Tag Archives: Turkey

Seven years since 9/11

On the seventh anniversary of the September 11th attacks on America, FrontPageMagazine conducted an interview with Alex Alexiev, vice president for research at the Center for Security Policy. It is reproduced below.

As we mark the 7th anniversary of 9/11 and the last few months of the Bush Administration, where do we stand in the war on terror?

Well, you can say that we are in fairly good shape in the war on terror, but doing very poorly in the war of radical Islam against America and the West.

This sounds like a contradiction in terms. Can you elaborate?

It does sound paradoxical, but it is the reality of the situation and an unfortunate one at that. We have done well in the war on terror because we have not had a serious terrorist incident on American territory since 9/11. So in the war on terror, strictu sensu one might argue that we have been victorious so far. But this is highly misleading, because the war we’re in is not a war against terrorism but against a radical totalitarian ideology in Islamic garb that is committed to the destruction of our civilization. And terrorism is just one of the instruments in the arsenal of this murderous ideology. To call what is essentially a war between civilization and barbarism a war on terror is not only highly misleading but also self-defeating since, as Sun Tzu teaches us, you can’t win a war if you don’t know who the enemy is. The failure to understand what this war is all about and explain it to the American people is the single greatest failure of the Bush Administration and the reason it will leave a pretty dismal record behind.

Expand please on how we have mislabeled this war.

If you declare terror to be your main enemy in this struggle, you’re elevating a symptom of the underlying malignancy rather than the malignancy itself to be your main adversary. This is like focusing on treating the symptoms of cancer like pain and such, rather than the cancer itself. It may make you feel better for a while, but sooner or later the cancer will kill you. The real enemy, on the other hand, whether you call it radical Islam, Islamofascism, Islamism or whatever is a militant millenarian doctrine seeking to impose Islamic rule and barbaric shariah doctrine worldwide. It aims to achieve that by various means and strategies, including proselytism, infiltration of our institutions, taking over Muslim institutions, creating parallel societies and enforcing shariah in Muslim communities, but also intimidation and terrorism. More recently, shariah finance has become yet another potent weapon in the Islamist arsenal. It pursues the legitimization of shariah while providing a new source of financing of extremism and terrorism.

In the West, this plan for conquest by undermining our society from within has been doggedly pursued by the Muslim Brotherhood with the help of Saudi money for at least three decades now. And it isn’t something that is a great secret. It was described in great detail in an Ikhwan document known as “the Project” found in Switzerland in the early 1980s. Indeed, if I remember correctly, Jamie, your publication was the first to publish an English translation of it some years back. The US government presented similar programmatic Brotherhood documents at the Holy Land Foundation trial.

Does that mean that you discount the visible success we have achieved in the war in Iraq? Cetrainly Bush deserves credit for that.

No, not at all. What our forces in Iraq have done is a great testimony to the professionalism, ability and dedication of the American soldier. And yes, President Bush certainly deserves a lot of credit for hanging tough and allowing our military to do the job. But even a complete victory in Iraq, while diminishing the terrorist threat, does not do much to advance the greater struggle against Islamism. It is also unlikely to be permanent if all of its neighbors with the possible exception of Turkey do not wish to see a secular and democratic Iraq. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria are all threatened by such a government in Baghdad and are doing everything possible to undermine it and we have done absolutely nothing to neutralize them.

Now, contrast that with the huge strides radical Islam has made since 9/11. In the important formerly secular Muslim countries of Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia, Islamization is proceeding at a frightening pace. Shariah is now firmly established in the northern half of Nigeria and a vicious Islamist insurgency is raging out of control in southern Thailand and again in the Philippines. Our “strategic ally” Pakistan is in the grip of a talibanization process and its military intelligence is actively sabotaging our efforts in Afghanistan seriously threatening our hard-won gains there. In Turkey, the most important Muslim country, in my view, we now have an Islamist regime that has a good chance of transforming the staunchly secular NATO member into an Islamist Trojan horse. Last but most, the burgeoning Muslim communities in Europe are dominated by militant Islamists that totally reject European norms and culture and seek to undermine them. What is going to happen when the radicalized young European Muslims become a majority in the under 20 years old cohort in most large urban centers in 20 years or less, as demographics tell us they will? 

This brings us to the U.S. How far has this ‘project’ progressed in the U.S. to date?

Very far, in my opinion. We have a lot fewer Muslims than Europe and most of them are professional, economically successful people that should not be susceptible to Islamist hate-spewing, shariah barbarism and caliphate fantasies. Nonetheless, the combination of Muslim Brotherhood conspiratorial and organizational skills and unlimited financial support from our Saudi friends have resulted in the takeover of most of the U.S. Muslim establishment by Islamist fanatics dedicated to the destruction of our constitutional order. Virtually all organizations claiming to represent our Muslims are the product of the Ikhwan-Wahhabi nexus. In fact, they are one and the same organization with numerous fronts and offshoots. The original Islamist front in America, the Muslim Student Association, is as much of a product of the Brotherhood as are its spinoffs NAIT, ISNA, ICNA, MPAC and their close affiliates CAIR, aka Islamic Association of Pakistan, the Muslim American Society and countless others. Taken together these organizations represent a subversive movement, indeed a fifth column, within our society the likes of which America has never had to deal with in its history.

All of this is fairly easy to prove and well-known to our law enforcement authorities as testified by the fact a number of these organizations and individuals have been designated unindicted co-conspirators at various anti-terrorist trials and more than a few have been sent to jail. Despite that, many at the highest levels of our government refuse to understand and come to terms with this serious threat.

Instead, they use these organizations as their advisors on Islam with the predictable result of legitimating them and facilitating their subversive activities. It is high time we started taking a hard look at the Islamist infiltration at all levels of our government. How was it possible, for instance, for a person who appears to be an Islamist plant and lied about his background on his resume, to get to advise the number two man at the Pentagon into becoming a dupe of ISNA?

It’s probably too late to expect the Bush Administration to do much to rectify the situation you’re describing, but can we hope that the new administration will do better?

Well, I hope we can and should, but I’m not sure how realistic such hopes are. John McCain is on record saying that radical Islam is the greatest threat we face and that is very encouraging, but I have not heard anything specific from him about how the threat manifests itself and how he will go about confronting it. As for the democratic ticket, there are reasons to be concerned. The Obama campaign, for example, invited Ingrid Mattson, the president of ISNA to a key ‘faith gathering’ during the Democrat convention, thus bestowing its seal of approval on the most important Muslim Brotherhood umbrella organization in the country. This is not an auspicious beginning when you consider that many on the Left now consider radical Islam as a potential ally against their political opponents.

What would you recommend that we do as a government and people?

The simplest and also most important task of a country at war is “know thy enemy.” The Bush Administration has been an abject failure in doing that and the next administration must do it if we’re to make any progress in this war. What we need to realize and explain to the American people are three simple things. First, Islamism is not about religion but about political sedition and must be treated as such. Second, the Islamist movement in the United States and the West is a well-organized and funded fifth column and must be treated as such. Third, most of the financial and political support for these seditious activities are state-sponsored by countries claiming to be our allies. Only if we recognize these basic facts and start acting accordingly, we can expect, at long last, significant progress.

 

This interview was originally published on September 11, 2008 at Frontpagemagazine.com

 

Resurgence in need of restraint

By Jared Anderson

Russia’s gargantuan state-run gas company, Gazprom, has been touted as the driving force behind the country’s economic resurgence. The boundary between the state and the gas giant exists in name only, as numerous government officials, including Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, were high-ranking Gazprom executives before entering into politics. The company’s intimate relationship with the Kremlin has allowed it to experience tremendous financial success, perfectly evidenced by its 2008 revenues of an astounding $26.8 billion.[1] More importantly, though, is the fact that this single entity run by a single state now controls nearly a quarter of the world’s gas reserves, which not only guarantees Gazprom financial success, but also gives Russia the ability to use its gas-distributing arm as a political wedge.[2] And, if Russia’s track record is any indication, the country will utilize this strength for every possible benefit it may bring.Gazprom’s recent advocacy of the most ambitious natural gas pipeline ever proposed, South Stream, perfectly demonstrates Russia’s immense desire for dominance over the industry. Russia claims that such a pipeline would be squarely “aimed at strengthening the European energy security.” [3] However, the Nabucco pipeline, an alternative proposal endorsed by the United States that uses Caspian Sea gas and runs directly from Turkey to Europe, trumps South Stream in two essential regards: not only does Nabucco cost less than half the price of South Stream, but its capacity, at 31 billion cubic meters (bcm), is slightly larger than the Gazprom pipeline’s capacity of 30 bcm.[4] Therefore, the “energy security” argument is proven to be entirely unsubstantiated, as Nabucco provides greater gas capacity with the added benefit of increased financial flexibility for European countries. Further examination divulges the reality that this situation is much more than a traditional case of two companies marketing their respective proposals.

