Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS, February 22, 2008

BILL MOYERS: So what happens if the American ambassador there, who’s a big advocate of aerial spraying to destroy the poppy fields. What happens if he succeeds? What happens if the United States government sprays all the poppy plants and kills them, as happened in Colombia. What do the farmers do?

SARAH CHAYES: They join the Taliban. I mean, it’s the biggest gift we could possibly do for the insurgency. What else would they do? They’re furious. Their livelihood is taken away. Their children might be poisoned. Or they might think their children are poisoned. They join the Taliban. They take revenge.

BILL MOYERS: So if people were not growing poppies, what would they be growing?

SARAH CHAYES: What exists down there is very valuable crops. Almonds, apricots. It’s fruit crops mostly. To me, the way to attack opium is to compete with it. Like let’s make it possible to make a living and not– you don’t have to import some exotic new plant. They’ve got almonds, they’ve got apricots, they’ve got pomegranates. They’ve got cumin, they’ve got anise seed. Wild pistachios. We’re putting all this stuff in our soap.

Why isn’t there a fruit juice factory in Kandahar? It’s the pomegranate capital of the world. You know, everyone’s talking about the antioxidant qualities of pomegranates. That it’s the Garden of Eden of pomegranates down there. And what’s amazing is, with all this money that you mentioned being spent over there, you can’t get any money to do stuff like that.

BILL MOYERS: We’ve also given a lot of money to Pakistan, across the border.

SARAH CHAYES: Right. Correct.

BILL MOYERS: To help fight the insurgents, right? What’s happening to that money?

SARAH CHAYES: Well, we’re paying a billion dollars a year to Pakistan, which is orchestrating the Taliban insurgency. So, it’s actually US-taxpayer money that is paying for the insurgents, who are then killing, at the moment, Canadian troops.

The Other Front, WP, Sunday, December 14, 2008

By Sarah Chayes

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan

Nurallah strode into our workshop shaking with rage. His mood shattered ours. “This is no government,” he stormed. “The police are like animals.”

The story gushed out of him: There’d been a fender-bender in the Kandahar bazaar, a taxi and a bicycle among wooden-wheeled vegetable carts. Wrenching around to avoid the knot, another cart touched one of the green open-backed trucks the police drive. In seconds, the officers were dragging the man to the chalky dust, beating him — blow after blow to the head, neck, hips, kidneys. Shopkeepers in the nearby stalls began shouting, “What do you want to do, kill him?” The police slung the man into the back of their truck and roared away.

“So he made a mistake,” concluded Nurallah, one of the 13 Afghan men and women who make up my cooperative. “We don’t have a traffic court? They had to beat him?”

In the seven years I’ve lived in this stronghold of the Afghan south — the erstwhile capital of the Taliban and the focus of their renewed assault on the country — most of my conversations with locals about what’s going wrong have centered on corruption and abuse of power. “More than roads, more than schools or wells or electricity, we need good governance,” said Nurallah during yet another discussion a couple of weeks ago.

He had put his finger on the heart of the problem. We and our friends in Kandahar are thunderstruck at recent suggestions that the solution to the hair-raising situation in this country must include a political settlement with “relevant parties” — read, the Taliban. Negotiating with them wouldn’t solve Afghanistan’s problems; it would only exacerbate them. Ask any Afghan what’s really needed, what would render the Taliban irrelevant, and they’ll tell you: improving the behavior of the officials whom the United States and its allies ushered into power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

I write this by flickering light, a fat candle at my right elbow and a kerosene lamp on my left. We get only three or four hours of electricity every couple of days, often from 1 to 5 a.m. Still, the bill has to be paid. To do that, you must wait in a total of eight lines in two different buildings. You almost never get through the whole process without hearing an uncouth bark as your turn comes up: “This desk is closing; come back tomorrow.” Due to the electricity shortage, the power department won’t open new accounts. Officially. But for $600 — 15 times the normal fee and a fortune to Afghans — you can get a meter installed anyway.

