Part I. Why The Surprise At The Wild Nazi-Like Ramblings of Mahathir Mohamad, At The Recent Islamic Conferences Of 57 Countries?

Those who know little about the brittle flaws and full-blown failures of Arab political and economic life --- the 280 million Arab people living in 21 despotic, backward states, only post-Saddam Iraq the exception, all full of corruption and nepotism and winner-take-all politics and all ruled ultimately by the secret police --- were no doubt surprised at the venom and repeated self-righteous attacks on Jews that appeared in the speech given to the Islamic Conference of 57 countries recently in Malaysia by the demagogic prime minister of that country, Mahathir Mohamad, whose hold on power extends back over two decades now. They shouldn't have been surprised. Though the jolting failures are hardly confined to the 22 Arab countries in the Islamic world --- they are rife among all the remaining Muslim countries save secular Turkey and Malaysia itself --- they're generally worse among the Arab peoples, and so we'll deal with them only.

For some quickly clued-in background, note that there are about 1.2 billion Muslims in the world --- roughly half the number of Christians. About a quarter of the Muslim peoples are Arabs, 280 million. As for Malaysia economic progress, it's largely due to a big Chinese minority population, roughly 25% of the total 24 million Malaysians; another 10% of the population are from India. Malay and other indigenous peoples, 60% or so of the population, are far more poorly educated and far less prominent in the professions or corporate business, despite systematic discrimination practiced by Mahathir's government against the Chinese and Indian minorities. Its per capita income in purchasing power is around $9300. At the same time, Mahathir --- in power for over two decades --- dismissed the chief justice and other judges in a highhanded manner, while trumping up sexual blasphemy charges against a political rival, until then a man he had been grooming for his successor. For a good survey, see The Economist. Turkey, about 70 million people all essentially Muslim --- and the only legally secular country in the Islamic world --- has a per capita income of around $7200, roughly on a par with Saudi Arabia's oil-rich country of 20 million. It is an institutionalized democracy, a member of NATO, on very friendly terms with Israel with which it has, essentially, an unofficial military alliance. As for the 22 Arab countries that together have 280 million people, the total GDP is somewhat smaller than Spain's, with 40 million people. Per capita Arab income is around $1800, probably double that in purchasing power terms, and that includes the oil rich countries of the Gulf and tiny Libya.

For comparisons, consider that the US has a per capita income in purchasing power terms of $36,000 and the EU around $25,000 on an average, Japan's slightly higher. In 1998, according to the UN's Arab Human Development Report 2002, per capita income of the Arabs --- when it is adjusted for purchasing power --- amounted to 14% of the EU average. The same UN report, put out by a team of Arab specialists, also noted that in the last 1000 years --- a whole millennium of ten centuries --- the 280 million Arab people have translated fewer books published abroad than Spain does annually for its 40 million people.

Half of the following article appeared originally in the previous article . . . one in a long series of ruminations and analysis about misinformed journalism and intellectual views of American foreign policy, and especially the US effort to destroy Saddamite Iraq and transform the country into a consensual political system that respects basic human rights --- something that exists nowhere in the Arab world of 22 states, all despotic and corrupt to the core, ruled ultimately by the secret police. They differ only in the degree to which violence and repression are used to maintain the corrupt tribal-clans in power, along with their cronies in influential positions in the economy, the legal and administrative systems, and the military. Not surprisingly, illiteracy among the 280 million Arab peoples --- who, at one time, a 1000 years ago, led Europe in mathematics and philosophical work --- is now the worst in the world: yes, worse even than in far poorer tropical Africa. Unemployment among men runs anywhere from 20-30% across the 22 countries, and the population explosion among the Arabs means that 50% right now are under the age of 15 and that in another 20 years the total number of Arabs will be close to 500 million.

All these failures and teeming problems in Arab life --- a failure to modernize effectively at bottom --- are set out at length and documented in the UN Arab Human Development Report 2002. See the ranging remarks on it with some links in an earlier buggy article. More recently, the UN's Arab Human Development Report 2003 scathingly criticized the poor quality of education in Arab countries, along with the severe censorship and other controls over intellectual freedom and civil liberties. See this interpretation.

 



INTRODUCTION: WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITHOUT MAJOR CHANGES IN THE ARAB AND WIDER ISLAMIC WORLD?

It's not hard to predict here. No great gifts of prevision are needed.

Paranoid Fantasies and Scapegoating in the Arab and Wider Muslim World

First and foremost, the appeals of atavistic, racist, woman-hating, and extremist Islam will continue to make speedy high-coiled headway among the Arab young and unemployed . . . themselves --- like large numbers of older people in their societies --- illiterate or poorly educated and above all mentally dislocated by fast-paced globalizing changes and the ineffectuality and jarring troubles of their economies and governments in dealing with their challenges. In turn, thanks to this simpleminded extremism, paranoid fantasies and delusions have become rife in the Arab world: the only way masses of unhinged and illiterate or semi-educated people can make sense of things. It has to be the fault of others, the cause of their personal and national plight and that of Islam in general.