As the competition between the Nabucco and South Stream projects perfectly exemplifies, Gazprom can literally play by a different set of rules than its opponents. Nabucco’s investors are interested in the proposal because of the project’s financial potential, and therefore must be completely confident that there will be enough supply and demand for the pipeline in order for the plan to proceed. Any ambiguity in profit projections, then, decreases the willingness of investors to back the endeavor. Gazprom, on the other hand, can readily pursue projects that are not economically viable, as long as the Kremlin believes they will benefit Russia’s overall political goals. Specific to this case, Gazprom’s unique status has allowed it to make an aggressive push to completely dominate the European energy market through South Stream, as the company is able to virtually ignore any potential financial ramifications. Since Gazprom already supplies 25% of Europe’s natural gas, further infiltration into the region could very well wipe out its competition in the battle over this critical market, and ultimately give Russia undeniable political clout over a number of countries.[5]

Additionally, the relationship between the Kremlin and Gazprom allows Russia to wield incredible expertise in the natural gas sector. The company is fully aware that, unlike oil, the most critical aspect of natural gas distribution is not the resource itself, but rather the pipelines through which the gas is transported. The construction of South Stream will ensure that Russia has a guaranteed vehicle for gas distribution without any sort of expiration date. However, for these very reasons, some outsiders have speculated that the country has aggressively pushed South Stream in order to account for internal concerns over the country’s gas supply.

Indeed, a number of agencies have called into question the status of the Russian natural gas industry. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) recent report on Russia’s gas delivery raises concerns about both the country’s gas supply and its infrastructure.[6] The United States’ Energy Information Agency (EIA) echoes these ambiguities, citing the fact the Russia’s four largest gas fields have all recently experienced significant declines in production.[7]

While Russia’s notorious lack of transparency prevents further insight into the status of its natural gas resources, the completion of South Stream would render such questions irrelevant; for even in the event of declining production, Gazprom would still profit tremendously by leasing out the pipes to other countries. Thus, advocating South Stream ensures Russia has entrenched itself in a “win-win” situation of guaranteed dominance over European gas. As previously alluded to, tangible information about the nature of Gazprom’s business dealings is virtually non-existent. Particularly shrouded in secrecy is its policy of gas distribution through regional intermediaries.

For example, RosUkrEnergo, which supplies Gazprom’s gas to the strategically imperative Ukraine, is half-owned by two long-unidentified Ukrainian businessmen with alleged links to Russian organized crime. Former President Vladimir Putin’s 2004 attempts to confront such accusations by vehemently asserting that “we don’t know the identities of the hidden owners” perfectly summarizes the nature of Gazprom’s dealings.[8] The company not only signs multi-billion dollar contracts with enigmatic individuals, but has no system of accountability whatsoever. It is difficult to imagine that there would be any reason for such secrecy other than to cover up illegal activities, something that Gazprom could get away with quite effortlessly given its relationship with the Kremlin.

So, while the Kremlin and Gazprom amass record profits, the real financial loser is consistently shown to be the countries importing Russian gas. They are coerced by Russian “pipeline politics” into putting up with Gazprom’s questionable practices because they have no alternative gas suppliers. Thus, the argument that South Stream will benefit anyone besides Russia and its select contract holders becomes increasingly hard to make. To date, the company has shown very little convincing evidence of practicing fair and responsible business. Until it does, the European Union should make a stand to resist Gazprom’s aggression and actively pursue any opportunity to receive gas from non-Russian sources. Reexamination of Gazprom’s stated goals for South Stream in the context of both the company’s structure and recent history provides unsettling projections for the long-term future. For European nations, the extent of Russia’s propensity to use gas as a political weapon was fully realized on January 1, 2006, when Russia cut off its gas supplies to pro-Western Ukraine. This display of aggression was eerily similar to events that transpired during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) strategically cut off oil to nations supporting Israel.

With such precedent, the prospect of an OPEC-like cartel controlling the natural gas industry cannot be ignored, especially when Gazprom Deputy Chief Executive Alexander Medvedev has been quoted as stating that "Gazprom is for the pursuit of dialogue which already exists in the framework of the gas forum which gathers together the most important gas exporters." [9]

While Gazprom executives deny having aspirations further than that of a “forum” when directly confronted, the company’s history of aggressive actions make such statements dubious. The European Union and the rest of the world cannot allow a cartel to be formed amongst leading national gas producers, as the creation of such a group would do nothing to prohibit the use of natural gas as a political weapon in the future.  OPEC’s dominance over the oil market has shown just how much power an alliance with control over a strategic resource can wield. All steps must be taken to ensure that natural gas does not succumb to the same fate, and the first step in doing this is to ensure fair, transparent competition.

Unfortunately, recent signs indicate that Russia’s brand of “pipeline politics” may very well be working better than the Kremlin expected. The country’s unwavering commitment to South Stream has raised questions among financiers about how to guarantee the constant flow of gas through the Nabucco pipeline. In response, Turkey has repeatedly suggested including Iran as part of the plan, due to its proven natural gas reserves of 974 trillion cubic feet (tcf), which trails only Russia for second most in the entire world.[10] Consideration of Iran as a Nabucco supplier places the United States in a unique quandary, as it is either forced to support Russia’s continued dominance of the natural gas market or an Iranian regime that has repeatedly defied calls to halt its nuclear program. Since Iran obviously poses the most imminent threat to worldwide security, the United States must, above all, ensure that Iran is not included in the supplying of the Nabucco line. However, maintaining staunch opposition to Iranian supply of Nabucco allows a number of underlying factors to potentially work in the United States’ favor.

Most notably, the Nabucco plan is set to be completed in stages, and experts calculate that Azerbaijan alone will be able to supply enough gas for the first phase.[11] In other words, Iranian gas is not necessary for the pipeline proposal to commence. During the first phase, other nations in the vicinity, such as Iraq, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, will have the opportunity to improve their respective infrastructures with the hope of being able to supply subsequent Nabucco stages by 2010 or 2011.[12] Finally, the time gap would theoretically allow relations to improve with Iran, and utilization of its gas supplies may very well be feasible at a later date.

Continued American support for the Nabucco pipeline in the interest of European energy diversity, then, is absolutely critical. Moreover, we must reinvigorate our relationship at the highest levels of government with Central Asian nations, including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, in an effort to push the Nabucco proposal. These countries, according to Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN), would welcome our diplomacy and are eagerly waiting to be freed from Russia’s shadow.[13] They have the gas to supply Europe’s needs, and with our backing, their infrastructures will improve over time. Further, we must not only work with these European and Asian countries, but also encourage them to work with each other.  Nothing short of a unified force will be capable of outmaneuvering Gazprom. Fortunately, there is historical precedent for virtually the same course of diplomacy, as U.S. support for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum (BTE) projects of 2006 allowed the respective governments of Georgia and Azerbaijan to resist Russian influence and utilize their own resources. These pipeline projects were able to succeed despite the same questions over supply, commercial viability, and Russian influence. Since our intervention in 2006, the two countries have progressed dramatically towards greater sovereignty. Other Caspian nations must be encouraged to follow the example set by their neighbors.  As was the case with BTC and BTE projects of 2006, anything less than swift diplomatic action will condone Gazprom’s questionable practices and pave the way for the company to further increase its hegemony over the gas industry. Until Gazprom improves its transparency and ethics, such ascension simply cannot be allowed. However, Gazprom does not need to be sabotaged; Russia does not need to be attacked. Rather, fair competition must be held as the overarching standard, a criterion that Gazprom is not likely to excel at. The benefits of the Nabucco line, both political and economic, are strong enough to beat out Gazpron’s South Stream. U.S. support for the Nabucco line would not only ensure true European energy diversity through fair competition, but also prevent the consolidation of the natural gas industry for decades to come.

[1] Forbes.com article reporting Gazprom’s 2008 revenues of $26.8 billion  
[2] Radio Free Europe article concerning Gazprom’s recent investments and activities citing the statistic that Gazprom controls 25% of the world’s gas 
[3]  Gazprom’s official mission statements  
[4] Nabucco’s Official Website outlining the plans for the pipeline

 

[7] Energy Information Agency’s report on Russia, which states that Russia’s four largest gas fields declined by 12 bcm between 2005 and 2006  
[8] Roman Kupchinsky’s testimony during the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ June, 12th 2008 hearing, concerning the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime 
[9] Reuters UK article discussing Gazprom’s interest in OPEC-like group 
[10] Energy Information Agency’s report on Iran, which cites both Iran’s proven gas reserves of 974 tcf and its highly underdeveloped industry  
[11] Video of Zeyno Baran’s testimony during the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ June 12th, 2008 hearing 
[12] Transcript of Hungarian News Agency interview with Matt Bryza, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, entitled “Energy Issues in Europe” 

[13] Video of Senator Lugar’s testimony during the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ June 12th, 2008 hearing

 

 

 

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From AMIA to Armageddon

According to foreign reports, Israel destroyed a nuclear weapons installation in Syria in September. Never has a larger story been pushed under the rug by so many so quickly. What are we to make of this?