A friend recently visited the jail in Urozgan Province, north of Kandahar, where he found 54 prisoners. All but six were untried and uncharged and had been languishing there for months or years. A Kandahar public prosecutor told him how a defendant had once offered him the key to a Lexus if he would just refrain from interfering in a case the man had fixed.

BBC survey, September 28, 2008, AlQaeda_Sep08_rpt.pdf (application/pdf Object)

US ‘War on Terror’ Has Not Weakened al Qaeda, Says Global Poll, September 28, 2008

The US‘s `war on terror’ has failed to weaken its prime target al Qaeda, according to people in 22 out of 23 countries surveyed in a new poll for the BBC World Service.

On average only 22 per cent believe that al Qaeda has been weakened, while three in five believe that it has either had no effect (29%) or made al Qaeda stronger (30%). And while negative views of al Qaeda are most common in nearly all of the countries surveyed, this is not the case in Egypt and Pakistan – both pivotal nations in the conflict with al Qaeda. In both of these countries far more have either mixed or positive feelings towards al Qaeda (Egypt 40% mixed and 20% positive, Pakistan 22% mixed and 19% positive) than have negative feelings (Egypt 35%, Pakistan 19%).

Asked who is winning the conflict between al Qaeda and the United States, the predominant view of those polled is that neither the US nor al Qaeda is winning, with 15 countries holding this view. In three countries – Kenya, Nigeria and Turkey – the dominant view is that the US is winning. In no country does more than one in five – 21 per cent in Pakistan – believe that al Qaeda is winning. Views are divided in other countries. On average across all 23 countries just 10 per cent think al Qaeda is winning, 22 per cent think the US is winning, and 47 per cent think neither side is winning.

Even in the United States only 34 per cent believe al Qaeda has been weakened. Fifty-nine per cent believe the `war on terror’ has either had no effect (26%) or has made al Qaeda stronger (33%). Meanwhile, 56 per cent believe neither side is winning the conflict; 31 per cent believe that the United States is winning; 8 per cent believe al Qaeda is winning.

Shooting from the hip doesn’t help – Haaretz editorial, September 24, 2008

The circumstances of Monday night’s incident in Jerusalem have yet to be fully ascertained. Statements from witnesses and police – which indicate that it was a deliberate attack by a terrorist who found himself a convenient target and simple means of execution – contrast with the family’s version of events, according to which this was a car accident involving an inexperienced youth who failed his driving test. If it turns out to have been a terrorist attack, it joins the string of recent attacks in which the perpetrators used their vehicles as weapons.

These attacks, which are attributed to individuals rather than organizations and thus become more difficult to pinpoint in advance, are a reminder of the explosive situation in which Jerusalem in particular and Israel in general find themselves. A series of meetings between the prime minister and the Palestinian leadership created a sense of progress on the diplomatic front. The gradual success of the Palestinian leadership in taking upon itself the responsibility for security in Jenin and other parts of the West Bank and the calm along the southern border create the impression that the era of violence is fading: If there still are Palestinian civilians willing to carry out terrorist attacks, they have become isolated, and thus tolerable, cases. Even if the Shin Bet security service struggles to see them coming, harsh and immediate punitive measures, including the destruction of the terrorists homes, would surely put an end to them.

This is an illusion. The diplomatic discussions between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, and Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qureia, have not advanced a diplomatic solution. The Israeli promise to improve living conditions in the territories translated into the removal of a few roadblocks and the release of some 200 Palestinian prisoners, but most parts of the West Bank are still subject to stringent restrictions on movement, unemployment is skyrocketing, and economic growth is virtually nonexistent. The calm in Gaza is hanging by a thread, be it because Israel is not fulfilling its obligations, as charged by Hamas, or due to the inner-Palestinian strife in the territories. This is a temporary and fragile lull that is not backed by a strategic and political plan, all the more so since Israel is busy with its own political backyard and a presidential campaign is underway in Washington.

