Strange Attraction: Stories of Imperial Decline

Not always a bad thing when the Captains and Kings Depart!

I have several times been accused of posts longer than some blog-readers' attention span, so I will not inflict this 8 page opus on you. Besides, I think people should look at Common Review and subscribe, since it is a highly readable yet cultured magazine. The link below takes you to the pdf of my cover story in this issue, and the links below that allow you to buy the works mentioned, and help my sagging bottom line with commission from Amazon!

"Strange Attraction: Stories of Imperial Decline," by Ian Williams

Nothing becomes an empire like its fall. We look upon its works with a sense of despair that such a mighty social edifice could fall so completely. Whether it is the Anglo-Saxon elegist on the ruins of the Roman city of Bath (“giants made it”), or Edward Gibbon “musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol," the fall of Rome is behind the almost omnipresent Ozymandian nostalgia that permeates Western intellectual life. But, although many of us share in this fascination, one has to admit how odd it is that our generally accepted apogee of civilization was in fact a military dictatorship based on brutal aggression, conquest, and slave trading, whose most memorable entertainments were forcing people to kill each other or setting wild beasts to dismember them in front of large audiences.

See the Decline and Fall of the Roman, British and American empires below...

Click on the Common Review

And buy the Books!!

Mohammed and Charlegmagne, by Henry Pirenne

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
by Morris Berman

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians
by Peter Heather

Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors by Charles S. Maier

Europe After Rome by Julia Smith

Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800
by Chris Wickham

With Friends Like These, NAM, Darfur and Palestine

There's No Monopoly on Hypocrisy

In an exemplary display of chutzpah this week, John Bolton and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Dore Gold called for the International Criminal Court to go after the Iranian President. Please note that this is the International Criminal Court whose founding Rome Treaty Bolton "unsigned" and which he has spent six years trying to sabotage.

One has to admit that having Bolton as the US Ambassador was a good excuse for a lot of silly behavior by alienated Third World delegations. But it is not a good enough excuse for their collusion in covering up violations of human rights. Since the controversial Human Rights Council was established, the Non-Aligned have behaved as if they deliberately trying to vindicate Bolton and the pro-Israeli anti-UN lobby.

Of course I am not complaining that the Council sees fit to criticize Israel for its human rights violations--often. After all Israel often violates the human rights of its Palestinian and Lebanese neighbors and the various pro-Israeli UN-Watch and NGO-Monitor sites could productively suggest to the Israeli government that the best way to avoid being in the dock is to stop committing crimes.

But providing cover for tyrannies like Uzbekistan or Belarus, as the non-aligned majority has done this year, blocking resolutions on their practices, is to give the Palestinian cause a bad name in an equally hypocritical way. Human Rights are too important to indulge hypocrisy.

In his valedictory speech to Human Rights Watch last Friday, Kofi Annan pointed this out and more. In a recent interview with me, he commented that "The question of double standards is a question you never get away from when you touch the Middle East, whether you are discussing the Middle East in the region or outside the region. We’ve often been accused that UN resolutions are implemented selectively, and I try to explain that we can only implement these resolutions with the cooperation of the member states. In situations where the member states concerned do not cooperate it’s extremely difficult for the UN to impose any resolutions."

In particular, of course, is the issue of Darfur, where all the objective evidence shows that the Sudanese government is backing a murderous militia in mass killings, rapes and ethnic cleansing of local people. Having outvoted a resolution that named the government, the Non-Aligned and Muslim countries on the Human Rights Council supported an African Union resolution that passed condemning the killings--without mentioning the government that was organizing the murders.

This is a travesty that plays into the hands of Israel supporters. Most of those campaigning for Darfur are sincere humanitarians, but there many among them who see it as a wonderful opportunity for anti-Arab propaganda. And who can blame them--it is a wonderful opportunity, handed to them on a plate by the Arab and African governments who will not speak up against Khartoum.