Over the weekend former federal prosecutor and the head of the non-governmental International Intelligence Summit, John Loftus, released a report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program. His report was based on a private study of captured Iraqi documents. These were the unread Arabic language documents that US forces seized, but had not managed to translate after overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003.

After a prolonged battle between Congress and then director of US National Intelligence John Negroponte, President George W. Bush ordered those documents posted on a public access Web site last year. They were taken down after it was discovered that among the Iraqi documents were precise descriptions of how to build nuclear weapons.

As Loftus summarized, "The gist of the new evidence is this: Roughly one-quarter of Saddam’s WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990s. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid-to-late-1990’s. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam’s nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam’s entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans’ noses."

Loftus then cites Israeli sources who claim that the Iraqi nuclear program was transferred to the Deir az Zour province in Syria.

Loftus’ reports jibes with a report published on the Web site of Kuwait’s Al Seyassah’s newspaper on September 25, 2006. That report, which I noted last November, cited European intelligence sources and claimed that in late 2004 Syria began developing a nuclear program near its border with Turkey. Syria’s program, which was run by President Bashar Assad’s brother Maher and defended by an Iranian Revolutionary Guards brigade, had by mid-2006 "reached the stage of medium activity." The Kuwaiti report stated that the Syrian nuclear program was based "on equipment and materials that the sons of the deposed Iraqi leader, Uday and Qusai transferred to Syria by using dozens of civilian trucks and trains, before and after the US-British invasion in March 2003."

The program, which was run by Iranians with assistance from Iraqi scientists and scientists from the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, "was originally built on the remains of the Iraqi program after it was wholly transferred to Syria." These reports and several others like them which have surfaced over the past several years tell us interesting and disturbing things.

First, they show just how difficult it is to gather accurate information on the status of weapons of mass destruction programs.

From the 1991 Gulf War until the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs were a top issue on the international agenda. And yet, year in and year out, UN inspectors, who were on the ground throughout most of the period, failed to provide an accurate picture of those programs. Indeed, the documents and reports regarding the transfer of those programs to Syria show those inspection reports were wildly off the mark.

And not only did the UN fail. The US itself also failed. After invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam’s regime, the US military and intelligence arms took almost no action to ensure that suspected sites were secured and searched. The US failed to pursue clear intelligence reports indicating that in the weeks before the invasion, suspicious truck convoys had traveled from Iraq to Syria carrying what were presumed to be weapons of mass destruction components.

As for Syria, still today, after Israel reportedly destroyed the Syrian nuclear installation at Deir az Zour, the US and the international community as a whole behave as though nothing is out of order. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with her Syrian counterpart Waleed Muallem on November 3 and invited Syria to demand the Golan Heights from Israel at her peace conference at Annapolis later this month.

The Syrian and Iraqi cases also show that political courage and intellectual honesty are the keys to intelligence collection and analysis regarding weapons of mass destruction programs. When leaders and intelligence officials are uninterested in finding information about these programs, they are guaranteed to discover nothing. And when they wish to do nothing about information that they have, they can easily argue that their information was inconclusive. In contrast, if they decide to act on intelligence information that challenges preconceived notions and entrenched political interests, they are guaranteed to suffer the condemnations of those who have an interest in continuing to downplay or deny the dangers those programs manifest.

Against the backdrop of the international and American inability and unwillingness to handle the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs, the reports coming out from Iran regarding the mullocracy’s nuclear program and the American and Israeli responses to it are nothing less than terrifying.

Last week, the IAEA acknowledged that Iran is currently operating 3,000 centrifuges. At this rate of uranium enrichment, Iran will be capable of producing an atomic bomb in a year. This means that diplomacy today is a dead letter. It is too late to talk Iran out of its nuclear program.

Perhaps more disturbing than the IAEA report – written by Muhammad ElBaradei, who with the exception of the mullahs themselves is probably the man least interested in taking action against Iran’s program – were the Israeli and US responses to it. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly told his ministers that Israel needs to develop contingencies for the day after Iran joins the nuclear club.

The US is not merely developing contingencies for the day after. It is working to whitewash Iran’s role in fomenting the insurgency in Iraq in an effort to restart direct negotiations with Teheran. According to the New York Sun, Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are so eager to ascribe a decrease in Iraqi violence to Iran that they are willing to pooh-pooh the US military’s own achievements in its "surge" in Iraq.

The danger implicit in the US and Israeli decisions to plan for the day after Iran gets the bomb is made clear by two recent developments.

First, Sunday The New York Times reported that since Sept.11, the US has been assisting the Pakistanis in securing their nuclear facilities. Speaking to the Times, John E. McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the CIA, said, "I am confident of two things, that the Pakistanis are very serious about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent on getting their hands on it."

This story makes clear that even if a regime is considered trustworthy, if threatened by jihadists there is a danger that its nuclear weapons will fall into their hands. If that happens, the notion of deterrence is thrown out the window.

The latest developments in the investigation of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires provide even more reason for worry. Thirteen years ago, Iran ordered its terror arm Hizbullah to attack the AMIA building. Eighty-five people were killed.

Two weeks ago, Argentina requested that Interpol issue international arrest warrants against five Iranians and one Lebanese man implicated in the bombing. Interpol complied. Last week, Iran responded to Interpol’s move by demanding that Interpol issue arrest warrants against five Argentines involved in the investigation of the AMIA bombing. Iran accused them of the "crime" of insulting Iran.

This is an unsettling state of affairs on several levels. The AMIA bombing involved a state contracting a terror group to carry out a massive attack against innocent civilians simply because they were Jewish. For years, for political reasons, the Argentine government derailed its own investigation of the attack. Indeed, it took 14 long years for Argentina to request that Interpol issue arrest warrants.

And then, in a sign of contempt for the international community, Iran announced its counter-warrant demand. And the world has said nothing.

The point is, even if one believes the dubious argument that the Iranian regime can be trusted with nuclear weapons, given the AMIA precedent there is no reason to doubt that Iran would eventually transfer its weapons to Hizbullah or some other Iranian terror group to detonate in Israel.

What the Iranians learned, and indeed what Israel should have learned from the investigation of the AMIA bombing, is that no one will automatically point a finger at Iran for an attack carried out by Iran’s terror proxies.

And so we return to Iran’s nuclear bomb program, which like the Syrian and Iraqi programs, is partially hidden from view, but which the pro-Iranian IAEA claims is just one year away from completion. And we return to the US and Israel acting as though it is possible to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.

We look at all of this, and we ask: How can Washington and Jerusalem be so irresponsible? We look at Olmert’s reported willingness to countenance a nuclear-armed Iran, and we wonder, how can he try to wish away an impending threat of nuclear annihilation?

Nonproliferation, Deterrence, and Nuclear Strategy

by Robert R. Monroe 

The nuclear weapons ambitions of North Korea  and Iran have made front-page news of the related U.S. issues of nonproliferation, deterrence, and nuclear strategy.  Both the Administration and Congress are scrambling to play catch-up ball  in recovering these vital elements of U.S.  foreign policy and national security, which have  been unaddressed since the end of the Cold War.  This paper interconnects these three critical issues, and illustrates how far we must go to have them serve America’s interests today.

Enforcing Nonproliferation

America is at a critical moment in history.  We face a momentous decision about nonproliferation, a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy since the nuclear age began.  Our decision will shape the world’s future.  Proliferation of nuclear weapons  is a threat like no other; and  America has led the effort to harness it from the start.  The Baruch Plan of 1946 was followed by Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace of 1953, and these led to a decade’s work forging the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970.  This 37-year-old treaty is arguably the most remarkable and effective arms control instrument ever conceived.  It is distinguished by two characteristics.  First, the NPT is a vastly unequal treaty.  It approves five nuclear-weapons states (U.S., Russia, China, UK, and France…the five permanent members of the UN  Security Council); and  it requires all other signatories to remain non-nuclear-weapons states.  Second, 188 of the world’s 193 states have signed the NPT, voluntarily accepting this inequality.

During the Cold War—the first two decades of the NPT’s life—nonproliferation was greatly aided by the awesome presence of thousands of U.S. and Soviet nuclear warheads, poised for instant launch.  During those years, eighteen nations started developing nuclear weapons, and all subsequently terminated their programs.

Since this Cold War restraint was lifted, however, nonproliferation has been failing.  First India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons.  Now North Korea and Iran seem determined to go nuclear.  This should be a real wake-up  call!  North Korea and Iran are  rogue states, belligerent and irresponsible.  If either or both acquire nuclear weapons it will mark a global watershed point of the highest order, ushering in the full-fledged era of nuclear terrorism.  Clearly, nonproliferation will die if it does not evolve.  The choice is ours; and in making it we should consider the two alternative futures.

