China's motives: sane as ours
ARTICLE: China Offers Glimpse of Rationale Behind Its Military Policies, By Edward Cody, Washington Post, December 30, 2006; Page A17
The Big War crowd wants to keep overfeeding the Leviathan while starving the SysAdmin, no matter how many ground personnel deaths that takes in Afghanistan, Iraq and everywhere else we go in this Long War. They will tell you the "real war" is going to be with China over Taiwan. Why? The Chinese are--by default now--the second biggest military spender in the world. Our worst-case estimates place total Chinese military spending at roughly what we spend on acquisitions alone, or what we spend on R&D alone, and nowhere near what we're cranking just in Iraq on an annual basis. The vast majority of the stuff they've imported has been from the Russians, and last time I checked, we weren't that impressed with their stuff. According to our own Pentagon, in a generation's time China could be spending roughly half of what we're spending right now.

Think China's going to close any gap that way?

Ah, but the advantage of proximity WRT Taiwan. China "gets" Taiwan and the West falls, does it not? Because it would signal that . . . oh something or other.

But China makes it clear each and every time that the trigger will be Taiwan's actions. So what does America do? We sell Taiwan very sophisticated arms. We bolster our alliance with Japan on this score, inviting Japan into our defense guarantee on Taiwan (yes, that Japan that was the colonial master of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century and still denies its atrocities vis-a-vis China in Manchuria during WWII). In fact, we bolster our military ties with virtually every country that surrounds China--save Russia--during the Bush administration. Moreover, we cite China consistently to justify high-tech capacities that we continuously purchase in dollar amounts that vastly outweigh China's spending. Between now and 2025, we are likely to spend the Chinese military by $10 trillion dollars.

So what is China guilty of in this last explanation of its vaunted defense build-up?

As a rising economic power they're doing to their military the same thing they've been doing to their economy for years now: swapping out cheap labor (here, ground troops) for high-tech capital (mostly air and naval, aping their model, otherwise known as the U.S. military). Why does the PLA ape the Pentagon? Who else should they logically ape?

And here are the provocative rationales offered by Hu Jintao for China's build-up:

1) danger on the Korean peninsula (hmm, that one's hard to critique);

2) rising U.S.-Japanese military cooperation (given the state of Sino-Japanese relations, that seems fairly plausible, does it not?)

3) rising provocations re: independence from Taiwan (that's really BS, but a standby for the Chinese).

China continues to use Taiwan as a national diversion, with the Party leadership making that the great excuse for a build-up that logically arises from China's rising. Yes, the obsession is real, and it's mind-boggling with the PLA. I have sat in conversations with their military strategists and planners and listened to nonsense after nonsense on this issue. You'd think the whole frickin' universe revolved around this all-important scenario, when--truth be told--this scenarios matters only to military acquisition planners in both Beijing and Washington. Why? Frankly, it's all we have left and for the Chinese, it's a nice cover for what I believe to be the long-term rationale truly at work: China's growing fears over its rising energy dependence, which within years will vastly outweigh ours.

But my God! What kind of nation builds a big military to protect its access to energy around the planet?

Well, actually, that would be us by a huge margin.

But imagine if the Chinese were perceived to move in that direction! This would be an affront to us, would it not? Wouldn't it signal China's trying to cut off our access to energy in the Persian Gulf (Where we get all our oil, right? Or is it China's oil in the main?).

Ah, now I'm confusing myself. All this mirror imaging by China's strategic thinkers, whether it's on Taiwan or energy security, that's got to be something just to confuse us. Surely they cannot be so unimaginative simply to ape our moves, building a naval and air force whose primary design is to prevent our ability to threaten their ability to threaten Taiwan's ability to threaten independence? And beyond that simply to guard sea lines of communication? Surely the Chinese strategic vision is not that narrow, that myopic?

Why the hell not? That's basically our Big War rationale. With China, they're aping #1. But what exactly is our excuse when Marines and Army are dying every day in this Long War we've declared? Why is the Pentagon so intent on having a war with the country that inevitably becomes our biggest economic partner?

I'm not overstating. There are many in the military and especially the Air Force and Navy that just gotta have their conflict with China. Otherwise these guys must contemplate evolutions of their forces that they do not care to contemplate.

Too many Pentagon planners want to make the environment match the force, not the other way around. They'll tell you China spies on us and tries to steal our secrets, constantly trying to make their force more like ours. They'll tell you the big future threat we face is the loss of Taiwan. They simply don't want the war we've got, and if left to their own devices, will continue to build a force that's unprepared for that war--getting our people killed in the process.

This Sino-focused strategic argument is nothing more than the primacy strategy in disguise. It's the notion pushed by the neocons near the end of the elder Bush's administration, which said that now that the Sovs were gone, our #1 goal in military spending should be to remain the world's biggest military power by far. Well, an extra $10 trillion vis-a-vis your #2 competitor strikes me like we're already there. But that's not enough for the primacists, and if it takes a botched Long War effort and thousands upon thousands of U.S. ground troops to achieve, well then that's just too damn bad.

Thanks to Keir Lauritzen for sending this article in.

Iraq Mainly Calm, Riveted by Video of Hussein Death

By JOHN F. BURNS and MARC SANTORA
BAGHDAD, Dec. 30 — After nearly three decades living with the brutal repression of Saddam Hussein and the violent aftermath of his overthrow by American troops, most of Iraq responded with relative calm on Saturday to the news that the former dictator had been hanged at dawn in one of the grimmest of his own execution chambers.