However, as a testament to the efficacy of international and popular pressure, including strong words from Annan, in the end, the Council realized it was losing all credibility and was forced to agree to hold a special session this week, which decided to send a team to Sudan to investigate. But even now, the only references to the Sudanese government are to thank it for its cooperation. The five person team will be picked by the President of the Council after "informal consultations" among members, which means that he will have to resist governmental pressures to appoint those who will not rock the boat with Khartoum.

There are some caveats here. The situation in Darfur and Sudan is much more complex than some of these lobby groups would have us believe. Some of them take the UN to task because it refuses to call what is happening there genocide, which makes one suspect their motivation. In fact the UN inspectors reported that what the Jinjaweed were doing may be "no less serious and heinous than genocide."

For a close look at the complexity of the issues see Alex De Waal's piece in the current London Review of Books.

Darfur should matter to the Palestinians, despite the large cheque the Sudanese handed over to the Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniyah. Diplomatically, the Palestinians have lost ground, not least because of the large, and very important, European Union bloc whose support for entirely correct resolutions has wavered. The EU members are under heavy pressure from the US, and they have a Trojan horse in their midst, in the form of Tony Blair’s Britain. But externally, the Non-Aligned’s stance on overall human rights issues, and its seeming refusal to accept that anyone other than Israel violates international humanitarian law, has certainly made it easier for Blair and Bush to pull the EU away from its former commitment to international law on the Middle East to a more expedient view.

That is a much larger threat than the handful of Pacific coral atolls which are the only active supporters of Israel that the US can muster. And the way to deal with it is for delegations that really care about the Palestinians to is to do the right thing by supporting human rights wherever they are violated, regardless of which government is doing the violating – or indeed even if it is terrorists depriving people of the fairly fundamental right to life.. There is really no excuse for democracies like India and South Africa to cover up for Uzbekistan, Belarus--or Sudan, just as there are no real excuses for EU collusion with Israel's violations.

Pinochet, Thatcher, Kirkpatrick and Galtieri

Pinochet, Thatcher, Kirkpatrick and Galtieri in perspective

Augusto Pinochet was evil and few will mourn his passing, although there is room to mourn that he spent his declining years outside a prison cell. Even his former supporters were disappointed when they discovered that he had been dipping the till. There was nothing pure about this evil! No one who watched what Margaret Thatcher did to Britain in the eighties will be too surprised that both she and the Murdoch press are the only ones with tears to spare, in public at least. Thatcher reputedly suffers from Alzheimer's, and so she has an excuse, but one feels that she would have said the same with her full faculties.
See Marc Cooper for more details from someone who knew Pinochet's victim Allende well.

In fact, it is to the credit of the often-disparaged Labour government of Harold Wilson that they offered asylum to many Chileans fleeing Pinochet's Kissinger-backed civilization effort. I had one staying with me in Liverpool, traumatized by the torture he had undergone.

But ever since, the disparity of treatment between Chile and Argentina has intrigued me. While the Argentinian military did nothing so spectacularly thuggish as bombing the presidential palace and killing the president, according to Human Rights groups, they ended up killing ten times as many Argentineans as the Chilean Junta killed Chileans, and often in gruesomely imaginative ways that betoken seriously twisted minds.

Yet, as I remember, Chile was the cause celebre for the decade, and Argentina was an afterthought.

I cannot help suspecting that it was to do with international relations. While the Chilean Junta was fervently anti-communist, the Argentinians happily carried on trade relations with the Soviet Union, selling wheat, for example. Was the disparity in publicity as demonstration of the power of the Soviet led communist parties in the world's left? I really cannot think of any other explanation.


Margaret Thatcher's affection for Pinochet is, of course, also based on personal gratitude for his regime's covert help against Argentina during the Falklands War. Certainly, Mrs. T showed no signs of disaffection with Galtieri's regime before the Argentinian invasion, and the Junta could be forgiven for mistaking the signals London was sending, that it really did not care too much. Thatcher was running down the British presence in the South Atlantic, and indeed the Navy. If Galtieri had had any sense, and was really worried about liberating the islands, all he had to do was to wait a few years and her penny-pinching policies would have handed them to him on plate. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who beat her protégé Pinochet to the pearly gates by a few days, was deeply reluctant to back even Thatcher against Galtieri, and Reagan had to order her to back Britain in the UN Security Council. You may remember Kirkpatrick distinguished between "authoritarian" regimes, which imprisoned, killed and tortured people, and totalitarian regimes, which did the same, but disagreed with her.