  • If we continue as in the past, we’re gambling that North Korea will end their decades-long pattern of deception.  If they do not, they’ll probably conduct a second nuclear test, and—once they get the design right—they’ll proceed into production of nuclear weapons, selling them to anyone desiring to buy.  This could easily cause Japan, South Korea, and possibly Taiwan to acquire nuclear weapons in self-protection.  Once the pattern has been set by North Korea, it will be difficult to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program; possibly leading to transfer of nuclear weapons to proxy organizations (e.g., Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda).  Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and  other Mideast states will likely acquire balancing nuclear arsenals in response.  The cascade then goes global: Venezuela, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, etc.  With so many nuclear-armed states, and with nuclear weapons and nuclear material so widely available to terrorists and criminals, frequent nuclear weapon use will surely follow.
  • But it doesn’t have to be this way.  We can vastly improve our future world if we finally open our eyes to the truth about nonproliferation.  It requires enforcement!  And surely the stark inequality of the NPT—voluntarily agreed to by every one of the 188 signatories—shows that the policing organization must be one or more of the treaty’s five nuclear-weapons states.  Ideally all five (which have exhibited reasonably responsible stewardship over a half-century) would act together, forcibly if necessary, to prevent any hint of proliferation.  Our world will probably  evolve to this, years in the future, after entire cities and millions of people are lost.  But at present it’s unrealistic to expect this degree of international cooperation.  Thus it’s up to America to take the lead, informing North Korea and Iran that, in support of nonproliferation, we will use military force, if necessary, to deny them a nuclear weapons production capability.  If use of force became necessary, there would surely be a number of immediate adverse effects; but long-term world prospects would be immensely better.
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Dictatorships and Double Standards

By Clay Varney

Pakistan’s tenuous political situation took another strange twist on September 10as a former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, attempted to return home in order to run in the upcoming presidential election this fall after seven years of exile in Saudi Arabia. Sharif, Pakistan’s ruler in the early 1990’s and again from 1997 to his overthrow in a coup by Pakistan’s current leader General Pervez Musharraf, flew into the Islamabad airport, where he was quickly met by security forces and given the option of arrest and imprisonment or continued exile, despite previous approval of his return by the nation’s Supreme Court. Choosing the latter option, Sharif was flown out of the country while a crackdown was launched on the leaders of his All Parties Democratic Movement. In taking this step, the military government of Musharraf risked another round of domestic turmoil against the regime. This event would be significant by itself, but taken in combination with other recent occurrences within Pakistan, it does not bode well for the future of the Musharraf government, let alone the prior state of popular acquiescence the general’s rule had once maintained.

Amid increased unrest among disparate elements of Pakistani society ranging from militant jihadists to secular lawyers against Musharraf’s continued hold on power, August saw the near declaration of a state of emergency. This move, which would have increased the government’s authority for a crackdown against dissident elements, was rumored to have been squashed via a telephone intercession from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. More recently, a purported power-sharing deal between Musharraf and another former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, turned sour after it appeared an arrangement was about to be struck. This agreement, which received backing from the Bush administration, would have given Musharraf some leeway against critics of the regime. On the same day as Sharif’s unsuccessful attempt at a homecoming, a spokesman for Bhutto alluded to her own return to Pakistan in October to contest the upcoming national elections. Whether Bhutto’s return will receive a similar welcome wagon remains to be seen.

Though initially these occurrences may appear to be unimportant developments in a far off land, the outcome of this struggle for power in Pakistan will have direct implications on the national security of the United States. Musharraf has played a delicate game in his alliance with the US against Al Qaeda. After the intensity of American resolve became apparent after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Musharraf and his regime began cooperating with the United States in its prosecution of the war on terrorism. Since that time, prominent figures in the Al Qaeda hierarchy, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have been captured or killed in Pakistan with Pakistani assistance. However, the strength of this cooperation has come into question recently in light of the peace treaty signed between the government and tribal forces in North Waziristan, which has given the Taliban and al Qaeda elements residing in the area considerable breathing room for reorganization and operational planning. The abrogation of the treaty, which lasted for nearly a year, saw a spasm of violence, including suicide bombings, against both military and civilian targets. If the events previously mentioned were not enough to make clear the degree of instability currently underway in Pakistan, there was also the bloody siege of the Red Mosque in downtown Islamabad. The religious students of the mosque, under the leadership of cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, had attempted to impose sharia law in the city through violence. This campaign proffered a direct challenge to the authority of the Musharraf regime and forced a showdown between the government and the religious militants.

In sum, Pervez Musharraf is facing a challenge to his rule from two sides, the first being from the radical Islamists who have attempted to assassinate the general on more than one occasion and who also challenged government authority at the Red Mosque. The other challenge is from the pro-democracy forces of Sharif and Bhutto who are urging an opening of the political system and whose protests against Musharraf ended in the reinstatement of sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. In this situation, American policymakers are stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place.

The Bush administration is faced with a difficult choice. On the one hand, President Bush has made democracy promotion a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda. On the other, Mr. Musharraf has been a respectable, if albeit far from perfect, ally in the aptly-named long war. It appears that the administration, much like Musharraf himself, is straddling the fence. Only in this case, the fence is between democracy promotion and terrorism prevention. The apparent American support for the now defunct power-sharing arrangement between Bhutto and Musharraf was a fine example of split priorities between the desire to support democratic reforms and enhance counterterrorism measures.

Continued assistance from the Pakistani government in the efforts against al Qaeda is of the utmost importance and should be the first priority of the commander-in-chief. As the National Intelligence Estimate released in July made clear, al Qaeda has gained a safe haven in the Wild West areas of Pakistan and is still aiming to strike within the United States. The administration needs to ask itself how it can ensure continued Pakistani support and cooperation in the war on terrorism. An opening of the political process, which could end with Sharif or Bhutto back in power, may be positive in the short term but disastrous in the long term. In this case, the Pakistani leadership would likely be less than enthusiastic in combating al Qaeda in order to shore up popular support by playing the anti-American card, to a much greater degree than currently shown by Musharraf. Secondly, the Pakistani military, which has been on the front lines in the tribal areas and suffered significant losses in battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda elements operating therein, may exhibit far less loyalty toward a politician than toward an experienced general from within its own ranks. The army, much like Turkey’s, has a long history of intervention in politics. Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former president, was himself deposed by the military and executed. Nawar Sharif’s experience with the army is little better, as it was his attempt to fire Musharraf in 1999 that touched off the general’s coup.

Finally, an opening of the system, to include a power-sharing agreement between Musharraf and Bhutto, will only placate one spectrum of the opposition. The Islamist opposition, of the type so bloodily demonstrated at the Red Mosque siege and in the outbreak of violence in the siege’s wake, will continue apace. American policymakers need to be aware of this fact, because a government run by Bhutto or Sharif simply may not be up to the challenge of confronting this violent movement. If that proves to be the case, the nightmare scenario of an Islamist government with nuclear weapons comes within the realm of possibility.

The late sage of American foreign policy, Jeane Kirkpatrick, offered useful advice relevant to today’s situation in her well-known article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” published in Commentary almost thirty years ago. In making reference to past developments in Iran, Nicaragua, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Angola, Kirkpatrick detailed how the “American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed, but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy–regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.” As Kirkpatrick’s statement makes clear, the Bush administration should tread lightly, as the last thing we need is a repeat of the revolution in Iran, this time with nuclear weapons.

Iran 2, Israel 0

Jafar Kiani was an anonymous Iranian prisoner until earlier in the month he became the first Iranian to be stoned to death since 2002.

Iran’s decision to revert to domestic barbarism is just one aspect of the regime’s strategy for terrorizing its people sufficiently to quell all pockets of resistance to its rule.

The regime’s determination to prevent an internal rebellion is an integral part of its larger plan to cast aside all obstacles to its acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Iran already possesses what it needs to make nuclear bombs. What it needs is time. Last summer’s war against Israel was timed to provide Iran with a respite from international pressure. Hizbullah’s abduction of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser took place the day before the leaders of the G-8 were scheduled to discuss Iran’s nuclear program. By ordering the assault on Israel, Iran diverted their attention away from its nuclear program.

Ever since the war, the Olmert government has declared that the war split the Muslim world into two camps – the moderates and the extremists. Operating on the basis of this perceived split, Israel has sought to build a coalition with the moderates in the hopes that such a coalition will block Iran from acquiring the bomb.

A year after the war, the time has come to make a renewed assessment of the situation. Are moderates blocking Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? If not, what has transpired?

A good place to start the analysis is with an item that appeared on both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s to-do list this week. Both leaders telephoned Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan to congratulate him on his Islamist AKP party’s electoral victory on Sunday.

Turkey is perceived as the paragon of Muslim moderation. Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and President Shimon Peres have all stated that Israel does not have a problem with AKP’s Islamist character. Indeed, in a bow towards Turkish friendship, Olmert revealed last week that Turkey has been facilitating talks between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights.