The others can be the West, Hindus, Russians, and Chinese, all depending. Increasingly, it's the USA and Jews --- the two merged into one in the minds of extremist demagogues and their hate-filled messages and symbols that pour out through the state-controlled media and mosques day-in, day-out.



 

Enter Vicious and Demented Anti-Semitism Again

Small wonder, against this background, that the Nazi-like conspiratorial talk engaged in at the Summit Meeting last week of 57 Islamic Countries in Malaysia by Mahathir Mohamad --- the Malaysian demagogic prime minister who spoke menacingly of Jews running the world and sending out others to fight their battles and die for them --- received such a resounding echo of applause from the heads of those countries in attendance, only about 35% even Arab. Jews, the unrepentant Mahathir repeated a few days later, were irreparably arrogant: witness the attacks on his simple honest observations about them at the conference!

A couple of visitors have sent emails asking the buggy prof when the three-part mini-series on the media and Iraq will be finished. A perfectly good query. So far, the first of the three-article series is done, and the second one about 4/5 finished. In that second article --- Progress and Problems in Iraqi Reconstruction II, published October 19th --- a survey of the media's coverage in West Europe of Iraq was unfolded: in particular, the British and the French and to an extent the German. The article noted that the British reporting on Iraq, with some exceptions, has been polemical and negative and in a kind of attack-dog mode toward the Blair government and Bush America. The BBC --- once justifiably famous for its objectivity and accurate journalism --- has been a particular offender, something that has fortunately caused a scandal in Britain and has put the BBC under a much needed public spotlight. In France and Germany, as you might predict, the coverage has been much worse --- a kind of systematic outpouring of envy and resentment of the US, wounded national pride, crude anti-Americanism, and almost wholly inaccurate reporting of an ideologically prejudiced sort.

HOW WORSE CAN JOURNALISTIC SHODDINESS GET?

The pitiful nature of the French media's reporting was brought out in a lengthy interview with a noted French novelist, now in exile in Quebec and disgusted with what he regards as his country's systematic efforts in the media and political circles at "brainwashing" when it comes to the US on almost any topic and especially on the Middle East. His views were vented at length in the earlier buggy article just referred to. Go here if you prefer to see the original source of the interview. In the German case, the buggy prof gave an example from one of the two most respected German newspapers --- the weekly Die Zeit out of Hamburg, whose Iraqi reporter made fatuous claims about the views of Baghdad residents regarding post-Saddamite Iraq and the American role since that flew in the face of recent scientific opinion polls carried out by Zogby International Pollsters and the Gallup Poll organization. The Gallup Poll was specifically limited to Baghdad itself, the subject of Die Zeit's article that claimed that the residents of that city were in hopeless despondency, with not a spark of optimism about the future.

The truth? According to the Gallup Poll which came out only a week or so before the Die Zeit article appeared, 67% of the Baghdad respondents were optimistic about the future, and 72% want American and British forces to stay in Iraq.

Could it be worse, such journalistic claptrap and contempt for accuracy and objectivity?

Yes, apparently so. At a recent Harvard symposium, the leading German correspondents in this country admitted openly that they have to cater to systematic anti-American prejudices of their publishers and editorial staff and their presumed readership. It is strikingly revealing, the report of this symposium, that appeared in the best German newspaper, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine.

What follows, in line with all this debased journalistic shoddiness, is five things:

Ten days ago, the buggy prof published a lengthy article that asked why films are so lousy these days, and suggested a few briefly sketched-in reasons, along with some links . . . the best one a long analysis by the novelist and talented editor of Premiere Magazine, John Richardson. Oddly, another talented novelist and a screen-writer, Roger Simon, ran an article at his web site two days ago that listed what are in his view the best 25 films of all time . . . an impossible task, hard enough to do with the best 50 or so. The buggy prof joined in the follow-up comments, which didn't so much set out his own preferences, rather continued the earlier buggy commentary on films, past and present, and the sharply declining quality of those of the last 20 years or so.

What ensues here are those follow-up comments, along with the counsel to look over Simon's original list and the preferences of 30 or so visitors to his site.



WHY ARE FILMS SO CRUMMY THESE DAYS: A SEQUEL



Funny, but 10 days ago on my own website --- http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org --- I posted a lengthy article on why films are so crummy these days, and the reasons why. It dealt mainly with the US cinema, but not entirely: the Italians, French, Germans, and Japanese film industries doing even worse than Hollywood since the end of the 1970s, and the British cinema not what it once was from the 1930s through the 1960s, despite still putting out an occasional good film. It also linked to some informative commentary by others --- a classic one above all by the senior editor of Premiere magazine and a novelist to boot --- on what has happened to the American cinema since 1980 or so: Dumb and Dumber by John Richardson. It appeared in the mid-1990s and is far and away, it seems, the most perceptive roasting of the film industry ever published.