Sadly, in the trade off from Galtieri's stupidity, Britain lost and Argentina won. The Junta fell and Thatcher was re-elected despite her disastrous economic and industrial policies. Her spectacular success was then to rebuild the British economy back to where it was when she took over, for which economic pundits with short term memories applauded her.

But then, amnesia is such a general phenomenon nowadays. How many of us think back to the descriptions of life and painful death in the Argentinean and Chilean generals, and see the repressive technology of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. People kidnapped, "rendered," shackled, hooded, and tortured. Can it just be a coincidence that the same people in Washington who applauded Pinochet are now implementing his policies and practices on a global scale?

Magic moments on Wall St

This was one of my "Speculator" Columns in Investor Relations Magazine earlier this year. I offer it until I catch up with more current events.

Magic Moments

The Wall Street Journal recently noticed that executive stock-options often seemed to dated and priced just before a leap in stock prices or while the they were in an abnormal trough.

Their number-crunchers decided that the odds against this happening on a random basis, for the companies it studied ranged from 800,000 to 1 to 100 million to one.

Then it became clear that at some companies, the options were provably backdated at specific, and for the executives, highly propitious, dates.

How can we explain this or the fact that all these incidents seemed to happen at around the same time? When we exclude all possible but unthinkable explanations for such events, then the impossible becomes feasible.

So let's sing a response to the Loving Spoonful, at least those of us old enough too remember those carefree days, "Do you believe in magic?" Dead right we do. You often hear people talk about the magic of high finance, but it must be real!


It is clear that America's senior executives discovered both time travel and telepathy simultaneously. They traveled back in time to issue themselves options, and mentally communicated the technology to their colleagues in other companies so they too could travel back and do the same thing

Of course this may seem a little far-fetched, but the alternative hypotheses are absolutely untenable. We would have to assume that much of the corporate leadership of the United States was involved in an unprincipled conspiracy to defraud the shareholders, employees and pensioners of their companies, and what is more to make an end run round the SEC while they were doing it. Unthinkable!

Similarly, when faced with reports of executives awarding themselves bonuses for declining earnings and stock prices it would be unthinkable and preposterous to assume any veniality on their part. It is much more reasonable to assume that they are creating real shareholder value, but that our ever-inventive corporate leadership is siphoning it off into another dimension, beyond the reach of the IRS, where it will be available at the appropriate time for the use of trusting and patient shareholders.

Think about the massive thaumaturgic advance made by all those compensation committees and experts who can prove with charts and diagrams that every executive must be paid above average in case they desert. In the American corporate world, everybody is above average, and so is their pay. If it is not math, it's magic.

It may be useful to send an exploration party into the fifth dimension to find out what happened to the below average - since they are clearly not to be found in this universe.

These are special people we are talking about: masters of quantum uncertainty who can argue to annual meetings and compensation committees that they are uniquely indispensable for the companies that they manage, but tell the jury afterwards that they had no clue what was going on in their companies.

I know that there will be some skeptics out there, but clearly a select group of insiders is in the know, doubtless all honor graduates of the Hogwarts School of Business. How else to explain why institutions with large voting blocs and big research departments saw nothing amiss, and did not raise it at the annual meetings, why respected banking operations with astute analysts did not put sell on their holdings? Because they know about the magic of finance.

So why will they not share the news with the rest of the world? Because it would pose a moral hazard, that's why. Imagine the consequences for American public morale, let alone morality, if people learnt that you could get much greater pay for working less efficiently, or that they could go back and retrospectively rewrite their contracts?

Whatever would happen to the American work ethic? As the carefully selected readers of Harry Potter's Guide to Business Success will know, these are secrets that must be kept hermetically sealed form Muggles, or Mugs, as we affectionately call them, who have to work longer and harder for less pay and fewer benefits or smaller dividends each passing week. Doubtless there are dire consequences for anyone foolish enough to revea.................... SPLOTTTT.