Yet Ankara’s readiness to encourage Israel to hand the Golan Heights over to Iran’s client state does not necessarily indicate that Turkey is Israel’s friend. Indeed, since the AKP rose to power in 2002, it has distanced Turkey from both Israel and the US while warming Turkish relations with Iran and Syria.

Starting with Turkey’s refusal to participate in or support the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, recent years have been marked by steadily increasing Turkish hostility. Two weeks ago, to Washington’s dismay, Turkey signed a $3.5 billion gas deal with Iran.

As to Israel, Erdogan was the first leader to host Hamas terror masters after the jihadist movement won the Palestinian elections in January 2006. During last summer’s war, Iran shipped arms to Hizbullah through Turkey. Turkey’s leaders have repeatedly declared their support for Iran’s right to develop its nuclear program.

IRAN’S COURTSHIP of Turkey is but one aspect of its foreign policy. Over the past several years, Iran has built webs of alliances with other states, alliances that have significantly deepened since last summer’s war.

In the first circle, Iran has its clients – Syria, Hizbullah, the Shiite (and increasingly the Sunni) militias in Iraq, and the Palestinians. Just as these forces fought together last summer, so they will fight together in the future. Ahmadinejad’s visit to Damascus last weekend was strikingly similar to meetings he held with his terror underlings before last summer’s war.

In its second circle, Iran has cultivated strategic ties with countries in Latin America, which, led by Venezuela, share its hatred for America. These ties serve three purposes. First, they provide Iran with a global deterrent against the US. Second, they provide Iran with ready support in diplomatic forums. Third, they build support for Iran among the "progressive" set in the US and Europe.

In Iran’s third circle of alliances are countries like Russia, China and Egypt. While all these states publicly oppose Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, they effectively block the international community from taking effective action against Iran’s nuclear program.

In the meantime, Israel’s coalition of moderates has failed to materialize. The leaders of the sought-for coalition, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, refuse to take any action against Iran. Indeed, they effectively support Teheran. In February, Saudi King Abdullah feted Ahmadinejad during a state visit. The next month, by mediating the formation of the Hamas-Fatah government, Abdullah enabled Iran’s Palestinian proxy to gain control of the Palestinian Authority. As for Egypt, it is using Iran’s nuclear program as cover to advance its own nuclear weapons program.

Then there are the great powers and foremost among them Russia, France and the US. Any UN action against Iran must be agreed upon by all three. And there is little chance of that ever happening.

Russia is Iran’s ally. Russia supplied Hizbullah and Syria with arms and intelligence during last summer’s war. In the intervening year, Russia has sold advanced weapons systems to both Iran and Syria. Last weekend’s report in the Arab media regarding Iranian financing of Syrian purchases of Russian jet fighters, tanks and missiles is part of this overall picture.

Israeli analysts scoffed at the report, noting that the billion dollars Ahmadinejad pledged is insufficient to purchase the weapons he outlined. But those weapons will not all be going to Syria. Last April Iran and Syria signed an agreement essentially merging their militaries. Iran’s Defense Minister Mustafa Muhammad Najjar told reporters in Damascus, "We consider the capability of the Syrian defensive forces as our own." He added that Iran "offers all of its defense capabilities to Syria."

While Russia is selling the weapons to Syria, a Russian military official said of the aircraft, "The Syrians will be getting the top line of Russian aircraft through financing by Iran and [will] share some or most of the platforms with the Iranian air force." Jane’s Defense Monthly reported that at least 10 of the artillery-missile systems will also be transferred to Iran.

Russia also acts as Teheran’s diplomatic shill. During a summit in Teheran last month Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, "We do not see any kind of threat from Iran." In a subsequent visit to Israel, Lavrov insisted that Russia’s arms sales pose no threat to the Jewish state, and anyway, the only way for Israel to ensure its security is to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria.

But the Olmert government refuses to acknowledge that Russia has reinstated its Cold War hostility towards Israel. It vapidly praises President Vladimir Putin for his "positive role" in the region and continues to adhere to the line that Russia will agree to UN Security Council action against Iran.

Then there is France. Last summer France displayed open hostility towards Israel in its representation of the Lebanese government in which Hizbullah was then a member at the UN ceasefire talks. On the other hand, in 2005 France joined forces with the US to expel the Syrian military from Lebanon after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Israel hoped that with Nicholas Sarkozy’s victory in the presidential race, France would take a more pro-Israel stance. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred. Sarkozy has warmed French ties with the Iranian-Syrian-Hizbullah axis. Sarkozy legitimized all three when he invited Hizbullah representatives to participate in talks he held with Lebanese factions outside of Paris this month.

Additionally, early this month France led 10 EU member states in meddling in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The foreign ministers of these largely Mediterranean EU member states sent a letter to Quartet envoy Tony Blair, demanding, among other things, that Israel agree to the deployment of international forces in Judea and Samaria, and that Hamas be invited to participate in an international conference on the issue.

As France treats with Iran on Lebanon, the US follows a similar course of engaging the mullah on Iraq. After his meeting with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad this week, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker announced the formation of a joint US-Iranian security committee which will discuss Sunni terrorism in Iraq.

Apparently in the interest of advancing America’s "security cooperation" with Iran, the State Department refused to raise the issue of the five American citizens being held hostage in Iran at the meeting. And with the prospect of diplomatic "progress" with Iran on Iraq in the air, the US certainly doesn’t want to rock the boat by pursuing the issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Indeed, Iran’s carrot and stick approach to powers like the US and France form a fourth circle of ties. Iran has worked to neutralize threats from these countries by attacking their interests in other spheres: Lebanon, in the case of France, and Iraq, in the case of the US. Given both countries enthusiasm for "engagement," it seems that the mullahs have hit on the right approach.

ISRAEL HAS experienced some achievements regarding Iran over the past year. The UN Security Council did pass two sanctions resolutions against Iran. With the active lobbying of opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, many US public employee pension funds are moving to divest from companies that do business with Iran. And this week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that like his predecessor Tony Blair, he will not rule out the option of using military force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Yet despite these achievements, Iran has made steady progress with its nuclear program. Wednesday Ahmadinejad announced, "Iran will never abandon its peaceful [nuclear] work." Sunday, a senior Iranian official told The Independent that with almost 3,000 centrifuges operating at its nuclear facility at Natanz, "We have at the moment enough centrifuges to go to a bomb."

Back in Israel, this week Olmert made clear that he wishes to advance contacts with the Palestinians towards an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. His advisors told reporters that Olmert is moved by his desire to get beyond his failure in last year’s war and the criminal investigations into his shady business dealings. He wishes to be perceived as a statesman.

Of course if Olmert truly wishes to be seen as a statesman, then he shouldn’t be concerning himself with Israeli withdrawals that will only strengthen Iran. He should change his strategic focus to Iran which threatens to wipe Israel off the map.

Despite his government’s protestations to the contrary, there is no coalition of moderates to work with against Iran. There is no coalition at all. And time is not in Israel’s favor.

If Olmert wishes to gain the public’s support, and even admiration, he must quickly build and deploy a military option for destroying Iran’s burgeoning ability to destroy the State of Israel.

Enlightenment’s Dusk? The West’s Decline and Islams Stormy Rise

The topic at hand is of grave concern for all of us, irrespective of what faith-tradition we adhere to, or even if we choose not to belong to one. Its importance does not merely arise from the events of September 11, 2001, but these events, what followed and where we find ourselves have given greater credence to Samuel Huntington’s prognosis of the “clash of civilizations” than the efforts of those to be dismissive of his analysis and warnings.

We need to pay close attention to the role of ideas in shaping history even as the unfolding of events shape ideas in ways unanticipated. I like the phrase Richard Holbrooke used in introducing Paul Berman’s book, Power and Idealists, “the savage intersection where theories and personalities” collide. “Enlightenment’s Dusk? The West’s Decline and Islam’s Stormy Rise,” I take to mean as that moment in our contemporary history when we stumbled into the “savage intersection” where ideas that went into the building of the modern world of science and liberal-democracy are in collision with other ideas hostile to this world as represented by the West. In this collision to which we are witness there will be unforeseen consequences as there were in past collisions, and unanticipated developments will place tomorrow’s generation into situations resulting from decisions of the present generation in response to the events of 9/11.

In the millennium year of 2000 Jacques Barzun published his chronicle of ideas in the making of the West over the past five hundred years titled From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Barzun’s narrative begins with the generation to which Martin Luther belonged. Luther’s posting of his 95 theses on the door of All Saints’ church at Wittenberg in October 1517 was a seminal moment in the history of the making of the modern world, sparking as it did the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was carried forward into the period known as the Enlightenment and then followed by what Marshall Hodgson, in writing The Venture of Islam, described as the “great western transmutation” that placed Europe ahead of all other existing civilizations. Barzun’s choice of the word “decadence” instead of “dusk” is pregnant with allusions that would have been otherwise missing, for “dusk” foretells of the “night” ahead arriving as a closure to any history with a distinct beginning. “Decadence” suggests that closure is not a given, that though age brings infirmity and the passage of time breeds corruption, that ideas and the accompanying human spirit can become revitalized, and that in the Biblical sense an Abraham of much advanced age can still bring off-springs into the world and with them his world’s renewal.