Foreign Films

As for the foreign film industries, watching most European cinema the last 25 years or so is about as much fun as hacking and hewing your way through the dense underbrush of a post-modernist article: the only way to make it to the end, assuming you want to get there, is with copious quantities of aspirin, ad-van, and whiskey. From start to finish, it's largely intellectually pretentious pishposh with scarcely a redeeming feature: little or no sense of dramatic pacing, scripts written by what appear to be washed-out literary theorists, klutzy direction, and wooden acting . . . the British the exceptions on these scores. Japan, alas, is only slightly better.

If you've read the previous article on this analogy --- a favorite of the uninformed or misinformed, not to mention disgruntled partisan critics of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq --- you should have a good working idea of why it's so misleading and wrongheaded. That doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate criticisms of the way the administration has managed the post-war reconstruction of Iraq, another point stressed in two other articles that were published a tad earlier, and repeatedly so: those two articles, remember, part of a three-article mini-series on the progress and problems of Iraqi transformation. Most of the media's criticisms don't fit this criterion --- something else we've tried to show in that mini-series. If anything, the negativism and carping on the problems and setbacks in Iraq that have dominated the media's coverage until very recently have done the public a reprehensible disservice . . . much as they might cater to partisan attacks from many Democratic activists and even many of the party's presidential candidates. (Not all fortunately: not Senator Joe Lieberman and Representative Dick Gephardt, or Senator Joe Biden of the Intelligence Committee, or Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington State, the heir of the great Scoop Jackson, the influential liberal Democrat who served in the Senate from that state where I grew up for two decades from the late 1940s through most of the 1960s and believed in the essential benevolence of American foreign policy as long as it sought to promote human rights and democracy abroad.

All that granted, there is one possible justified worry that does concern many of us who support the administration's unprecedented campaign to reconstruct Iraq and transform it from a totalitarian state and society --- under Baathist party control and terror for 40 years, almost four times longer than Hitler ruled in Nazi Germany. That worry? Whether the US public will tolerate many more months of rising US casualties; or --- to be more precise, since this worry is exaggerated as we'll show --- whether the media elites and the most vocal critics in Democratic party circles might not persuade parts of the public to start fearing and protesting those casualty numbers.

Granted again: put this bald way, this last claim seems hard to understand, let alone emerge compelling. By way of clarification then, plus the evidence, let the argument begin to unfold here.



Will the US Public Stomach Our Casualties in Iraq In the Future?

Since the end of the Vietnam war --- in the mid-1970s --- our political leaders in both parties and for that matter most of the top military brass have been ultra-sensitive about American casualties in the field: whether in outright wars or limited peace-keeping missions: think of Mogadishu in September 1993 or a decade earlier when Reagan withdrew US peace-keepers from Beirut after Islamo-fascist terrorists blew up a barracks-building and killed more than 200 US Marines. It's legacy of the long, bitterly divisive American involvement in Indochina, an effort to keep it outside the Communist world that lasted nearly two decades --- from 1956 until 1975 --- including eight years of escalated warfare that led to over a million American soldiers serving there, with more than 50,000 dead. And that's not the only impact. The legacy has also influenced our enemies for over three decades now. Whether Islamo-fascist terrorists like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda who attacked our Marines in Lebanon or our sailors in Yemen or our embassies in Africa in the late 1990s or American citizens in New York and Washington D.C. later --- or political demagogues like Milosevik in Yugoslavia or the warlord Mohammed Addid in Mogadishu or the fanatical Taliban in Afghanistan or the tyrant Saddam Hussein in Iraq --- it encouraged the belief that the US is essentially a paper-tiger in combat, whose people are unwilling to tolerate military casualties when faced with heroic, well-motivated if outgunned resistance.

Last night on MSNBC's Meet the Press --- a weekly interview by the gifted Tim Russert --- two of his guests paired off against each other were Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida and an intelligent and informed critic of the Bush handling of Iraqi reconstruction and transformation, and Senator John McCain of Arizona who supports the administration over Iraq without being happy with the Bush economic and environmental policies at home. It was a testimony to the knowledge and reasoning powers of the two Senators --- plus the predictable skill as an interviewer of Tim Russert --- that you couldn't but be more enlightened on what's at stake in our occupation of Iraq and the strengths and weaknesses of the Bush administration's policies there . . . this, no matter what you own substantive views happen to be. Mine are much closer to McCain's. Graham proved to be a highly informed and thoughtful critic of the administration all the same.

The Vietnam Quagmire?

At one point in the interview-debate --- to bring us to today's buggy theme --- Senator Graham raised the analogy between what's unfolding in Iraq and the Vietnam war, along with the usual metaphor of a quagmire. It's common currency, that analogy, in the circles critical of the Bush administration; and very quickly Senator McCain --- who was an aviator in the Vietnam war, only to be shot down and held captive for more than 5 years by the North Vietnamese --- disputed the analogy. After a few seconds, Russert intervened in order to move the debate back to the Bush administration today and the forthcoming electoral season in 2004. As a result, the reasons why the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq today are or aren't sound weren't elaborated on.