Unfinished Business for Blair

In Tribune, London, 8 December 2006

Kosovo Independence - There's No Alternative

It is sad to see the ruined fragments of the former Yugoslavia. You can travel from the Arctic Circle to the Moroccan border with Spain without showing a passport. But to travel from Skopje to Pristina, which was once as trouble-free as going from Manchester to Leeds, is a time-consuming bureaucratic business. The only hope for the sundered Balkans is for the separate states to start cooperating and eventually to join the European Union.

For that to happen, the last piece of the Balkan jigsaw has to have clear and guaranteed shape-and that is an independent Kosovo. Recognition must precede cooperation and reintegration.

Occasionally overlooked in the wake of the Iraqi debacle is the fact that Tony Blair's foreign policy was not always bad. Without the Prime Minister's strength over Kosovo, Slobodan Milosevic would probably have escaped with the ethnic cleansing– and remained in power. Certainly, Clinton ungoaded by Blair would not have supported action-and, since it was on behalf of Muslims and there was no oil involved, not even a belligerent Bush would have been that fired up about a genuine humanitarian issue in an oil-free niche of the Balkans.

But now as Blair approaches the end of his premiership, Kosovo is still unfinished business. Europe and the UN are hedging about independence, almost eight years after Milosevic's killers beat an ignominious retreat. Accepting that he certainly is not going to see a happy ending in Iraq, the Prime Minister Blair's last mission, should he choose to accept it, should surely be to ensure recognition of Kosovo's independence.

In a recent interview, Kofi Annan told me that the UN was treading water on the issue so as not to give Serb nationalists leverage in the forthcoming elections. This is the wrong approach. You do not cure nationalist illusions by pandering to them. Belgrade's claims to Kosovo were always about as well founded as London's to Calais, which may have been written on Mary Tudor's heart but has long been erased from any serious map of Britain.

The founders of the regime in Washington that Mr. Blair admires so much declared that governments derive their "just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

In the modern democratic world, there is no way that the international community can force Kosovo back under Serbian rule against the wishes of some ninety per cent of its population. Over twenty years ago Milosevic ago instituted a form of Apartheid against the majority of its population, and followed it up with a bout of ethnic cleansing and mass murders, whose victims are still being exhumed from mass graves in Serbia.

The only right the Serbs had to Kosovo was that of conquest, in the early twentieth century. And the problem with the right of conquest is that he who conquers last has the last laugh. Milosevic lost. More pertinently, the Kosovars will not, and nor should they, be forced back into the state that deprived them of all their rights, including the right to life.

If there had been an effective reformist government in Belgrade, it would have spent the years since the overthrow of Milosevic apologizing to the Kosovars and trying to kiss and make up. But instead of trying to win hearts and minds they have directed a haze of irredentist claims against Kosovo and its government, the latest of which involves railroading through a reaffirmation of Serb sovereignty over the province in a Floridian-style vote on a new constitution.

It is true that the Kosovars have not exactly made a stellar success of self-government hitherto. However, almost every such objection, no matter how accurate, could equally be levelled against Serbia, whose government had in addition waged recent aggressive and genocidal war against its neighbours. By the same logic, having proven unfit for self-rule, perhaps Serbia should return to Ottoman suzerainty?

Some so-called socialists now claim to be deeply concerned about the problem with minorities in Kosovo. It would, one cannot help thinking, have helped their case if they had shown similar concern when Milosevic's regime was ethnically cleansing minorities, Albanians, Bosniak Muslims and Croats, but even so, there is indeed a serious problem with how Kosovars treat the minorities they see as accomplices of Belgrade.

The occasional obsession with it by those who see the likes of Saddam and Slobodan as socialist saints and martyrs is on a par with concentrating on how the Czechs (genuinely) mistreated the Sudeten Germans while forgetting what Nazi Germany had done before. The one does not excuse the other–but it puts it into perspective. There is certainly room for a continuing international presence and protection for the minorities, Serb, Roma or whatever, with a strong message to Kosovo that there would be financial and political consequences for a failure to ensure their safety.