The slogan of Enlightenment was given by Kant. “Enlightenment is humanity’s departure,” Kant declared, “from its self imposed immaturity. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause is not lack of intelligence but failure of courage to think without someone else’s guidance. Dare to know! That is the slogan of Enlightenment.”1 Not only man alone without intermediaries may reach God directly as Luther proclaimed, but man alone aided only by rational thinking can unlock the mysteries of God’s creation as Newton demonstrated.

Enlightenment was the opening wide of human intellect to reach for the stars and beyond. Its premise was the unlimited power of unfettered reason among free individuals. Reason and Freedom would be the two faces of the Enlightenment’s coin, each supporting and enhancing the other’s widening horizon. Both on their own were fragile and precariously situated; but together they would be nearly invincible in the making of the modern world. In the five centuries since this adventure began the ideas of Reason and Freedom have had innumerable collisions with countervailing and hostile ideas. There would be moments of grave doubts about the survival of Enlightenment’s ideas from enemies who placed the authority of the collective – be it of the church, the general will, class or race – ahead of individuals to be free and to think for themselves in constructing a society where Reason and Freedom remain protected and are unassailable.

Of the West’s decline and Islam’s stormy rise, I will place “decline” and “rise” within quotation marks. For the past century, at least since Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic ruminations in The Decline of the West published in 1918, western historians and philosophers in regular intervals have speculated on West’s passage to some end state of irreversible weakening. The story of ancient Rome’s decline and fall stalks such speculation which, ironically, is also an attribute of the modern West’s resilience. Hence, “decline” is more apparent than real, though concerns about the loss of vitality are genuine.

Islam, unlike Christianity, has yet to have its own reformation. Here it should be noted that “reform” of a faith-tradition accompanying an institutional framework of order is neither an event nor an instant in time but a process deeply frustrating, confounding, ugly, prone to violence, and of end state not entirely predictable. Luther posting his 95 theses stands out in the flow of that long winding process of Reformation in Europe as does the royal prerogatives of Henry VIII’s break with Rome when refused annulment of his marriage to Queen Catherine and establishing the Anglican Church, and so does the Reign of Terror in France that made a mockery of a revolution in the name of the Rights of Man.

It might also be said that 9/11 for what it now has come to represent, an episode of the intensity of turmoil inside the world of Islam, is indicative of the unpredictable nature of the reform process at work. The stormy “rise” of Islam is the action-reaction of Muslims as they seek either to embrace or to resist and reject the modern world. Europe’s reformation process took place over a period when boundaries separating civilizations and continents were impenetrable to a sufficient degree, and even adjacent cultures could be closed to each other. The squeezing of the world of Islam is taking place in the full glare of globalization, and the world that Canada’s Marshall McLuhan imagined as a “global village” is one we inhabit in which boundaries have dissolved and no culture can remain unaffected by what occurs in another.

When we speak and write of Islam, as we do for example of Christianity, we mean simultaneously a faith-tradition with its non-negotiable core doctrine and an institutional framework of socio-political order built by human enterprise in the name of that faith-tradition. This distinction needs to be kept in perspective for much confusion is generated by conflating the two. In discussing Islam we mean generally more or less what Muslims do in practicing their faith-tradition as they variously understand its meaning provided primarily in the Koran taken by them to be divinely revealed words to Muhammad. But the practice of Islam comes in great variety as there is much diversity in ethnicity among Muslims. The world of Islam is not monolithic though its domain is vast. Yet Islam as a monotheistic faith-tradition belongs to the family of faith-traditions which includes Judaism and Christianity. We know from experience that no quarrel tends to be more difficult than the quarrels within a family as what is common gets neglected and differences are amplified.

Mohammed Arkoun of Berber-Algerian origin and professor of Islamic studies at Sorbonne, Paris, observed, “Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant forms is the only religion which, in what it has rejected and what it has accepted, has been continuously exposed to the challenges of a modernity which was forced and which developed in Europe and exclusively in Europe until the Second World War.”2 Arkoun will not quibble if I extended Europe to include the United States and Canada. The point to note in Arkoun’s observation is that Christianity’s experience in the development of the modern world has important lessons for other faith-traditions whose followers are in various degrees yet to make as full a transition from pre-modern to modern world as Christians of Europe did. This lesson bears upon Muslims with urgency and with demands that Jews do not confront in the like manner.

Christianity influenced and shaped the moral foundation of the modern world even as it retrenched and conceded space to secular thought in the realm of politics. Rodney Stark in The Victory of Reason contends, “Christianity created Western Civilization… Without a theology committed to reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: A world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists.”3 Stanley L. Jaki, the Hungarian-born scientist and Benedictine priest, similarly but less stridently has pointed out the “science” we are familiar with and which has been central in the making of the modern world is uniquely European, and this “science” owes its “viable birth in a Europe which Christian faith in the Creator had helped to form.”4

In the long arc of history the world of Islam for several centuries in the medieval period, from the 8th to the 12th, stood ahead of Christian Europe in terms of civilization. This was the period dominated by Muslim thinkers of Arab, Persian, Turkish and Afghan origins within the commonwealth of Islam. But within this period a confrontation among Muslims took place between men of doctrinaire faith and men of rational thought, and the doors of reasoning in matters of faith and law were closed. It brought to an end development in science within the world of Islam situated at the crossroads of civilizations and the role of Muslims as the bridge between the ancient world of Greece and the modern world’s awakening in Europe.

The world is constructed and reconstructed by ideas. This notion is inherent in Islam as the Koran insists people observe nature and its working and see in them signs pointing to God as the Creator of the universe and the world in it. But once the dictates of authoritarian politics in the Muslim world shut the door on speculative reasoning, the creative impulse dwindled at a time when Europe was to take its “great leap” forward. The result was a breach opened between Europe and the Muslim world; it would soon become a chasm and the present widening distance between these two worlds – one modern and the other pre-modern – seems insurmountable. Abdus Salam, the first Muslim scientist to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979, reflected upon this parting of ways. Salam remarked,

[A]round the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history.

But about the same time there was also created – and this time only in the West – a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton’s Principia, published in 1687. Newton’s work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals. I would like to describe the fate of the technology which built the Taj Mahal when it came into contact with the culture and technology symbolized by the Principia of Newton.

The first impact came in 1757. Some one hundred years after the building of the Taj Mahal, the superior firepower of Clive’s small arms had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the descendants of Shah Jahan. A hundred years later still – in 1857 – the last of the Mughals had been forced to relinquish the Crown of Delhi to Queen Victoria. With him there passed away not only an empire, but also a whole tradition in art, technology, culture and learning.5

The emergence of the Muslim world into independence and statehood in the middle years of the 20th century after over two hundred years of European control is one motif of Islam’s “stormy rise” and Europe’s retrenchment, not “decline.” But the Muslim world was not alone in this emergence into independence and statehood; India’s independence, China’s nationalist revolution under the banner of Marxism, and the gradual withdrawal of European powers from Africa are all part of this singularly over-arching narrative. What makes Islam’s “stormy rise” noteworthy is the close proximity of the central core of the Muslim world, the Arab-Muslim Middle East, to Europe geographically and historically, and its many threads of relationship with Europe. This intricate web of history places the Middle Eastern societies in a special tension with Europe that is not similarly present in the story of modern India, nor China.

There is the memory – however vague, uncertain or imprecise – recalled when a Muslim mind is scratched of a past when the Islamic world was at par with Europe, and even in some respect ahead. This memory works in many different ways to question, obstruct, rattle, and also defeat efforts of that segment of Muslims who want to engage with the modern world, learn from it, adopt its ways and make the social transition from the traditional pre-modern arrangements to the modern world of science and democracy. This is what we are witnessing in large measure in Iraq and Afghanistan where the collision between the modern and the pre-modern world due to circumstances that brought about 9/11 has been the most dramatic. This is in part what Mohammed Arkoun was referring to for Muslims to learn from Christianity’s long standing experience with modernity and the process of modernization; instead openness to learning in the Muslim world is under siege.

