that Mexico's government does not discourage but facilitates migration north. The remittances illegal immigrants send to their families are a valuable source of cash, and the possibility of outmigration is a valve venting popular anger and frustration. Thus the Mexicans shunt some of their troubles onto us.

    Those who obscure the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants overlook the huge burden illegals impose by their disproportionate criminality. As Heather MacDonald has discovered, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants are for illegals. A California Justice Department study reported in 1995 that the infamous 18th Street Gang (20,000 strong) is at least 60 percent illegal.

    This is not to suggest we close the border. There is every reason to believe we need more legal immigrants. But our wink, wink, nudge, nudge permitting of thousands to pour across the border every year without so much as a once-over from an immigration official is perverse.

    Republicans should stress we need and welcome hard-working legal immigrants from around the world but will not and cannot be the dumping ground for Mexico's particular miseries.