But we return to the same point. There are no conceivable circumstances short of extermination or expulsion of the Kosovars that would bring about a restoration of Belgrade's power in the province. Tony Blair should make himself useful in his exit, and effect the independence wanted by an overwhelming majority of Kosovo's inhabitants.

John Bolton's Greatest Hits

Sorry about the recent silence, but illness inhibited productivity. Normal Service should now be resumed.
Here is the latest on Bolton.

The Nation
December 4, 2006
John Bolton's Greatest Hits
Ian Williams
In a rare midterm election in which foreign policy was a major issue, it is not too much of a stretch to say that American voters put UN Ambassador John Bolton out of office. Bolton's resignation from his unconfirmed recess appointment at the UN removes the residual fear that the Bush team had something up its sleeve to bypass senatorial resistance to his confirmation. The White House had claimed the support of a bipartisan silent majority for his appointment--even though it was vociferous defections from GOP ranks that helped thwart his confirmation.
In fact, Bolton's determination to hang on up to this point suggests that his obsession with the United Nations is as serious as Ted Haggard's with sin: He just can't keep away from it. For three decades of work at conservative think tanks and at the State Department, Bolton has angled for appointments that would in some way keep him grappling at close quarters with the organization even if they sometimes involved him in contradictory positions.
Even when the Bushes were out of office, Bolton filled in his time working with former Secretary of State James Baker when he was appointed UN special envoy for the Western Sahara. The Moroccan annexation of the territory has been on the UN agenda for more than thirty years and a standing invitation to complaints about the organization's ineffectiveness; Bolton has been remarkably reticent to highlight it.
Bolton's other job in exile was to advise the Taiwanese government on how to get into an organization that he had spent decades advising the United States to get out of. No sooner had he arrived at the UN in 2005 than he cooked up a deal with Beijing's ambassador to scuttle the efforts of Germany, Japan and India--all US allies--to get permanent seats on the Security Council. He may have had a point about the undesirability of the changes--but a more diplomatic envoy would not have left American fingerprints so messily obvious.
From the White House point of view, Bolton's appointment appeased the know-nothing foreign policy crowd while rewarding his longstanding loyalty to the Bush dynasty. That loyalty had been shown most memorably in 2000, when the man who has spent the past year preaching democracy to the members of the United Nations strode into a library polling place in Florida yelling, "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count."
To be fair, while Bolton's tenure has from the standpoint of any rational diplomacy been a disaster, it has not been an unmitigated one. He has been a very well-trained attack dog, always coming to heel when the White House wanted and chewing his own words when necessary.
One of his proudest achievements in his previous job at the State Department was to "unsign" the treaty that committed the United States to the International Criminal Court, and then to bully and browbeat small countries across the world into signing agreements not to extradite US citizens to its seat in the Hague. And then this year he had to allow a Security Council resolution setting the Court's prosecutors on the perpetrators in Darfur.
As pious commentators talk about how effective he was, it is worth remembering that while he was in charge of arms control, North Korea joined the nuclear club and that, according to him and Bolton and his allies, Iran is about to. It is an achievement--but of a dubious sort for an alleged arms control maestro. To be fair, within the Administration, he reportedly opposed the US-Indian nuclear deal, although he remained silent on Israeli nuclear capabilities.
Otherwise, Bolton's most memorable "achievement" occurred while he was in charge of arms control at the State Department before moving to the UN. He was a major saboteur of Congressional efforts to improve and tighten the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If these measures had been passed, countries would not have been able, as North Korea did, to drop out of the treaty after reaping its dual-use benefits, and the voluntary protocols on inspection that Iran stopped observing would have been compulsory.
However, his greatest legacy may be his semi-successful attempt to wreck the UN reform proposals last year. By introducing hundreds of unilateral amendments after long months of painstaking negotiations between the members, he certainly managed to destroy the efforts of Kofi Annan to persuade the Third World members that managerial reforms were not some form of American and Western plot. In fact, almost every public statement he made pretty much confirmed their suspicions.
Bolton leaves unfinished business at the UN. His attempt to enforce on Iran an international law in which he professes disbelief comes to nothing as Security Council members try to insure that Washington has no excuse to take military action. The resolution is stalemated and diluted.
Although he is now implying personal credit for the appointment of Ban Ki-moon, the incoming Secretary General, Ban is astute enough to know that he was far from Washington's first choice for the position. Ban differed from Bolton on issues ranging from the International Criminal Court to how to deal with Pyongyang.
Bolton has clearly relished his role at the UN, and one nightmare scenario would be intense White House pressure on Ban to grant him a senior UN appointment. If that sounds farfetched, just consider the recent appointment of Bush supporter and former Washington Times editor Josette Sheeran Shiner as head of the World Food Program.
One cannot help but suspect that Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman will soon have competition in xenophobic grandstanding. Bolton's media prominence, his longstanding credentials as a Goldwater supporter and his newly acquired status as a martyr for conservatism would certainly equip him for a political career in the GOP's new confederate heartland, where tough talk regularly obscures lack of achievement.