This nation of 27 million people spent much of the day crowding around TV sets to watch mesmerizing replays of a video recording that showed the 69-year-old Mr. Hussein, in what appeared to be a state of subdued resignation, being led to the gallows shortly after 6 a.m. in Baghdad by masked executioners, and having a noose fashioned from a thick rope of yellow hemp lowered around his neck.

A separate video shown on a privately owned Baghdad TV station showed Mr. Hussein shortly after the hanging, lying lifeless in a white shroud, apparently in the back of a vehicle. The grainy video, possibly shot with a mobile phone, showed the former dictator with his head twisted at the neck, a bruise on his left cheek and what appeared to be bleeding at the point on the left side of the neck where the noose was tightened, in accordance with hanging techniques that are intended to be most effective in snapping the neck of the victim as he falls.

The much clearer recording of the hanging itself ended as the executioner began moving away to pull the lever that released the trapdoor, but its most remarkable feature was the steady, unflustered demeanor of Mr. Hussein. After more than 1,000 days in solitary confinement at an American detention camp on the western edge of Baghdad, and more than a year of histrionics in the courtroom where he was condemned to hang, he contrived to live his life’s final moments with a dignity that seemed certain to become part of his legend among loyalists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. The recording of the hanging was released by the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and carried no sound. But the calm and seeming courtesy with which the fallen ruler responded to the grim procedures on the gallows, disdaining the offer of a hood, then listening carefully as the chief executioner explained the need for a black cloth to be wrapped around his neck to prevent the noose from cutting his throat, impressed even the small group of Iraqi officials who attended as witnesses.

Numbering about 14 in all, they included a judge, a prosecutor, a doctor, a Muslim cleric and the warden of the Khadamiya prison in north-central Baghdad where the hanging was carried out, as well as other government officials. Iraqi officials said that no Americans were present, and that the final American role in the saga of Mr. Hussein’s passage — from his capture by United States soldiers in December 2003, and his three years of imprisonment at an American military prison — consisted of handing him over to the Iraqi authorities sometime late on Friday.

The handover encompassed a 10-mile journey from the detention center on the western edge of Baghdad airport to the site of the hanging, an old military intelligence headquarters that was notorious for its hangings under Mr. Hussein. As seen on the government’s recording, the execution chamber itself was a low-ceilinged room with bare concrete walls, with a ramp on one side up which Mr. Hussein shuffled to the gallows. Shackled at his feet and with his hands manacled behind his back, he was guided gently by three executioners in black balaclavas into a space set between a three-sided, russet-painted railing that enclosed the trapdoor.

Many of those attending the hanging were Shiites whose families were decimated in the murderous assaults carried out by Mr. Hussein, but their accounts of the execution were redolent of respect for the way in which their former tormentor died. “He looked strong” as the executioners moved to fasten the noose around his neck, said Munkith al-Faroun, one of the prosecutors at the trial that ended with Mr. Hussein receiving the death penalty for his role in the persecution of the townspeople of the Shiite town of Dujail. An attack on Mr. Hussein in the town in 1982 was followed by mass arrests and the execution of 148 men and teenage boys.

There was little sign in the first hours after Mr. Hussein’s execution of any major surge of violence by his loyalists among the minority Sunni population, whose centuries of political domination ended when American troops swept into Baghdad in April 2003. Statements by remnants of the ousted Baath Party, the political vehicle Mr. Hussein rode to power, had promised retaliation, in the form of a new wave of insurgent bombings, if the death sentence passed by an Iraqi court eight weeks ago was carried out.

But the most visible Sunni reaction took the form of scattered protests, many of them in towns across Anbar Province west of Baghdad, principal heartland of the Sunni insurgency that began with an underground fight against American occupation by Mr. Hussein’s loyalists and escalated over the past 40 months into full-blown war. In one major insurgent stronghold, Ramadi, American troops were reported to have fired in the air to scatter demonstrators marching through the streets hoisting portraits of Mr. Hussein and firing automatic weapons into the air.

American troops and other coalition troops were on high alert in all major cities as the sudden end came to days of wrangling among Iraqi leaders over whether to hasten Mr. Hussein to the gallows in the wake of an appeal court ruling on Wednesday that upheld the death sentence and started a maximum 30-day countdown to the execution. But reports from across the country after the hanging indicated levels of violence, including a car bombing that killed 31 people in the Shiite town of Kufa, that were at or below normal for a country in which such incidents have become commonplace. In Baghdad, three car bombs killed 36 people and wounded 77, Reuters said.

American and Iraqi officials cautioned against any premature assumption that Sunni insurgents lacked the striking power, or perhaps the will, to carry out retaliatory strikes. Other major watersheds in the history of Iraq since the American-led invasion — Mr. Hussein’s capture by American troops in an underground hole three years ago, and the missile strikes in June this year that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq — have been followed by lulls in the violence, only to be followed days or sometimes weeks later by a new spike in attacks.

Similarly, many of Iraq’s more sober-minded politicians cautioned against seeing the execution of Mr. Hussein as opening a decisive new chapter in Iraq’s turbulent history. At his death, Mr. Hussein had ceased to be a major rallying point, even among die-hard Sunnis. Their battles in the past three years have been less about restoring Mr. Hussein and his clique to power — a goal long since recognized as unachievable, given the tight security cordon that American forces had thrown around him — than about reversing the wider political upheaval, which has seen Sunni minority rule usurped, in elections, by the majority Shiites.