In the meantime, the harm done to the Palestinian populace is felt in every home where the main wage earner cannot get to work, a pregnant mother in labor cannot get to a hospital, or a student is not granted a permit to travel abroad for studies. The motivation to carry out terrorist attacks is increasing. In such conditions, thwarting individual hostile acts is an uphill battle. The defense ministers hasty reaction, blaming the legal system for harming the states ability to respond immediately, seems particularly bizarre. Has razing the homes of terrorists families prevented terror attacks in the past? Has collective punishment quelled the outbreak of the intifada? Even the security services eventually understood that harsh punishments are no cure. At most, they can provide a sense of revenge.

This dangerous and fragile situation does not call for shoot-from-the-hip statements or a political shrug of the shoulders. Even a caretaker government is authorized to make practical decisions that affect the daily life of civilians in the territories and create an atmosphere that will lead to a more positive direction. This way, the government can aid the Palestinian security services in their ongoing efforts against terrorism and perhaps weaken, if not dissolve, the population’s support for those lone terrorists ready to carry out attacks.

Worshiping the Indispensable Nation – by Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch, September 10, 2008
9/11 Plus Seven

by Andrew J. Bacevich

The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable – a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.

On Sept. 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld’s chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: “If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim.” That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to “transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally.”

Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.

The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!

The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on Sept. 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to “change the way that they live.” Rumsfeld didn’t specify who “they” were. He didn’t have to. His listeners understood without being told: “They” were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.

Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or “liberated”), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evildoers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region’s oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration’s strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.

Nicholas D. Kristof, Make Diplomacy, Not War, NYTimes.com, August 10, 2008

Iraq and Afghanistan are the messes getting attention today, but they are only symptoms of a much broader cancer in American foreign policy.

A few glimpses of this larger affliction:

¶The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.

¶This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.

¶More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.

In short, the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.

AP/ABC News: Study Questions US Strategy Against Al-Qaida, July 29, 2008

The United States can defeat al-Qaida if it relies less on force and more on policing and intelligence to root out the terror group’s leaders, a new study contends.

“Keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight,” said the study by the federally funded Rand research center, an organization that counsels the Pentagon.

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term “war on terror” and replace it with “counterterrorism.”

“Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.

“The United States has the necessary instruments to defeat al-Qaida, it just needs to shift its strategy,” Jones said.

Nearly every ally, including Britain and Australia, has stopped using “war on terror” to describe strategy against the group headed by Osama bin Laden and considered responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 suicide attacks at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.

Ann Scott Tyson, Gates Warns of Militarized Policy – washingtonpost.com, July 16, 2008

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned yesterday against the risk of a “creeping militarization” of U.S. foreign policy, saying the State Department should lead U.S. engagement with other countries, with the military playing a supporting role.

“We cannot kill or capture our way to victory” in the long-term campaign against terrorism, Gates said, arguing that military action should be subordinate to political and economic efforts to undermine extremism.

Margaret Nagle, Rethinking Islamic Fundamentalism, UMaine Today Magazine – March/April 2007

Why has American foreign policy in the Middle East failed? Part of the answer, says Munson, is the failure to understand people who do not see the world as it is seen by most Americans. This, in turn, is related to the failure to situate current events in their broader historical context. American policymakers often have failed to understand that the angry rhetoric reverberating in the Muslim world is rooted not just in religion, but also in nationalistic and social grievances.

“We must understand how the other side thinks,” says Munson. “And that’s not just an esoteric, anthropological, ivory tower view, but a fundamental point in understanding international affairs. Foreign policy is not just about natural resources or missiles, it’s about having a sense of others and why they do what they do. If we don’t understand others, we can’t respond appropriately,” a point that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War eloquently made more than 2,500 years ago.

Munson argues that fighting people whose motives one does not understand is like fighting blindfolded. That’s what we are doing in Iraq, he says.

Munson emphasizes that it is a mistake to assume that political movements have only one cause or distinctive feature. He has argued in a series of recent articles that militant Islamic movements definitely do have a fundamentalist dimension. They insist on strict conformity to a sacred text and require that all aspects of life, including the social and political, should conform to sacred scriptures believed to be inerrant and immutable. But Islamic fundamentalism usually also has a nationalist and anti-imperialist dimension. For many Muslim fundamentalists, militant Islam is to some extent a means to an end — overcoming foreign domination.