Impunity and Jack D. Ripper

Bolton's Beit Hanoun Veto-Bad for Israel, Bad for the World.


If an Israeli soldier runs over a protestor like Rachel Corrie with a bulldozer, or shoots a British journalist like James Miller, he is unlikely to suffer any consequences. So we should not be too surprised that the culture of impunity covers the killing of mere Arabs.


It seems that any trigger-happy Israeli private is guaranteed a chain of exculpation all the way through the ranks, through the politicians in Jerusalem, and through Washington to the UN, where John Bolton once again vetoed a much watered down resolution condemning the killings at Beit Hanoun.

It is a much better deal than the fetishes that the Lords Resistance Army believe protects the bearer from harm

Unlikely as it seems, it may even be possible that the slaughter of a sleeping family in Beit Hanoun was simply an accident, a mis-targeting of the artillery. But when you add up the chains of misfirings, the massacre on the beach, the shelling of the UN compound at Khyam, the targeting of Qana-twice, it really takes rapid onset amnesia to make it feasible. The chain of incidents is getting so long that it is stretching the logistics of the IDF's excuse supply to breaking point.

Israeli inquiries regularly and promptly exonerate the IDF from any blame with a series of "dog ate homework" excuses that would be laughable if the subjects were not so tragic.
This time, it was a misfiring targeting system.

On the Gaza beach massacre earlier this year, they announced that yes, well five of their shells fell in the area, but none of them killed the Ghalia family. Their excuses should have been laughed out of court, not least when the HRW reporter discovered fragments of IDF 155mm shells at the site. The Guardian dissected that one as thoroughly as the shell vivisected the family.

At Khyam this year, repeated shelling all day, on clearly marked permanent site, in the face of repeated calls from the UN at local and international level, was just a mistake. As Kofi Annan said "This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked UN post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that UN positions would be spared Israeli fire. Furthermore, General Alain Pellegrino, the UN Force Commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day on Tuesday, stressing the need to protect that particular UN position from attack."

At Qana, in 2006, IDF sources claimed that the building had been used by Hezbollah, and even that Hezbollah had blown it up themselves. Human Rights Watch reported, "None of the dozens of international journalists, rescue workers and international observers who visited Qana on July 30 and 31 reported seeing any evidence of Hezbollah military presence in or around the home. Rescue workers recovered no bodies of apparent Hezbollah fighters from inside or near the building."

In 1996, at Qana, the UN had videos of a drone artillery spotter and helicopters hovering above the target at the time of the massacre, which was, remember, yet another clearly marked and mapped UN compound, to which civilians had fled for protection.

That was "due to incorrect targeting based on erroneous data." The IDF claimed that the shells hit the base not because Israeli gunners used outdated maps of the area- the base had not moved for a long time- and that the gunners miscalculated the firing range of the shells.