Still, high-ranking Shiite politicians represented the hanging as a turning point. Mr. Maliki, who short-circuited an entangled legal debate about the legitimacy of a rapid hanging by signing an execution order on Friday night, issued a statement after the execution saying that it should send a signal to warring Sunnis that their hopes of regaining power are lost. Mr. Maliki led the push for a quick hanging by saying last month that he expected Mr. Hussein to be executed by the end of the year, at a time when American officials were predicting that a strict adherence to legal procedures — including a much longer appeal process than the three weeks taken by the Iraqi judges — might delay the hanging until the spring.

”Saddam’s execution puts an end to all their pathetic gambles on a return to dictatorship,” Mr. Maliki said, referring to the former Baathists who are at the core of the Sunni insurgency. “I urge followers of the ousted regime to reconsider their stance, because the door is still open to anyone who has no innocent blood on his hands to help in rebuilding Iraq.”

Another high-ranking Shiite, Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, also saw the hanging as a turning point for the embattled, Shiite-led government, which has moved from crisis to crisis since it took office in May, with steadily rising levels of insurgent and sectarian violence that have sapped public confidence in the government, and, among many Iraqis, in democracy itself. Among Shiites, Mr. Hussein, appearing several times each week in live TV relays from the courtroom where he conducted much of his own defense, had become intolerable, especially with his frequent denunciations of the country’s new rulers as “traitors” and his encouragements to the insurgents to intensify their attacks.

“It means that we have turned the page, and that we are looking forward to the future,” Mr. Mahdi said in a BBC interview after the hanging. Like many top officials in the new government, Mr. Mahdi spent years in exile under Mr. Hussein, lost family members to his repression, and found himself on the wanted list of the assassins that Mr. Hussein’s intelligence agencies sent after exiles. “Of course, some people are thinking of a return to the old days,” Mr. Mahdi said. But in his view, justice had now been achieved, and Mr. Hussein had been shunted into history. “He’s been done,” he said.

Most Iraqis, however, put aside calculations of the hanging’s political impact for avid discussion of the way in which Mr. Hussein died. They saw him display an extraordinary composure, even courage, that seemed at odds with the gangster-like, psychotic figure he cut during his 24 years in power, and with his record as a ruler who ordered the killings of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens, many of whom ended up in mass graves scattered across Iraq’s oil-rich deserts.

Those who attended the hanging said that the proceeding lasted about 25 minutes, including a 10-minute period after the trapdoor opened when Mr. Hussein, who was said to have dropped about five feet before the rope tightened, was left dangling above the concrete floor. Mr. Faroun, the prosecutor, said in an interview that about a minute passed after the hanging before Mr. Hussein stopped all movement. “It took a short while,” he said. “And then he was not moving a hand or a leg.”

How to Build a Democratic Iraq
By Adeed I. Dawisha and Karen Dawisha
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003

Summary: What follows the war in Iraq will be at least as important as the war itself. Nurturing democracy there after Saddam won't be easy. But it may not be impossible either. Iraq has several assets doing for it, including an educated middle class and a history of political pluralism under an earlier monarchy.
Adeed I. Dawisha is Professor of Political Science at Miami University, Ohio. His latest book is Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. Karen Dawisha is Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian Studies at Miami University, Ohio. Her books include the four volume Democratization and Authoritarianism in Post-Communist Societies.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Thus far, most of the endless talk about the war in Iraq has focused on several issues: the scale of the operation, Washington's motivation, and the rift in the Atlantic alliance. It is now safe to assume, however, that if and when war comes (as of this writing, the battle had yet to begin), the United States and its allies will win, Saddam Hussein and his cronies will be toppled, and some sort of massive military occupation will follow.

In the aftermath of the war, the occupiers will focus on immediate tasks, such as ensuring order, providing relief to the long-suffering Iraqi people, and asserting control over the country. Very quickly, however -- even before they have met these goals -- the victorious powers will have to answer another pressing question: How, exactly, should they go about rebuilding the country? Saying simply that postwar Iraq should be democratic will be the easy part. Just about everyone agrees on that, and indeed, for many this end will justify the entire operation. The more difficult question will be how to make it happen.

Fortunately, the job of building democracy in Iraq, although difficult, may not be quite as hard as many critics of the war have warned. Iraq today possesses several features that will facilitate the reconstruction effort. Despite Saddam's long repression, democratic institutions are not entirely alien to the country. Under the Hashemite monarchy, which ruled from 1921 until 1958, Iraq adopted a parliamentary system modeled on that of its colonial master, the United Kingdom. Political parties existed, even in the opposition, and dissent and disagreement were generally tolerated. Debates in parliament were often vigorous, and legislators were usually allowed to argue and vote against the government without fear of retribution. Although the palace and the cabinet set the agenda, parliament often managed to influence policy. And this pluralism extended to Iraq's press: prior to the 1958 revolution that toppled the monarchy, 23 independent newspapers were published in Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra alone.

Not that the Iraqi kingdom always refrained from electoral fraud, harassment of opponents, or abuse of emergency powers. The government also occasionally banned newspapers that dared to indulge in particularly virulent criticism of the regime (although the bans typically lasted for only short periods). To be sure, Iraq's history -- both under the monarchy and especially after the 1958 coup -- has been filled with plenty of authoritarianism, tribalism, and ethnic and sectarian violence. The postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan, however, not to mention the more recent transitions from communism in eastern and central Europe, all testify to the way in which democratic political institutions can change such attitudes in a country -- often quite quickly. Having said that, the success or failure of democracy in Iraq will depend on whether the country's new political institutions take into consideration its unique social and communal makeup. It is therefore important to start talking about specifics. What should the blueprint for a future democratic Iraq look like?