In the Quran, as well as in the minds of many traditional Muslims today, there is but one explanation for the subjugation of the believer by the unbeliever: God is using the latter to punish the former for his sins, including deviating from his laws, Munson says. Only a return to a strictly Islamic way of life will induce God to free the faithful from the faithless. A return to Islam is thus linked to overcoming foreign domination and a return to cultural identity. In 1972, the Ayatollah Khomeini told followers:

If the Muslim states and peoples had relied on Islam and its inherent capabilities and powers instead of depending on the East (the Soviet Union) and the West, and if they had placed the enlightened and liberating precepts of the Quran before their eyes and put them into practice, then they would not today be captive slaves of the Zionist aggressors, terrified victims of the American Phantoms, and toys in the hands of the accommodating policies of the satanic Soviet Union. It is the disregard of the noble Quran by the Islamic countries that has brought the Islamic community to this difficult situation full of misfortunes and reversals and placed its fate in the hands of the imperialism of the left and the right.

Munson stresses that understanding such rhetoric does not entail endorsing it. He notes that there are many aspects of Islamic militancy that are outrageous and deserve condemnation, notably the horrendous violence against civilians and the anti-Semitism. He describes the Holocaust conference held in Tehran in December 2006 as “sickening.” But he stresses that “it is in the interest of the United States to try to limit the appeal of militant Islamic movements. Invading Muslim countries has precisely the opposite effect, as we can see in Iraq.”

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Strengthening Extremists, NYTimes.com, June 19, 2008

The yearlong siege of Gaza may soon end with the new cease-fire there, marking the eclipse of one more American-backed Israeli policy that backfired by strengthening extremists.

Here in Gaza, sulfurous with fumes from cars burning cooking grease because the siege has made gasoline scarce, the entire last year of the blockade feels not only morally bankrupt — a case of collective punishment — but also counterproductive. The fragile new truce between Hamas and Israel just might create a new opportunity to stabilize the Palestinian territories, but only if we absorb the lessons of what has gone wrong.

Consider Adham Sharif, a 26-year-old man whose only child, a baby girl named Mariam, had a tiny hole in her heart and needed surgery to repair it. Gaza hospitals were unable to perform such an operation, but doctors said that surgeons in Israel or in neighboring countries could save her.

Iraq, perceived hypocrisy fuel record anti-Americanism: report, June 11, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Anti-Americanism is at record levels thanks to US policies such as the war in Iraq, and Washington’s perceived hypocrisy in abiding by its own democratic values, US lawmakers said Wednesday.

A House of Representatives committee report based on expert testimony and polling data reveals US approval ratings have fallen to record lows across the world since 2002, particularly in Muslim countries and Latin America.

It says the problem arises not from a rejection of US culture, values and power but primarily from its policies, such as backing authoritarian regimes while promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

“Our physical strength has come to be seen not as a solace but as a threat, not as a guarantee of stability and order but as a source of intimidation, violence and torture,” said Bill Delahunt, chairman of the subcommittee on international organizations, human rights and oversight.

“We have dangerously depleted what (former president Ulysses S.) Grant… identified as our greatest source of international power — our reputation for what he called conscience. I would substitute the phrase ‘moral authority’,” Delahunt added.

The report blames specific policies for falling approval ratings, notably the war in Iraq, support for some repressive governments, a perception of bias in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the “torture and abuse of prisoners” in violation of treaty obligations.

Fareed Zakaria, Who’s the Real Appeaser? Newsweek.com, May 17, 2008

The foundation of Hizbullah’s strength is not just its rockets but the support it can command from 1 million Lebanese Shiites. That’s why dealing with the group as a military problem is counterproductive. Augustus Richard Norton, author of the best recent study of Hizbullah, argues that the 2006 war strengthened the group. “I was in Lebanon in late 2007,” he told me. “And Shia families that had been neutral for 20 years now accepted Hizbullah’s argument that the Shia needed the protection it provided.”