An elaboration is what this buggy article seeks to do. It strikes the buggy prof as noticeably misleading, and on several counts . . . all of which will be singled out here in a few moments.

First things first though. Note that the criticism of the Vietnam analogy as wrongheaded and badly thought through appears originally in the previous buggy article on Iraq --- Progress and Problems in Iraq II, the second of a three-part series on the US campaign to reconstruct and transform that country; what follows here isn't the promised third article in that series. It's a stand-alone article, nothing less.

This is the second in a three-part series that deals with the problems and progress being made by the US and UK in reconstructing Iraq, after 40 years of Baathist Party totalitarianism and mass-murdering brutality . . . during which time there was a complete collapse of civil society, never mind anything approaching ordinary political life, Baathist rule marked by a pervasive secret police, abundant recourse to the torture-chamber, the use of poison gas and biological warfare against Iraqi citizens, and an unbridled cult of leadership-worship. You should read the initial article, published on Friday and now completed, before plunging into this one. The arguments in the three articles form a coherent whole. The final article should be available tomorrow or the day after.

The Unprecedented Challenge of Iraqi Nation-Building

The challenge the US has faced in Iraq since the end of the war six months ago is unprecedented in our long history in the 20th century of nation-building: the effort --- starting in the Philippines at the beginning of the last century, then in parts of Central America with no success during the interwar period, later at the end of WWII in Germany and Japan, and more recently in the Balkans --- of occupying defeated or hostile or bankrupt countries and seeking to foster a more democratic government and a much more effective economy. Even in the case of Central and Latin America, where the US has pushed for democratic government starting with John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress --- with some veering during the cold war competition, especially in the Nixon era --- all the countries south of the US, beginning with Mexico and down throughout Central America all the way across the Continent to the Straits of Magellan, are now democratic in an electoral sense, with several making good headway in institutionalizing their democratic gains. Even Argentina, suffering its umpteenth economic crisis of the last 100 years, has remained solidly democratic throughout; and in fact its government is now trying former politicians, including an ex-President, for corruption.

Have these democratic developments banished marked inequalities in Latin America, between classes and ethnic groups? Or overcome traditions of corruption and nepotism in public life? Obviously not. They are rooted in nearly 600 years of Spanish rule and heritage, including the lack of a genuine grass-roots revolutionary movement anywhere in Latin America during the 1820s when Spanish rule simply collapsed and macho warlords --- caudillos, along with the support of small and powerful economic cliques --- took control everywhere.

A sidebar clarification: These recent democratic developments since the 1980s are impressive all the same. Almost everywhere south of the Rio Grande, they've spawned a far more vigorous and independent media and vocal human rights groups operating at the grass-roots level. Elections too are relatively honest for the first time in Latin American history (Chile something of an exception before 1969). Something else too. In scarcely any country will you now find the sort of polarizing political extremism --- left and right --- that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s and led to urban guerrilla warfare and brutal military coups in much of the Continent or, in Central America, more rural-based terrorism and homicidal guerrilla warfare and civil war that pitted right-wing violence against left-wing violence. Today, all of Central America is democratic and pacific. It looks like staying that way for a long time too.



The exception is Communist Cuba. Less idolized by the radical left these days, it still seems to beguile certain minds in the US and even more the EU. Consider this. At the same moment a judge in Spain sought to have the former Chilean dictator Pinochet extradited from Britain to Spain four years ago, a Spanish university was awarding the dictator Fidel Castro --- responsible for killing far more of his population than Pinochet, while driving ten to twenty times the number of his citizens into exile and filling his jails with dissidents --- an honorary doctorate. Apparently, to make sense of this, you have to assume that a dictator who can stay in power for almost 45 years, crush all opposition, ruin his economy, jail and torture all dissidents, and turn his island country into a huge secret-police controlled prison --- the inmates told what to study, what to read, when or how they might pray, or how they should show their constant support for the hero-leader, with no parole and hence any freedom ever possible --- will be celebrated in large parts of West Europe as long as he serves up a heady lather of radical mumbo-jumbo.



For the US, Iraq is the greatest challenge of all.

In that country, after 40 years of malignant, mass-murdering Baathist Party rule abruptly ended last April, there was nothing resembling the indispensable basis of any effective democratic development --- or even a moderately authoritarian plural society: no free trade unions, no free newspapers, TV, or radio, no free professional associations, no business associations, no political parties besides the fascist Baathists --- modeled, as the previous article showed, on Mussolini's Fascism and Hitlerian Nazism. Nothing. Nada. No independent local government or independent Parliament either. For four decades, the judiciary and all the police and security forces had been similarly under the tyrannical thumb of Saddam Hussein, his Baathist-Party tribal-clan, and the other members of the party.

A visitor, Sam Ward, left a comment at the end of the buggy article, published over last week, on how blatantly the media misinterpreted David Kay's interim report to the Bush administration and the Congressional Intelligence Committees on the search in Iraq for WMD. Sam's brief comment starts off this commentary, followed by a lengthy Buggy analysis of four related matters.