LET'S GET FEDERAL

Iraq's ethnic and sectarian diversity -- the splits between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen, and between Shi`ites and Sunnis -- is usually seen as an impediment to building a stable democracy there. The fact is, however, that all this antagonism could serve a constructive purpose: having factions zealously check each others' power could actually promote democracy at the expense of rigid communal particularism. The trick is to work out a constitutional arrangement that makes sense of Iraq's social and cultural mosaic, transforming diversity into an agent for positive change.

For that reason, democratic Iraq must have a federal system of government. Already, the Kurds -- who have enjoyed freedom from Baghdad's control since the establishment of the northern no-fly zone -- have been adamant in demanding such a system. But all Iraqis would benefit from federalism, as the example of other current federal states -- the United States, Germany, Russia, and now the United Kingdom -- suggests.

In a federal Iraq, both Baghdad and the regions should be equal guardians of the constitution. Monitoring the rights and arbitrating disputes between these power bases should be the responsibility of a strong federal judiciary. As other federal states have shown, constitutional amendments to change this arrangement should be allowed only with the concurrence of both houses of the legislature, the head of state, and all federal units. Allowing the center to bypass the regions in amending the constitution quickly dilutes local rights and increases regional antipathy to central control -- as occurred in Russia before the December 1993 referendum imposed a new federal constitution.

Successful federal systems also divide power to raise and distribute revenues between the capital and the periphery. Central revenues can be used to redistribute resources from rich to poor regions, whereas local revenues support local economic and cultural initiatives. Such revenue-sharing arrangements are critical because power follows resources; when the central government denies regions the right to raise and spend money, it is tantamount to denying them authority. Revenue-sharing, on the other hand, can also decrease the temptation for one ethnic group to either capture the state or seek separation. That said, as in other federal states, certain strategic assets such as Iraq's petroleum must remain in the hands of the central government.

Local governments should in general have widespread control over their territories. This includes responsibility for all citizens in a given region, not just those of a given ethnicity. The now-collapsed Israeli efforts to give the Palestinian Authority control over some Arab activity in the West Bank and Gaza, while Jerusalem retained sovereignty over Jews in the territories, was a doomed formula: modern states, with their massive infrastructures, must be organized territorially and can function only in that manner. Limiting authorities to caring for their own kind only reinforces tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions, which can undermine democracy. For these reasons, any attempts on the part of Iraq's Arab elites to once again grant the Kurds autonomy -- without also giving them substantial control over their territory as a unit in the federal structure -- will likewise be doomed to fail.

Admittedly, federalism does not always satisfy the aspirations of groups bent on independence, as demonstrated by the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Chechnya. At the same time, devolution of power has succeeded in stemming the rise of separatism in the other ethnic republics of Russia, in Scotland, and in Montenegro -- and could do the same for Iraq, if properly handled.

The question therefore becomes how to increase the chances that federalism will work in Iraq. To begin with, it would be a mistake to create only three ethnically or religiously based federal units: a Kurdish north, a Shi`ite south, and a Sunni center. Such a structure would only entrench current divisions and might even lead to ethnic cleansing. A far better idea would be to maintain Iraq's present administrative structure, under which the country is divided into 18 units. Keeping these provincial boundaries would serve the interests of Iraq's various communities, while avoiding inordinate emphasis on ethnic and sectarian concerns and increasing healthy political competition for resources -- even within various ethnic or religious communities.

Each of the 18 units should be allowed to elect a local government and send representatives to the upper chamber of a new parliament. Creating an upper house in parliament that -- like the German upper house or both houses of the U.S. Congress -- is based on regional representation would give regions a voice at the center, check the centralization of power, and, by providing a second set of local elites, minimize regional corruption. Such a system would be far better for Iraq than a centralized one, along the lines of France's old prefect system or that newly adopted by Russia, which lets Moscow appoint the governors of the seven new super-regions. Such centralized systems allow for enormous abuse, especially if the executive branch is not particularly devoted to the rule of law. The postwar occupiers of Iraq should therefore avoid even temporarily appointing Iraqi governors, since it may prove difficult to displace them once the occupation ends.

WHO'S IN CHARGE

Executive branches of government are usually structured in one of two ways: unified in a single, strong presidency combining the powers of the head of state and the head of government, or divided between a head of state (a president or monarch) and a head of government (a prime minister). What would be the advantages and disadvantages of each for Iraq?

In strong unitary systems, presidents are normally directly elected, enjoy wide latitude in ruling by executive order, can call referendums to override legislation, may unilaterally declare states of emergency under conditions prescribed by the constitution, and usually have broad powers of political, administrative, and even judicial appointment. Such presidents are the primi inter pares of the branches of government and, depending on their performance and perceived legitimacy, can be extremely popular -- as, for example, was Charles de Gaulle in the first years of the Fifth Republic or Boris Yeltsin until 1993.

Too much, however, depends on the character of the individual president, and thus the disadvantages of such a system outweigh its benefits. In all but the strongest democracies, such systems are vulnerable to abuse, to coups d'etat by opposition forces, or to self-overthrow by sitting presidents who refuse to leave office once their terms are up. Indeed, one need only glance at the unitary presidencies of the Middle East and Central Asia to be reminded how prone they are to corruption, repression, and self-aggrandizement. Getting strong presidents to leave office is particularly difficult and, outside the West, rarely happens without the help of a coup, assassination, or natural death. In sum, then, strong presidencies can be judged less a mainstay of democracy than a blunt instrument for its demise.