The Bush administration’s response to the current setback has again been a military one—promising more arms for the Lebanese Army. But the reason Hizbullah was able to wrest control of so much of Beirut was that the Army sat back and refused to intervene. The Army—which mirrors the diversity of the society—was wary of getting involved in a struggle in which it would likely lose militarily and politically.

It’s not just Hizbullah. In dealing with many such groups—Hamas, the Taliban—the Bush administration has adopted a macho, exclusively military approach. All three of these groups have a political base in their societies that is deep and enduring. Denouncing them as evil and promising to destroy them will not change that; in fact, doing so only adds to their mystique of resistance and struggle. What we need is a political strategy to combat, contest and weaken the appeal of these groups or to marginalize their violent factions. Such a policy would naturally involve some contact with their leaders, but as part of a much broader effort to engage all groups in these societies politically.

Tony Judt, What Have We Learned, If Anything? – The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008

No one who has lived in Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Japan, the UK, or France, not to speak of more habitually violent lands, could have failed to notice the omnipresence of terrorists— using guns, bombs, chemicals, cars, trains, planes, and much else—over the course of the twentieth century and beyond. The only thing that has changed in recent years is the unleashing in September 2001 of homicidal terrorism within the United States. Even that was not wholly unprecedented: the means were new and the carnage unexampled, but terrorism on US soil was far from unknown over the course of the twentieth century.

But what of the argument that terrorism today is different, a “clash of cultures” infused with a noxious brew of religion and authoritarian politics: “Islamofascism”? This, too, is an interpretation resting in large part on a misreading of twentieth-century history. There is a triple confusion here. The first consists of lumping together the widely varying national fascisms of interwar Europe with the very different resentments, demands, and strategies of the (equally heterogeneous) Muslim movements and insurgencies of our own time—and attaching the moral credibility of the antifascist struggles of the past to our own more dubiously motivated military adventures.

A second confusion comes from conflating a handful of religiously motivated stateless assassins with the threat posed in the twentieth century by wealthy, modern states in the hands of totalitarian political parties committed to foreign aggression and mass extermination. Nazism was a threat to our very existence and the Soviet Union occupied half of Europe. But al-Qaeda? The comparison insults the intelligence—not to speak of the memory of those who fought the dictators. Even those who assert these similarities don’t appear to believe them. After all, if Osama bin Laden were truly comparable to Hitler or Stalin, would we really have responded to September 11 by invading…Baghdad?

But the most serious mistake consists of taking the form for the content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump together the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA, Switzerland’s Jura Separatists, and the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica; dismiss their differences as insignificant; label the resulting amalgam of ideological kneecappers, bomb throwers, and political murderers “European Extremism” (or “Christo-fascism,” perhaps?)…and then declare uncompromising, open-ended armed warfare against it.

This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.

Tomgram: Mark Danner, Generals Bin Laden and Bush, March 25, 2008

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to “take stock” of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts.

Fareed Zakaria, The Fearful Superpower, Newsweek.com, December 12, 2007

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. Since 2001, Washington, with bipartisan support, has invaded two countries and dispatched troops around the world, from Somalia to the Philippines, to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain. It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. How then would Giuliani go on the offensive? Invade a couple more countries?

To recover its place in the world, the United States should first recover its confidence. It remains the world’s only superpower, the only big country with a total portfolio of military, economic and political dominance. Most major states are either well disposed toward it or, at worst, neutral. The challenges America confronts come from small, faceless terrorist organizations and a few rogue nations. This is not to minimize the challenges. Today’s asymmetries of power mean that small groups can do big damage. But it is to put things in perspective. When President Bush speaks of Iran’s nuclear program as the road to World War III, one wonders if he has noticed that Iran’s total GDP is just one sixty-eighth that of the United States, or that its military spending is less than 1 percent of the Pentagon’s.

The real challenges that the United States faces come not from globalization’s losers but from its winners, not from yesterday’s bombs but from tomorrow’s factories. The crucial project for the next president will be to change the basic focus of U.S. foreign policy, away from the Middle East and toward the Far East. When the history of these times is written, surely the great trend that will dominate the accounts, far larger than the war in Lebanon or the tensions over Iran, will be the rise of China and India and how they reshaped the world.