1) The problems and progress of post-war Iraqi reconstruction --- dealt with in earlier buggy articles, especially the latest, published October 5th, 2003 --- are tackled again, with another effort at clarifying them and adding some historical and comparative perspective.

Once again, too, as we've noted before, there are some justified criticisms of the ways the Bush administration has handled that daunting venture --- even if most of the reports on Iraq in the media, or from opponents of Blair in Britain or Bush in America, forget or conveniently ignore just how monumental and challenging that undertaking is. Doubly so, to be more precise, in a region where democracy in any western sense has never existed: instead, where political life is marked by 21 despotic Arab states and --- next door to Iraq, eastward in Iran --- by a die-hard, despised Islamist ruling clique. These valid criticisms will be set out here later.

2) As against the discouraging trends --- which were dealt with at length in the earlier buggy article of October 5th --- there are some recent encouraging developments. We will lay these out too.

3) What follows next is an extraordinary article --- no other word for it. The grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini --- the fiery Islamist revolutionary who spearheaded the 1979 Iranian revolution in 1978 and denounced the US as the Great Satan, a position endorsed by Shiite radical terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon, then emulated by extremist Sunni Islamist terrorists like Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Taliban among others --- says after several months of work in liberated Iraq that "'We consider [the U.S. invasion] as the arrival of goodness, and I hope the American people understand this,' It is important for Americans to keep their eyes on the big picture, he added, and 'to make the [democratizing] mission possible" by not getting discouraged by the day-to-day difficulties.'"

The previous article ended with a selection of memorable films on the war crimes of the Japanese and Germans, singling out especially at the end Judgment at Nuremberg by Stanley Kramer . . . released in 1961. It then added a few comments, two or three sentences --- nothing longer --- about what makes for a memorable film. Those brief sentences begin this loose, freewheeling commentary about what has happened to the cinema business: in particular, why so few good films are made these days compared to the great era of Hollywood cinema between the mid-1930s and early 1980s. Loose? Freewheeling? It won't take the savvy among you long to note that these are a euphemism, a cover for essentially a discursive list of buggy preferences, a few questions, and a some fast, top-skimming observations at the end.

Nothing less, nothing more. Still, an important topic given the role of films in our lives --- whether made for distribution in theaters or directy for television. And, let's hope, a stimulus to some comments from our visitors that exceed the buggy ones in insight and thoughtfulness. Yes . . . especially since at the end of these casual, throwaway remarks --- skimmed off the surface --- you will find a remarkably good article full of insights on the topic that appeared a few years ago in The New Republic.

WHAT'S HAPPENED TO FILMS?

If the worth of a film is in part a matter of how many times you can see it over your lifetime --- and never cease being struck by its depths, intelligence, drama, humor, acting, and directing --- then Judgment at Nuremberg , like Casablanca, is one of them. I've seen the latter maybe a dozen times over 50 years now, always left wondrous by its stupendous impact. As for Judgment, maybe 7 or 8 times, and left with the same dumbstruck feeling. Both are in black-and-white and have no special digital effects, just stunning scripts, crisp direction of unusually talented actors, a remarkable sense of dramatic pacing, and the treatment of major historical themes without ever degenerating into soapbox didactics. Note: the lengthy discussion of Judgment at Nuremberg, which unfolded in the previous article, is tacked on at the end here, just in case there are readers of this article who haven't seen that earlier one

Good Cinema

Good films, of course, don't have to have world-historical themes like these two.

Lots of good ones are just solid entertainment of a high-quality order . . . no greater aspirations, no need too. Come to that, if you think of it, Casablanca --- even as it treated the themes of Nazism and its threat, German occupation of France and Vichy collaboration (in the film, Vichy rule of Morocco), and immoral US neutrality, symbolized throughout most of the film by Humphrey Bogart --- probably aimed as much at just being entertainment with remarkably stimulating personal stories as it did at treating the political background themes. Oppositely, as we know from a lot of recent European cinema, pretentiousness and a blatant lack of dramatic sense and sensitivity --- to say nothing of clunky actors sitting around moaning about the woes and numbing misery of modern life --- add up to a lot of off-putting pompous tosh, about as bracing as hacking and hewing your way through an impenetrable jungle of lengthy post-modernist academic pishposh without, close at hand, copious quantities of aspirin, Ad-van, and iced Sauvignon Blanc to urge you on.

What follows is an exchange with two different students currently enrolled in political science 121, both their comments dealing with the decision of the Truman Administration in August 1945 to drop nuclear bombs on Japan . . . first on Hiroshima, then a few days later on Nagasaki. The decision has been a source of controversy from the start, raising both practical strategic questions and moral ones. The strategic questions boil down to one overriding concern: was it necessary to drop the bombs in order to force the Japanese government into surrendering immediately afterwards? The moral ones are more complex, as they frequently are in international life . . . especially where wars are concerned, including their conduct.