One alternative system that might be proposed for Iraq, especially given its divisions between Arabs and Kurds and Shi`ites and Sunnis, is the Bosnian model: a shared presidency, in which each ethnic community receives a seat on a presidential triumvirate. Agreed to as part of the U.S.-brokered Dayton accord, this unwieldy arrangement was the price that had to be paid for an end to the fighting. It has, however, been beset by untold problems and has resulted in almost no state building. Each of Bosnia's three presidents is elected by, and therefore responsible only to, the electorate of one of the three ethnic communities. Unfortunately, this has reinforced the tendency of Bosnia's rival substate authorities to maintain the fiefdoms they built during the war, leaving leaders no incentive to cooperate. Bosnia's Serbian ministate in particular has remained entrenched and continues to act as a vassal of ultranationalists in Belgrade. Iraq's Shi`ites might likewise be tempted to form similar bonds with Iran, and Iraqi Kurds could look to their brethren in Turkey, Iran, and Syria -- rendering a Dayton-style shared presidency particularly dangerous for the country.

A weak but unified presidency, on the other hand, would avoid both the Bosnia scenario and the problem of creeping authoritarianism. In weak presidential systems, such as in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Israel, and Italy, the president is typically chosen by parliament and has limited, largely symbolic powers, such as recommending judges, approving constitutional amendments, and signing laws and treaties. In such systems, presidents typically cannot initiate constitutional changes, unilaterally call referendums, or prorogue parliament. The prime minister or chancellor, not the president, is the one who heads the government and does most of the work of a chief executive.

Splitting the executive between a weak president and a prime minister has a better chance of sustaining democracy in Iraq. This division would allow political dueling to take place within the democratic tent, and not in the Iraqi street. A prime minister chosen by, and dependent on maintaining, a majority in the lower house of a bicameral parliament would serve as an institutional buttress against presidential abuse and would keep the affairs of the state running. Meanwhile, a charismatic president, chosen by the upper house (itself composed of the elected representatives of the 18 federal units, as well as notables and professionals) would function as the symbolic figurehead of the Iraqi nation.

Another option that might work well for Iraq is restoring the Hashemite monarchy under strict constitutional limits. Because the Hashemites share the faith of Iraq's elite Sunni minority, restoration would reassure the Sunnis that the inevitable change in the balance of power will not lead to their marginalization. The monarchy also has the advantage of being well connected with tradition, which would make it a stabilizing force during a time of uncertainty and a barrier against extremism. A constitutional monarchy could become the symbol of Iraq's unity and civility and act as the custodian of its positive traditional values. A monarchy would also help reassure Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf states that they would no longer face the kind of threat Republican Iraq has long posed.

Two obvious candidates for the throne would be Sherif Ali bin al-Hussein of Iraq or Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. Both are cousins of Iraq's last king, Faisal II. Sherif Ali, a British-trained economist, is the current head of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, an Iraqi opposition group. Prince Hassan, a graduate of Oxford University and the younger brother of Jordan's late King Hussein, has been a long-time proponent of greater democracy in the Arab world.

Of course, some Iraqis and outsiders will oppose a restoration of the kingdom on the grounds that monarchies are a thing of the past -- regressive and outdated. It is important to remember, however, that monarchies can actually help safeguard democracy. After all, when Spain restored its monarchy in 1975 after 40 years of Francisco Franco's rigid authoritarianism, the king served as a powerful guarantor of stability and progress. Moreover, in the Arab world today it is not the presidential systems but the monarchies -- Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Qatar -- that are leading the way in democratic reform. Whatever the theoretical benefits of reinstating a limited constitutional monarchy in Iraq, however, it should be done only with popular support, as demonstrated through a referendum.

GETTING READY TO CHOOSE

Talk of referendums leads naturally to the next question about postwar Iraq: If the country opts for a weak presidential system with a split executive, how should the president be chosen? By direct or indirect elections?

There would be advantages to both. Direct elections, in which the entire population votes for president, theoretically encourage rival candidates to position themselves at the center of the political debate, in order to maximize their chances of winning as much support as possible. At the same time, however, democratic theorists from the ancient Greeks through de Tocqueville have observed that direct elections favor populist and antidemocratic candidates. It is because of this fear that presidents in several new central European democracies are chosen by parliament.

In Iraq, where some 60 percent of the population is Shi`ite, direct elections could be expected to shift the political balance away from the minority (but traditionally dominant) Sunnis. Although such an outcome should not in and of itself be thwarted, direct elections should be avoided lest they allow the election of a Shi`ite president who unfairly favors the south or promotes an increased role for religion in state affairs. Selecting the president through indirect elections -- for example, making it a choice of the upper house of parliament, perhaps by a super-majority -- would, on the other hand, make the president beholden to, and dependent on, the success of another democratically chosen and regionally diverse body.

Prime ministers generally are leaders of the parliamentary majority in the lower house. The president and prime minister thus have different power bases and may come from different parties. During periods of so-called cohabitation, gridlock might increase, but so would the need for consensus politics. In countries where dire economic conditions demand strong and swift government, such a system can seem less than ideal. But democratic Iraq's major problem will not be economic hardship; the real threat will come from the concentration of great wealth in one industry (oil production) that is located primarily in the Shi`ite south. Getting all Iraqis to share this resource for the common good will be difficult, but institutions that diffuse power will have the best chance of success.

Turning to parliamentary elections, Iraq will face two key issues: how to draw the boundaries of its electoral districts, and how many members should be elected from each. During the monarchical period, Iraq was divided into 14 provinces, each of which was subdivided into electoral districts of 20,000 voters. These districts each elected a single member, and the complaint was often voiced that tribal leaders predominated at the expense of urban populations. Iraq is vastly more urbanized today, however. Thus it seems best to draw electoral boundaries in a way that will give greater influence to city dwellers. Doing so will also serve to strengthen secularist tendencies and decrease the possibility of rural and tribal domination of the lower house.