Let us take the past fifty years. In 1957 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Canada’s foremost scholar of Islam and comparative religions, published Islam in Modern History. Smith had traveled in the Middle East before the Second World War, and lived and taught in Lahore of pre-1947 India. He witnessed India’s partition, followed closely the developments in Pakistan, and his book was an effort to put in perspective history’s challenge for Muslims as they were beginning to work out their place in the modern world. Smith wrote,

The massive certainties of the nineteenth century have given way to the bewildering complexity of the twentieth. The resurgence of Asia has included the strenuous, gradual emancipation of Asian countries from European political control, an emancipation now almost but not quite complete. A radical modernity in living, Western in provenance, has shown a continually expansive, determined, seemingly irresistible penetration of all areas, including the Muslim. In this process it would be difficult to overestimate how fundamentally involved the Islamic societies are; in the cities psychologically and culturally, in all parts economically and administratively.6

Smith was a student of Sir Hamilton Gibb, the doyen of Anglo-Islamic scholars of the first half of last century. In 1932 Gibb published a study, Whither Islam, in which he wrote,

The most remarkable feature of the Moslem world in these early decades of the twentieth century is not that it is becoming westernized, but that it desires to be westernized. It would be difficult to point to a single Moslem country which entirely rejects the contributions of the West in each and every field of life and thought.7

Between the two observations of Gibb and Smith the world was politically wrenched out of its moorings as a result of wars and revolutions. The Muslim world was deeply affected by these events as were other cultures. Independence came, or was won as in Algeria, and the ruling class in the Muslim world made a bid to establish political order and engage with tasks that Smith described. But other forces were also at work abroad and domestically. Cold War logic on either side of its divide lent support to ruling elites across the Muslim world as they placed their survival in power ahead of the need to work out some institutional arrangement allowing for participation of the widest segment of the population in meeting the requirements of democracy and socioeconomic progress. Domestically the ideas of secular nationalism morphed into the politics of religious exclusion, and the insistence of religious authorities that the political order of Muslim societies conform with the legal principles of Islamic law (shari’ah) worked out in the early centuries of Islam between the 9th and the 11th century.

The rulers of the Muslim world in the decades after Smith’s landmark book was published went into retreat from their early adherence to the “desire,” as Gibb had written, of making their societies “westernized” or “modernized” in the vocabulary of later times. The retreat was occasioned by military defeats in Muslim encounter with non-Muslim countries – Israel and India, for instance – due to inherited grievances from colonial years. It was also as a result from the loss of legitimate authority, as in Iran of the Shah, of those in powers confronted by populist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan.

By the end of the last century the guarded optimism of Gibb and Smith had faded. Paul Kennedy, a Harvard historian, in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century published in 1994, summarized differently the situation of the Muslim world. Kennedy observed,

It is one thing to face population pressures, shortage of resources, educational/technological deficiencies, and regional conflicts which would challenge the wisest governments. But it is another when the regimes themselves stand in angry resentment of global forces for change instead of (as in East Asia) selectively responding to such trends. Far from preparing for the twenty-first century, much of the Arab and Muslim world appears to have difficulty in coming to terms with the nineteenth century, with its composite legacy of secularization, democracy, laissez faire economics, transnational industrial and commercial linkages, social change, and intellectual questioning. If one needed an example of the importance of cultural attitudes in explaining a society’s response to change, contemporary Islam provides it.8

Those Muslims most acutely tormented by the collision of their inherited world with the modern world are, and not surprisingly as witnessed in similar circumstances with other people, members of the social elite educated in the traditional value system of their society and exposed to the currents of modern thinking. It is from this class the opposition has come to the modern world based on identity politics. It is the much privileged children of this class whose alienation morphed into the politics of terror. Their rage would have been of little consequence but for the upheavals inside the traditional world of Islam resulting from the relentless pressures of globalization. They succeeded in fusing their anger and resentment against the modern world born of failure and defeats with the protests of uprooted peasantry and unemployed workers in sprawling urban ghettoes of failed economies into the making of populist movements within the Muslim world.

Khomeini and Osama bin Laden are the two faces of Muslims irrespective of their differences joined together in the fight against the modern world, as are the faces of Mohammed Atta, the lead pilot of one of the hijacked airplanes on 9/11, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al Qaeda mastermind of global terrorism in the name of Islam. In the opposite end are Muslim faces in the crowd of those rallying in support of democracy and the modern world as in Turkey and Lebanon, Indonesia and Iraq, or forced into silence as in Iran. Marshall McLuhan would remind us, what occurs in one corner of the global village will invariably affect other corners since the global village is now wired and connected. This was the lesson of 9/11. This is the struggle in which the West has been drawn: its battlefields today are in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the West can no more afford to turn its back on this struggle in our interdependent world than Muslims can opt out of being engaged in bringing their societies to adapt to the requirements of science and democracy.

For the West the confusion is how to assist Muslim countries make the transition into modernity as much out of historical necessity as self-interest in terms of security. For Muslims the confusion is how to restore the centre to their civilization that collapsed a long time ago, and to reconstruct it in harmony with the modern world. So long as the world was predominantly an agrarian economy, Muslim civilization maintained vitality. Once the Europeans pioneered the making of the industrial civilization, the Muslim world fell behind. For Muslims the need is to acknowledge that they have to learn in new ways how to hear and understand the words of the Koran in the dramatically altered conditions of the world they inhabit if they are going to contribute as a people positively to its advancement as once in the past other Muslims did.

 

This paper was originally presented as a talk at the 2007 Civitas Annual Conference, May 4-6, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Mr. Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and a syndicated columnist in Canada and the United Kingdom.  A Muslim native to Calcutta, India, and a noted Islamic scholar, Prof. Mansur has written extensively on Islamic extremism and the challenges facing contemporary Islam.

 

Notes

1. Quoted in Barzun’s From Dawn To Decadence (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), p. 441.

2. M. Arkoun, “Is Islam Threatened by Christianity?” in Hans Kung and J. Moltmann (eds), Islam: A Challenge For Christianity (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1994), p. 54.

3. R. Stark, The Victory of Reason (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 233.

4. S.L. Jaki, The Road of Science And the Ways To God (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 243.

5. Z. Hassan & C.H. Lai (eds), Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Abdus Salam (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Ltd., 1984), pp. 48-49.

6. W.C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 298.

7. H.A.R. Gibb, Whither Islam: A Survey of Modern Movements in the Moslem World (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1932), p. 319.

8. P. Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-first Century (Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1994) p. 208.

 

Converging Interests and Shared Values: The U.S.-Japan Bilateral Alliance Enters the 21 st Century

 By Eric Sayers

Mr. Sayers is a graduate student in political science at the University of Western Ontario, and is an editorial assistant at the Center for Security Policy.

 

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaders in Washington and Tokyo questioned the continued viability of the US-Japan alliance. Washington’s desire to benefit from the newfound “peace dividend” led many in Tokyo to fear that the United States would discontinue its security commitments to Japan. Further complicating the alliance was Tokyo’s decision to assist only financially in the Gulf War and to deny Washington intelligence and logistical support during the 1993-94 North Korean nuclear crisis.  However, a series of events in the mid-1990s, including the growing strength of China and the continued belligerence of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), forced Japan to rethink the direction of its foreign policy and its relationship with the United States. Although formal steps to strengthen the alliance were initially slow, the events of September 11th , and the subsequent Japanese response, helped prove to both states that a strengthened alliance was in their mutual interest.  In analyzing the relationship between the US and Japan, this paper will attempt to demonstrate how a convergence of interests since the mid-1990s in relation to the threat from rogue states and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the rise of China have forced the two nations to reformulate their strategic relationship into a more “normal” alliance that can effectively cope with the challenges of the 21st century.

In order to analyze the reasons for the reemergence of the bilateral alliance, as well as the steps being taken to ensure its success, this essay will be divided into four sections. The first section will briefly outline the strains on the relationship following the end of the Cold War. The second section will focus on the security issues that helped drive Japan back towards the United States. These include the concern over China’s growing military build-up, which culminated with the Taiwan-strait crisis of 1996, as well as the threat posed by North Korea, specifically its test of a Taepodong 1 missile in 1998. The third section will look at the reemergence of the relationship after September 11th. The final section will discuss the challenges and opportunities both countries face as they work to reformulate the alliance for the 21st century. This section will also outline the work of the US-Japan Security Consultative Committee (SCC) during the past five years, in its efforts to shift the alliance from the traditional “shield and spear” concept, to a more balanced and integrated strategic relationship that will allow both states to ensure “a balance of power that favors freedom,” both globally and regionally.

A Strained Alliance

In September 1951, United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Japanese Prime              Minister Shigeru Yoshida signed the Security Treaty Between Japan and the United States of America. Under this treaty, the United States agreed to defend Japan against foreign acts of aggression, while Japan, now bound by the restraints of its new Constitution (specifically, the pacifistic Article 9), which disallowed its right to collective self-defense, agreed to allow the United States to establish military bases on its territory. This treaty established the beginning of the strategic bilateral alliance that has bound the US and Japan for the past half-century.