The first set of comments come from Pedro Cortez, who seems to have a vigorously commendable interest in international relations and diplomatic history, several solid courses under his belt, and a stint last year in the model UN, where he played the role of the US government in dealing with the nuclear weapons program of totalitarian North Korea. They deal with the question of US mlotives for dropping the two nuclear bombs on Japan: and in particular, whether they didn't reflect anti-Soviet concerns as WWII neared its end. The lengthy buggy reply follows.

The second set of comments has been posted by Joey Tartakovsky, a senior who has been laudably active, among other things, in journalism on campus. In that capacity, he has repeatedly tangled with the ex-cathedra ideological mumbo-jumbo that the politically correct zealots and dogmatists spew out daily --- frequently backed by put-downs in class, secret tribunals, witch-hunting, and either tolerance of student Red-Guard thugs who drive off campus any invited speakers to the right of Al Gore, or active encouragement of such antics. Not to forget invasions into the classrooms of non-conforming professors by these two-bit thugs, the inane, slogan-shouting storm-troopers of the pc movement. Joey's comments deal with the fierce resistance of Japanese soldiers as the brutal, savagely fought campaigns of US island-hopping in the Pacific drew closer to the Japanese homeland --- and especially the battle of Okinawa that raged for two months and entailed 40,000 - 50,000 American casualties, the beleaguered Japanese defenders, originally 110,000, fighting to the very end rather than surrendering. Didn't these staggering US casualties reinforce the determination of the Truman administration to avoid an invasion of Japan --- which would have entailed a mutual, massive bloodbath lasting months --- and use the nuclear bombs to end the war?

The buggy reply will follow once more. Several good historical films and books and other readings will figure in that reply as well.

FROM PEDRO CORTEZ

Prof:

I mentioned to you during the break yesterday in class that the Russians entering the war was a big factor in us using the atomic bomb. I agree that we should have had a demonstration on an uninhabited island, as some scientists at Los Alamos urged at the time. We dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima just before the Russians entered the war against Japan.

Though this buggy article is really for the students in political science 121 this quarter --- international relations theory --- it deals with a major problem in international life that might be of interest to general visitors to this site: why cooperation among states in IR is generally harder to establish than it is inside stable nation-states, and generally harder to sustain in the face of change. We start from a pivotal theoretical premise: from time immemorial, the basic logic of international relations reflects an overriding tension between a system of power politics and war on one side and international order on the other. The latter involves various formal and informal rules of the game for both cooperation and competition in IR --- including even, in formal treaties signed solemnly by states, the laws of war: how it should start, how belligerent states are to treat neutrals, how the war is to be fought and with what weapons and against what legitimate targets, how prisoners are to be treated and the like. International order of this sort creates mutual expectations among the leaders of states as to what they should or shouldn't do; and its impact in mitigating the power struggle among states, including war, and channeling state interests into various forms of diplomatic, economic, and security cooperation, varies considerably from one international era to another.

Think here of the breakdown of the global economy, extreme nationalism and extremist ideologies, and then the global destruction that followed in the 1930s and into WWII. The war was fought with scant attention to the laws of war on all sides, though the Nazi Holocaust and extensive slave-labor system in occupied Nazi Europe was of a brutal degree not matched elsewhere. Japanese behavior in occupied China and SE Asia was also unusually murderous, though there was nothing comparable to the Nazi Holocaust. Compare international order of that turbulent violent era, 50 million dead in WWII itself, with the much greater impact of international order today, reflected in such international organizations as the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, ASEAN, NATO, the UN, and the EU among hundreds of other such organizations. Even the recent war in Iraq was notable for its low levels of civilian deaths and harm to the Iraqi infrastructure.

WHAT EXPLAINS INTERNATIONAL ORDER'S GREAT HISTORICAL VARIATION?

Essentially, in barebones language, it boils down to the joint impact of five key considerations:

* Are there intense ideological or religious or civilization-laden conflicts among the major states that lead to intense ideational and moral struggles to destroy infidels and non-believers or at least convert them fully and transform the internal domestic politics and cultures of other states? The impact of this variable is self-evident. When rival great or mid-level powers challenge one another's legitimacy on these grounds, International order essentially breaks down or is at best fragile.

--- As we know only too well since 9/11, violent Islamo-extremist terrorist groups would be happy, if possible, to acquire weapons of mass destruction and kill off all the infidels, starting with this country. We also know there are some states that have supported these international terrorists, first and foremost Taliban Afghanistan . . . just as we rightly worry about the WMD in the hands of Saddamite Iraq and North Korea, two blood-soaked, mass-mudering totalitarian systems. Generally, though, none of this adds up to a major ideological challenge of the sort that raged in the interwar period of the last century or during the long cold war. As for the clash between civilizations, it exists --- but not between the West and, say, Islam. Rather, as a buggy article on the Samuel Huntington thesis tried to show at length, the clash is unfolding at the heart of Arab and other Islamic countries: it pits modernizers against retro-grade Islamist extremist revivalism, with the despotic rulers and tribal-clan cliques around them in the Arab countries mainly concerned with survival and maintaining their vast privileges and power-monopoly in a winner-take-all system of political life. See Huntington's Clash of Civilizations The buggy prof had the honor of studying with that gifted political scientist in the past.