As for the second question, in Iraq's case there would be several advantages to having multimember districts (MMDS). For one thing, MMDS allow a district's diversity to be more clearly mirrored in parliament. In Iraq, MMDS could thus increase the representation of the professional middle class, as well as local minorities, including Sunnis in Basra, Christians in Baghdad, Turkmen in Kirkuk, Arabs in Kurdish areas, and Kurds in Arab regions. In addition, MMDS elsewhere have been shown to boost the representation of women in parliaments. Given that Iraqi women already boast high levels of education and professional attainment, increasing their input in government would contribute considerably to democratic stability. MMDS would also allow for tribal representation without allowing it to dominate.

Another way to ensure representation of women and minorities in Iraq would be to set aside guaranteed seats in parliament. For example, Iraq's pre-1958 monarchical constitution reserved a certain number of seats for Christians and Jews. More recent examples of set-aside seats, however, show that they cement rather than eradicate ethnic divisions. For example, the guarantee of representation to diaspora Croats in Franjo Tudjman's Croatia was enacted to ensure that other minorities would not outvote Croats. But the provision gave the foreign Croats rights without any responsibilities, reinforced ultranationalism within the ruling party, and limited the development of interethnic trust. Similarly, the collapse of the Good Friday power-sharing agreement in Northern Ireland, which included set-aside seats for Catholics and Protestants, has further underlined the need to avoid any quota system.

The next question is whether Iraq should enact a mixed system of voting, in which half the seats in parliament would be chosen by elections in MMDS as described above, and half would be chosen by party list. Under such a system, voters would get two ballots at each election, one for district representatives, and another for nationwide parties. Countries that currently feature mixed systems include Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, and Venezuela. The advantage of such an approach for Iraq is that it would allow voters to have direct and personal contact with their local representatives while also encouraging the development of nationwide parties with national, rather than regional or sectarian, agendas. Usually, in order to run candidates in the party-list section of the election, parties need to have offices and a large number of registered members in most electoral districts. Using such standards would ensure that purely regional parties (which may be ethnic and sectarian) could still win individual seats in the lower house through mmd elections. But if they lacked offices and a nationwide membership, they would be ineligible to run in the party-list part of the campaign. Therefore, in Iraq, for example, Kurdish representation in parliament would be limited to seats won in MMDS unless the Kurds joined with others to form a truly nationwide party.

As for the upper house, following the example of Germany's Bundesrat, each of Iraq's 18 federal units would constitute one mmd, with the number of representatives per district determined by that district's population size. Legislators elected this way would constitute half of the upper body. The remaining half could be filled by elected representatives of a broad cross-section of society, such as tribal and regional notables and key representatives of professional associations (university deans and presidents, lawyers, the heads of women's associations, journalists, doctors, teachers, engineers, industrialists, and merchants). Allowing parliamentary representation by professional associations would stimulate and support the re-emergence of civil society so vital for democracy, while allowing tribal representation would reflect Iraq's history and traditions.

In accordance with typical parliamentary procedure in other countries, the upper house would not have the power to initiate legislation, but would be able to review and send back legislation deemed incompatible with the constitution and the federal system. The upper house could also be given a role in approving judicial appointments and amendments to the constitution. Providing federal units and organized interests a seat at the democratic table, even if it is in the chamber with lesser powers for everyday rule, would enhance constitutional continuity and deliberation.

In discussing electoral and party systems for Iraq, the question arises whether certain groups that have undermined democracy in the region -- specifically, the clergy, the military, and the Baath Party -- should be banned from politics altogether. As for the clerics, they could be allowed to enter the upper house as representatives of their communities (Muslim and Christian) provided they accepted the secular character of the constitution. After all, complete exclusion of the clergy has usually had disastrous consequences in the Middle East, whereas the United Kingdom, where bishops serve in the House of Lords, has shown that religious representatives can exercise a benign influence. As for Iraqi military officers, those not barred from office for complicity in the crimes of the past should be allowed to stand for election -- if, that is, they are retired from active service. The Baath Party, however, should be banned altogether in order to stigmatize it for its responsibility for the institutionalization of tyranny under Saddam Hussein. Officials who participated in torture and other human rights violations should be prosecuted and blocked from future participation in public life. And the thousands of midlevel Baath Party careerists should be allowed to return to political life only if they join new parties. Banning the party would also avoid the mistake made in some post-Soviet states, where reformed communist parties were allowed to keep their existing assets, thereby upsetting the level playing field necessary for the emergence of a competitive party system.

DEMOCRATIZING THE MIDDLE CLASS

As almost all political theorists agree, a fully developed middle class is essential to an effective and sustainable democracy. Fortunately, even after 12 years of debilitating sanctions, a substantial and highly educated middle class has persisted in Iraq. Thus far, however, this group has not pushed for democratization or reform. This is partly because Iraq's middle class, like other sectors of the country's society, has been terrorized by Saddam's regime into submission and inaction. But there are other reasons.

Democratic theory holds that independent and self-sustaining middle classes create the basis for democratic civil life. This notion is highlighted when one glances back at the second half of the nineteenth century and contrasts the experiences of the United Kingdom and Germany. During this period, democracy was rapidly incorporated into the British body politic through a series of parliamentary acts that not only expanded the electorate, but also placed ever increasing limitations on the power of the monarchy and the aristocracy. In Germany's Second Reich, by contrast, political elites dominated by the nobility ruled through a strong authoritarian system, and chancellors and their cabinets were not answerable to the Reichstag. Britain's progress toward democracy was spurred by an entrepreneurial middle class largely independent of the state. In Germany, the economy was much more closely connected to the government, and the industrialization of the country occurred as a result of the alliance between the state and the traditional elites. There was no robust middle class to agitate for greater freedoms and representation.