During the Cold War, Japan followed what became known as the Yoshida Doctrine. Under this doctrine, Japan chose to remain dependent upon the US security guarantee, while continuing to develop economically. However, by the 1970s and 1980s Japan’s situation in relation to the United States had changed considerably. In addition to becoming a major economic power, Japan was also responsible for financing much of the US debt and benefited from a large surplus in US-Japan trade relations. Relations were strained even further due to the inability of US businesses to access the Japanese market. By the end of the Cold War many in the United States, concerned with the concept of what Paul Kennedy called “imperial overstretch,” began to feel that Japan was exploiting the relationship by free-riding on US security guarantees.1 To its credit, Japan did increase its defense spending so as to allow it to maintain the world’s third largest military budget in absolute terms.2

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War drums in the Middle East?

By Clay Varney

As the dog days of summer begin to make their presence known here in Washington, the White House has been busy battling members of its own party over the course of the president’s strategy in Iraq. However, the current action in the nation’s capital is obscuring some more menacing developments in the Middle East. As the temperature spikes here, the ominous situation in that volatile region appears to be picking up the pace.

The Turkish army has reportedly placed 140,000 troops along its border with northern Iraq. In what may be the latest outbreak of fighting in a long insurgency dating to the 1980’s, Turkey may be looking to invade the Kurdish areas of Iraq in the north in order to combat the presence of the PKK, a terrorist organization that often launches cross-border raids and bombings, and potentially more long term, in order to have a say over the status of Kurdistan’s political status within Iraq. This region has so far been the most stable area of the country. Such a Turkish invasion would of course destabilize Kurdistan and severely complicate relations between the United States and Turkey, two NATO allies. Whether or not the Turks would need or even seek American approval before such an invasion remains to be seen.

This summer might also witness a repeat of the Hamas putsch in Gaza replayed in Lebanon. Hezbollah, in its strange alliance with General Michel Aoun, a Christian, has made no secret of its desire to overthrow the democratic and Western-backed government of Fouad Siniora. Lebanese politics have increasingly begun to look like a Mafia clan war, as several anti-Syrian politicians have been assassinated in what is an obvious attempt to chip away at Siniora’s majority in parliament. However, certain developments have led to open speculation that an outright civil war or an attempt to topple the government by force is likely to soon break out. The Middle East Media Research Institute has reported that Syria has ordered its civilians residing in Lebanon to return home by July 15. Further, it has also been widely reported that Hezbollah is busy rearming and returning to its positions in southern Lebanon behind the ineffectual backs of UNIFIL. A rehash of last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah could also be in the offing. Finally, Syria has also decided to remove military checkpoints on the road to the Golan Heights. These checkpoints have been in place for 40 years.

On another front, the Iranian regime’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons continue apace. The government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recently instituted gasoline rationing among its civilian population, triggering massive popular unrest. Though in some venues this has been interpreted as a method for allaying the population’s reliance on subsidized gasoline, such measures may in fact be intended to ensure that the military possesses enough gasoline in any upcoming conflict. In related news, the United States Navy has dispatched the USS Enterprise to the Persian Gulf, which would be its third aircraft carrier in that tiny body of water.

Back in the United States, the threat of a terrorist attack has reached a disturbing level. ABC News reported that al Qaeda is in the midst of planning a “summer spectacular,” a large scale terrorist strike akin to 9/11. The level of intercepted chatter and intelligence is said to be on the level with that which occurred prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the recent plots disrupted in the United Kingdom, it has become increasingly apparent that the menace of Islamist terrorism is not going away any time soon.

Clearly, these developments should not be taken lightly. The United States, whether it wanted to be or not, is now engaged in a shadow war with Iran and its allies, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. The previous discussion does not even mention Iran’s obvious interference in Iraq and its obvious supply of weapons to insurgent groups that have used these weapons to kill American soldiers. The course of this summer will have a huge impact on the region, as it will likely determine which side has the upper hand, America and its allies, or an expansionist Iran. Despite the concern in Washington over Iraq strategy, Congress must be careful to not see the forest for the trees. Though Iraq is a vital part of the United State’s current struggle, it is just one part of a larger battle, an encounter against an increasingly assertive Iran, whose people are beholden to a regime imbued with a dangerously apocalyptic worldview, preoccupied with trying to expand its power in the Middle East at American expense.

Putin’s ploy

Chess is the national sport of Russia.  It is, therefore, as Soviet Communists like Vladimir Putin used to say, "no coincidence, comrade" that the proposal on missile defense that he rolled out at last week’s G-8 meeting was a sophisticated gambit, a crafty effort not to advance the protection of Europe and the United States from future Iranian missiles, but to block such anti-missile defenses.  Call it Putin’s ploy.

In fact, in the manner of an accomplished master of the game – for example, his democracy-advocating nemesis, Garry Kasparov – Putin is playing on several different chess boards simultaneously. 

First, there is the US-Russian relationship.  An enemy is required by every would-be totalitarian – and it is increasingly clear that, despite his laughable claim to being "the last democrat," Putin’s behavior has the hallmarks of a new czar.  For Vladimir Putin, it is us.  By building up the notion that we are a threat, he is able to garner popular support for his growing consolidation of power and even repression at home.  He is also able to justify a new military build-up and adventurism abroad in league with the likes of world-class anti-Americans like Iran’s mullahs, China’s  Communist leadership, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il of North Korea.

Then, there is the Russian-European "board."  Putin has reverted to traditional Kremlin behavior towards Europe: bullying, coercing and blackmailing, using threats of nuclear attacks and energy cut-offs and other forms of economic pressure  Taking a move out of Stalin’s playbook, the man-who-would-be-Czar has even attacked one of the Baltic states, Estonia, albeit with cyber-warfare, not the old fashioned kind.

Finally, Vladimir Putin is trying to affect U.S.-European relations.  His service in the KGB during the American-led effort to place intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe nearly a quarter century ago clearly left its mark on Putin.  He is not only nostalgic for the Soviets’ superpower status that began to unravel when that deployment went forward.  He is also well-versed in the type of divide-and-conquer strategy that narrowly failed to topple key NATO governments and prevent the INF missiles from being fielded. 

Today, the Kremlin is hoping to capitalize on U.S.-European strains over Iraq and to use the wedge of opposition to Bush Administration plans to deploy a very modest anti-missile capability in Poland and the Czech Republic to create, and fill, a vacuum of power on the continent.

The Putin ploy seeks to advance these purposes in several ways:

The Russian president has offered a Russian radar in Azerbaijan as an alternative to the detection and tracking radar slated under the Bush plan for the Czech Republic.  Never mind that the Kremlin’s obsolescent radar is not designed for the kind of sophisticated discrimination of warheads from decoys inherent in the proposed, modern American system.  The idea is not to do the job.  Rather, it is to confuse the issue, give Czech opponents an apparent alternative to having the new radar based in their country, and make the U.S. appear unreasonable.

Similarly, Putin has proposed that instead of 10 anti-missile interceptors slated for deployment in Poland, the United States put interceptors in Turkey, Iraq and at sea on warships equipped with the Aegis defensive system.  This gambit gives Polish critics an out, while affording a chance further to roil the United States’ relations with Turkey and Iraq. 

The Kremlin has long sought to undermine the incalculably important strategic alliance between America and Turkey – already frayed at the moment by the anti-U.S. agenda of the Islamist government in Ankara and the growing tensions between the two countries over Iraq’s Kurdistan. And at a moment when the idea of "getting out of Iraq" is all the rage in American elite circles, committing to the long-term basing there of anti-missile systems is clearly not on.

The idea of making Aegis warships all they can be when it comes to anti-missile defenses is, of course, a great idea.  That is not what Putin has in mind, however.  And, unless a man who does – the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-designate, Adm. Mike Mullins –has his way, these missile defense ships will remain incapable of providing the sort of robust protection to Europe and the United States that they could, and that we need.

For good measure, Putin has thrown in two other problematic ideas:  1) There is no need to rush on European missile defenses, since he claims the Iranians have no missiles capable of reaching Europe, nor any plans to build them.  And 2) Russia must be involved in the decision-making about any anti-missile deployments.

The first is patently untrue.  Iran’s current Shahab-3 missile could reach parts of NATO territory.  And there are unmistakable signs that the mullahs in Tehran intend to develop a Shahab-4 which will be able to attack much, if not all, of the European continent.

The most insidious aspect of Putin’s ploy is his insistence, through seduction or intimidation, that Russia be a party to any decisions about the deployment – and perhaps the employment – of missile defenses for Europe.  This would be tantamount to allowing one of the Tehran regime’s most important allies and one of its nuclear enablers to determine whether and how our European partners and interests will be protected against the threat posed by Putin’s friends in Iran.

All this is expected to be discussed further in July when Vladimir Putin is honored with a trip to the Bush family compound in Maine.  President Bush will be under greater pressure to surrender American freedom of action on missile defense there than any U.S. leader since Ronald Reagan, who was tempted to do so by Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik two decades ago.  Now, as then, the response to the Kremlin’s gambit must be "Thanks, but not thanks."