Directions: The exam will be held on Thursday, October 17. Fortunately, it turns out that instead of having the room free for 90 minutes (until 7:00 PM), there's no class scheduled afterwards, and we can let the exam run another 15 minutes until 7:15 . . . if that's necessary. It might not be. In the past, for what it's worth, most students taking a mid-term of this sort finished within 90 minutes. Easily.



On the day of the exam, we will choose three of the following eight sets of questions or topics that cover the lectures and the readings in part one of the syllabus. Choose the two you want and write on each. Since the sets of questions or topics are divided into clear sections, you need only number each --- for instance 1.1 and 1.2 --- and then answer them. To help you prepare, we've given you the relevant pages in the reader that pertain to these sections. Our aim here should be patently obvious: it's to ensure that you have mastered the basics of the theoretical materials being set out in the lectures and especially the readings and relate them to one another. We're also interested in seeing if you can apply these materials to concrete cases, especially the recent war with Iraq. The teaching assistants will be particularly alert to see whether you've got on top of the readings and concepts and theories in them and the lectures and can apply them successfully this way. Be sure, too, to explain carefully all the key terms and concepts that a question or topic covers.



!. Stephen Walt, pp. 1-14, summarizes the three major theoretical schools of thought --- or paradigms --- that dominate IR work these days, plus some developments in foreign policy making (domestic politics). This question concentrates on liberalism and realism.

1) Summarize, following Walt and the lectures, the basics of the two major schools, realism and liberalism

Have the media, especially prominent newspapers like the NY and LA Times and major TV networks accurately reported what David Kay, the head of the Iraqi Survey Group of several hundred trained personnel looking for Iraqi WMD, actually said in his interim unclassified report to the Bush administration and the Congressional Intelligence committees, given all the innuendo flying back and forth about the contents? Have they even accurately reported what the unclassified 10 page summary that the CIA put on its web site? Not according to Kay, in a lengthy and revealing interview yesterday on Fox News. A trained CIA specialist on WMD, Kay had been a member of the original UNSCOM inspection teams in Iraq under UN Security Council authority until late 1998, when the teams withdrew after deciding that Iraqi obstruction had made it impossible for them to do their work. In particular, the Iraqi government failed to comply with three new UN Security Council resolutions, passed between September and December of that year, that demanded full compliance with the inspection teams.

Remember, in 1995 --- four years into the UNSCOM inspections --- two of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law fled Iraq and told the inspectors once they were in Jordan of their first-hand knowledge of Saddam's huge quantities of chemical and biological weapons. The brutal Saddamite government had no alternative but to concede the existence of these programs. Until then, despite four years of intensive inspections, UNSCOM hadn't been able to uncover any of those WMD stockpiles. Later, Saddam's sons-in-law returned to Iraq with assurances of their safety. Both were murdered within three days of their return. See global security.

DAVID KAY'S ACTUAL VIEWS

As we just noted, David Kay is the CIA specialist on WMD who heads the new Iraqi survey teams consisting of hundreds of trained specialists looking for them in Iraq. Last week, he gave a report to the Bush administration, then discussed it at length with the Congressional Intelligence committees, then let a 10 page public document be published at the CIA web site. Seizing on innunendo and selective quotes --- even from the published document --- the media tended to misinterpret the report and conclude that it was at odds with the Bush administration's position on WMD.

The facts are different. They appear much more clearly in a lengthy interview that David Kay had on Fox News yesterday.

If you've read the previous article --- which had a lengthy theoretical analysis of how wars start --- then you don't need to read this article . . . which is the latter half of that earlier article, focused specially on the Iraqi war and what has been unfolding there since its quick end in early April: politically, economically, and security-laden. The reason for this shorter version? Some of the vistors here might prefer to see just that Iraqi half, which was about 15 pages in Word --- a long enough article by any standard, no? First off here, you'll find an email sent to the buggy prof after his lecture in political science 121, international relations theory, that dealt with the ways wars start: it asks essentially, that email, whether our war with Iraq doesn't fit a blunder-model of war-initiation. The buggy reply follows.

That email's brief. The buggy reply is mostly what this article is about. After you read it, you should have a better working idea of a large number of key topics about the war with Iraq and the developments there over the last six months.

1) the various rationales for going to war against Saddamite Iraq,

2) the problems that have arisen since its end there,

3) the degree to which the Bush administration was over-optimistic about these problems, and how serious they are

4) the morality of the war and our occupation and goals

5) the progress or not being made in Iraq on three-tracks of change that we're in charge of in our occupying role: political, economic, and security-laden ones.

6) and the crucial stakes for our country's security in the war on terrorism that the challenge of rehabilitating Iraq and bringing pressure on the surrounding gangster regimes --- two of them active terrorist supports seeking WMD (Syria and Iran) and a third, Saudi Arabia, the main source apparently of funding for Islamo-extremist terrorism in the world and Wahhabi fanaticism --- to change their ways or else.