Iraq's middle class today is more like nineteenth-century Germany's than the United Kingdom's. As in many other Arab countries, much of Iraq's middle class remains directly dependent on the state, primarily through employment in the vast bureaucracy, in state-owned industries, in military and security agencies, and in Baathist political bureaus. Moreover, thanks to Iraq's immense oil wealth, government revenues come mainly from oil sales and not taxation, which further adds to middle-class docility.

In order to stimulate entrepreneurship and strengthen the free market, postwar Iraq must begin the process of transferring resources from the public to the private sector. This shift should have an enormous political payoff: the development of a self-sustaining middle class that will become more proactive in promoting democratic institutions. A proper taxation system should also gradually be introduced; only then will the middle class demand accountability from the government.

Helping orient the middle class toward democracy is also important because it is the middle class that fills the ranks of any bureaucracy. Bureaucracies, known for their rigid adherence to legal rules and to hierarchies, are often not ideal agents for fostering democratic values. These impediments substantially increase, however, when bureaucracies are oversized and corrupt, as is Iraq's. It is therefore imperative to improve the country's civil servants, so they will not impede democratic growth.

Not unlike the rest of the Arab world, Iraq's bureaucracy today is simply a vehicle for ensuring full employment. This has resulted in allying ever larger segments of the middle class with the government, creating an abiding sense of dependence on, and acquiescence to, the state and its institutions. In order to lessen this dependency and improve efficiency, the current size of the bureaucracy needs to be reduced considerably.

Inefficiency and corruption would also diminish if entry into the civil service were based on merit alone; without regard for sect, ethnicity, or political affiliation. Making such a change would not be impossible, or even very difficult. True, in Saddam's political regime, unqualified but loyal employees were given posts of high responsibility. But the culture of merit is in fact embedded in the Iraqi consciousness. The most visible example of this is the national baccalaureate exam, which for decades has been taken at the end of high school. This exam has, in many ways, acted as a great equalizer; children of humble origins and resources who achieve high scores get a free education in the country's most prestigious colleges or are sent on scholarships abroad. Despite complaints of nepotism and influence peddling, the baccalaureate has also functioned as the main determinant of one's future career, and the great anxiety it engenders among all Iraqi high schoolers and their parents, rich and poor, testifies to its neutrality. To build on this foundation, a civil service college, modeled on the French ƒcole Nationale d'Administration (ena), could be established not only to teach administrative sciences but also to train future civil servants in democratic values and practices. In order to make the bureaucracy smaller and more selective, civil servants should also be paid more. Unlike in Afghanistan, however, this will not be beyond the means of Iraq, a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world.

SETTING THE STANDARD

For the sake of all parties involved, the American endeavor in Iraq must not end in a more agreeable dictatorship or a successor regime that promises nothing beyond greater cooperation with Washington. The United States' standing in the world rests not only on its might, but also on the democratic values that it espouses and propagates. The country and its allies therefore cannot shrink from setting Iraq on a democratic path. Not only will Arab and international opposition to regime change be assuaged if a democracy results; building democracy in Baghdad is also the best way to eliminate the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Restructuring Iraq's political system will be laden with difficulties, but it will certainly be feasible. At the same time, the blueprint for Iraq's democracy must reflect the unique features of Iraqi society. Once the system is in place, its benefits will quickly become evident to Iraq's various communities; if it brings economic prosperity (hardly unlikely given the country's wealth), the postwar structure will gradually, yet surely, acquire legitimacy. As is shown by the eastern European example, where ex-communist dictatorships have now lined up to join NATO and the European Union, putting in place democratic political institutions that function properly, meet the particular needs of a given society, and deliver the goods can rather quickly produce "habituation" -- that is, inculcate democratic habits in the population that become well entrenched and resilient. A democratic federal system would turn Iraq into the standard against which other Arab governments are judged, and make the country a natural ally of the West. Such an outcome would benefit everyone -- but especially the people of Iraq, who, after suffering for so long, deserve no less.



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The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame

By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah
Last Updated: 11:15pm BST 17/07/2004

Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

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"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."

Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.

Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.2 deg Celsius over the past 20 years and are widely believed to be responsible for new extremes in weather patterns. After pressure from environmentalists, politicians agreed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, promising to limit greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012. Britain ratified the protocol in 2002 and said it would cut emissions by 12.5 per cent from 1990 levels.

Globally, 1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide weather records were first collated in 1860.

Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have contributed to the warming of the planet in the past few decades but have questioned whether a brighter Sun is also responsible for rising temperatures.

To determine the Sun's role in global warming, Dr Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the Sun's surface known as sunspots, which are believed to intensify the Sun's energy output.

The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.

Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.

He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.

Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki's research. "While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant," he said.

"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor."

Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.

He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase.

This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the natural factors involved in climate change", he said.

Dr Gareth Jones, a climate researcher at the Met Office, said that Dr Solanki's findings were inconclusive because the study had not incorporated other potential climate change factors.

"The Sun's radiance may well have an impact on climate change but it needs to be looked at in conjunction with other factors such as greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols and volcano activity," he said. The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy-makers are not.

"Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."

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Stopping at war isn't realistic, but it is realism
OP-ED: "Hearts, Minds ... and Schools: War isn't the best route to democracy," by Lawrence E. Harrison, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 25 December 2006-7 January 2007, p. 23.
ARTICLE: "The alternative to war: A landmark in the peace process," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ARTICLE: "The alternative to voting: A slide back into all-out war," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ONL LANGUAGE: "Realism: The comeback work in foreign policy," by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 24 December 2006, p. 20.

Good and very thoughtful op-ed by Harrison, that's somewhat obscured by the silly title (Duh! War isn't the best route? WHODATHUNKIT!). In it, Harrison makes a good case--based on a big project of research--that changing culture is the key to creating economic opportunity and successful connectivity with the outside world, and that this is the best route to generating democracy in the long run:

Our goal was to capture the role of culture and cultural change in a society's evolution. We found that Confucian values of education, achievement and merit played a central role in the economic "miracles" in East Asia. Open economic policies and the welcoming of foreign investment triggered several transformations, including in India, Ireland and Spain. Visionary leadership was crucial in the cases of Botswana, Turkey and Quebec. In Ireland, Italy, Spain and Quebec, modernization was also accompanied by decline in the influence of the Catholic Church [mostly on birth control, a concept that make sense as your economy matures--thus putting you at odds with the church--Tom].
We concluded that enlightened policies can, over time, produce cultural change--change that in turn spurs political pluralism and economic development. However, it is extremely difficult to impose such changes from outside; war is not a helpful instrument. Better tools include education that inculcates democratic and entrepreneurial values; improved child-rearing practices; religious reform; and development assistance keyed to cultural change.

Then he goes on to list a number of foci that make sense in assistance, like literacy and getting (and keeping) girls in school.

No arguments from me on that stuff (as these are arguments I've offered myself in PNM and BFA). My only problem with this article is the presumed binary choice between using war as an instrument and avoiding it.

Obviously, you don't want to have to wage war any more than is absolutely necessary, but the definition of necessary is crucial. Some situations (e.g., certain dictatorships, some forms of civil strife) simply won't get better without outside intervention. These are ongoing wars against individuals within countries that will rage on--if allowed--and thus prevent the evolutions in culture that Harrison rightfully advocates. In fact, left to their own course, these situations not only retard such necessary evolution, they can send the societies in question down retrograde paths of dissolution (in many ways, on display in Iraq today and what we saw in ethnic cleansing throughout long-repressed Yugoslavia). Great dysfunction like that often necessitates very violent divorces, which we can trigger (like in Iraq) or stand by and idly observe (Balkans), but which we'll likely be drawn into in some manner because of the inevitably resulting regional instability.

You can say, "We should only take on the easy jobs," but truth be told, the easy jobs will be handled for the most part by the private sector (not a big U.S. military interventionary role in Ireland and India, for example). It's the stinkers that get left to intervening states.

And no, I've never advocated (as some cartoonish reviews of my work surmise) invading every Gap state to bring integration. But in certain cases, intervening is the best route, not for creating democracy, but for removing a key impediment to its eventual emergence. Why? Dictators tend to squell economic connectivity between the masses and the outside world, because to let that stuff unfold is to lose power progressively over time. And civil strife kills such connectivity simply by making the environment too scary for outsiders to enter (unless they're energy companies protected by private security firms).

So yeah, war isn't the best route to democracy. But in certain cases wars are the only way to get to a postwar in which Harrison's ideas can get their logical play.

But if we're real realists, we're not interested in that postwar, just picking and choosing our wars for specific punitive effect. The problem is, the games really are won in the postwar nowadays, not in the wars. So interventionary wars themselves are not the problem (and indeed, sometimes are the solution), it's our unwillingness to take seriously the challenges of the postwar.

Indonesia's Aceh is mired in intractable conflict for decades, until the perfect, crushingly destructive foreign intervention occurs, known as the tsunami.

The disaster opened the eyes of both the government in Jakarta and the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) to Aceh's war-weariness. A peace deal was struck in August 2005. Since then, events have unfolded more hopefully than anyone could have predicted. Under the supervision of monitors led by the European Union, GAM disarmed and Indonesian troops returned to barracks. A law was passed granting Aceh generous autonomy.
A quasi-separation, achieved peacefully, amidst the massive reconstruction effort following untold destruction and death from a nasty outside force that crushed all in its path.

That's not to wish tsunamis on intractable conflicts. It's simply to note that sometimes something has to intevene from outside to break the deadlock, kill the conflict, stop the shooting and repression.

We made our recovery effort, engaging in nation-building and reconstruction with a far lighter hand and including a nifty array of local partners, and we resurrected a military-to-military relationship with Indonesia's armed forces for our reward.

Compare that effort (which I highlighted in BFA) with Sri Lanka's slide back into war. Yeah, it'd be nice if India took that one on again, but that's unlikely. And given the violence that will once again pervade that society, there's almost no chance that any of Harrison's precepts will be given a chance.

I know, I know. We're all realists now, thanks to our failings in postwar (not in the war) Iraq. But even an able diagnostician of those failures such as George Packer will readily admit that:

At some point events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security--that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils.
Globalization ain't going away, despite all its complications and challenges, and so pretending we'll only take the easy cases when we own the world's largest military just ain't realistic. Because what we don't try to fix (hopefully with plenty of others), others will be forced to fix--however well they can.

The real unrealism of today is the belief that by eschewing difficult efforts, we meet the hippocratic criteria of "do no harm," when the harm, in virtually every instance you can name, has already been done by ourselves and others, leaving us just to contemplate whether we give a damn at this point or simply want to pass off our problems to those "others," whose efforts will inevitably be cast by national security types as "clear proof" that Country A is trying to reduce our influence by increasingly theirs, and thus harming our "national interests," which too often consist of nothing more than our belief that certain regions are ours and ours alone to either ignore or screw around with.