Introductory Remarks About How Wars Start

A student in my upper division class, political science 121 --- international relations theory --- sent a query about the lecture on Thursday, which set out a model of how wars actually begin. We envisaged a spectrum with two polar opposites: 1) wars that begin with at least one state's leaders deciding, deliberately and with calculated efforts, to go to war because they see advantages to it compared to the status quo, at one pole; and 2) at the other pole, stark blundering into war . . . none of the conflicting states really intending to go to war, owing to sheer misperceptions or miscalculations that, in a spiraling manner, suddenly set off the use of force. Some good studies find no war ever started in a sheer blunder manner. Since the theoretical analysis is relevant, among other things, to the recent war to topple Saddamite Iraq, my lengthy reply to the student's query --- sent to the entire class yesterday --- seems worthwhile setting out here . . . especially with its long analysis of how the war against Saddam's regime started, and what seems to be going on in Iraq under US-UK occupation since then.

First though, some theoretical background needs to be sketched in briefly in order to make more sense of the model set out in class: remember, it deals with how wars start using the diagram of a spectrum running between the two polar points just mentioned

THE MODEL BRIEFLY FLESHED OUT

1) Security-Dilemmas and Pre-Emptive War

What's called a security dilemma is near the blunder pole . . . say a quarter or a third of the way back toward the middle. (Remember here: like all models, the current one is a purposeful simplification of complex phenomena, intended to distill the underlying structures, political agents --- unitary states in the present case --and the logic of state interactions that lead to war as fed through a policymaking process in the conflicting states.) As for the meaning of a security dilemma, it refers to a spiral of rising arms competition and of growing mistrust, worry, and fear among conflicting states; eventually, the arms competition --- if the spiral continues --- leads to outright arms racing, quantitative and qualitative (weapons innovations), along with possible worst-case thinking among the states' leaders about one another. At some point, a pre-emptive war could erupt: the leaders of at least one of the states, to put this tersely, fears that its rival or rivals are about to attack imminently, and so they launch an initial attack to get in the first-blow. Note that to be genuinely pre-emptive, the leaders of state getting in the first-blow have to be genuinely convinced that war is imminent, with no alternatives. Invoking a threat that isn't genuinely believed is a rationalization for aggressive or preventive war, not a pre-emptive strike.

The uncommonly informative exchange referred to in the title here appears this month in Commentary magazine: specifically, a lengthy set of replies, favorable and critical, to a provocative, wide-ranging article published by Arthur Waldron, a specialist on China and Asia, on China's political and economic destiny that appeared in that magazine in July-August's composite issue. Entitled "The Chinese Sickness," Waldron's article set out a long argument that was full of hard-hitting criticisms of the existing regime, cast doubt on its ability to handle its challenges and problems, predicted its collapse in the future, and argued that the US is ill-prepared now to deal with the fall-out of the CP-system's collapse for China, Asia, and US policies there. The argument had a big resonance, picked up by lots of the media around the world. It also had a big echo in the circles of Chinese specialists in this country, mostly --- though not entirely --- negative; and the initial several long replies in Commentary this month, Watching China, take issue with Waldron's argument and even assault it. Others, including a specialist who was a former US ambassador to China, defend Waldron. The whole set of replies, plus Waldron's lengthy rejoinder, is a mine of illuminating views that no one interested in China's future and the nature of US-Chinese relations should miss.

Note that the original Waldron article isn't available except to Commentary subscribers who pay an extra fee for accessing the archives. No matter: while important in its own right, it's not indispensable to following the lengthy exchange Watching China in this month's issue online. Note though: the exchange will be available without fee, to judge by past experience, only this month. Hence be sure to click on the link and, at a minimum, save the entire exchange to your hard drive or print it out. Once November comes around, you won't be able to get it without paying.

What The Debate Is More Specifically About

Essentially, the initial Waldron article and his critics are to-ing and fro-ing over four key topics about China today and in the future: 1) its current political system's durability; 2) the problems and achievement of China's economy in the reform era since 1978; 3) the prospects for ambitious and necessary economic reforms if high-levels of growth are ever to be sustained; and 4) the implications for Asia and US relations with China and the rest of Asia should China's CP-system crash sooner or later. To one degree or another, all these topics have been dealt with extensively, in a wide-ranging manner, in the previous five buggy articles published here recently on China --- with the latter topic, the foreign policy implications, less so: at any rate, up to now. All four, as we noted, are closely interconnected and entail a rippling built-in conflict of vast proportions, a head-on collision in the making that pits

* the logic of political authoritarianism of the Chinese CP, on one side, with all its built-in privileges, power, and wealth-making for the CP elite and its allies

* against, on the other side, the logic of systematic reform and the reorientation of the economy . . . whose fast growth in the past has already slowed down and is bound to slow down even more, and perhaps grind to halt, without fundamental restructuring.