Incident after incident implies that the IDF either has lousy discipline or lousy training–or both. The evidence suggests that IDF personnel are behaving like brownshirts and are being allowed to get away with what effectively are anti-Arab pogroms. Faced with the levels of incompetence or indiscipline that these incidents reveal, a real professional military would have been cashiering officers and disciplining men. There is no sign of that in the IDF, unless someone refuses to do occupation duties.

Kofi Annan accepted Olmert's assurances that he did not know about the Khyam firings (not, as misreported in some media, that he exonerated the IDF). But it really raises the question of how much control the politicians have over the Israeli military. Several disastrous invasions of Lebanon suggest that if anything the control is the other way.

One only has to look at recent events where IAF planes have gone on bombing runs against French troops in Lebanon and German ships off the coast. It took a French threat to shoot them down before someone restrained the military from their dangerous provocations.

This has serious consequences for Israelis, as well as their neighbors. In Dr Strangelove General Jack D. Ripper described what seems to be the current Israeli political doctrine. "War is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought."

A state with two hundred nuclear warheads hanging about and a seemingly limitless supply of Jack D. Ripper style officers with free use of artillery practicing for the big day, is even more frightening than a state where a few well-aimed shells or rockets can and do regularly sabotage any bold politician's peace plan.

Wakeupcallradio

I was on WBAI/Pacifica at the crack of dawn this morning
and this is the link to the show if you want to hear my pre-caffeinated take on events at the UN.

Wakeupcallradio.com
I thought I was rather restrained about Bolton, but then I was half asleep!

A Change of Tone, Not of Direction

Asia Times November 11

The US's new Democratic way
By Ian Williams

NEW YORK - Despite the results of this week's election, US President George W Bush, and of course Vice President Dick Cheney, will still largely have their own way, albeit with some frustrations. Between them Bush and Cheney have raised executive power, already fearsome, to impressive heights, aided by a Congress that has failed to oversee the White House - and media that have largely failed to oversee Congress.

Chastened by the results in which both the House of Representatives and the Senate went to the Democrats, the president may, for a short time at least, try to work in a consensual way with the changed Congress, whose composition is clearly a reflection of the popular verdict on his administration. One suspects that he will only be kidding, however. The real aim will be to split centrist Democrats from their colleagues as Bush seeks to divide and rule.

Previously, that would have been easier, but by a demographic accident, the Democrats with the seniority to move into the crucial committee chairs are mostly old-school liberals, rather than some of the new input who fought their elections by being more conservative than their Republican opponents.

Many of the Democratic incumbents excluded and marginalized by the rampant Republicans over the past decade may not be very merciful in return. At national and at state level, where they also won some significant victories, such as the Massachusetts and New York governors' races, there will be pressure to reverse Republican measures designed to gerrymander seats and suppress votes.

In the Senate, the Democrats, with their paper-thin majority of one, will face problems, as a party generally needs a 10-seat majority for effective control, and US senators are notoriously independent. Just as sufficient Republicans defied their party to prevent the confirmation of John Bolton as United Nations ambassador (Bolton was appointed ambassador in August 2005 during a congressional recess), it only takes the defection of a few quasi-Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman to break the party's strength on key security issues.

On the other hand, Lieberman's centrism is countered by the remarkable but little remarked-on election to the Senate of a self-confessed socialist, Bernie Sanders from Vermont, who will certainly caucus with the Democrats, but could counter any tantrums from Lieberman with his own threat to break ranks.

Even so, among the things that are certainly not going to happen immediately despite the dreams of the fervent grassroots Democrats are an immediate impeachment of Bush and a hasty withdrawal from Iraq. After all, most of these legislators voted for the invasion, and in their often-temporizing way complain about the conduct of the war rather than the invasion itself. Many of the Democratic leadership are considering presidential bids next year and so will impale themselves on their own statesmanship to avoid offending key voting blocs.

For example, John Conyers, who will probably chair the House Judiciary Committee, wants Congress to censure Bush and Cheney for misleading members over the decision to go to war in Iraq, and he has mentioned impeachment. But a newly centered Nancy Pelosi (incoming House Speaker), backed by centrist Democratic leadership types such as Rahm Emanuel, have already pulled him back.

In foreign affairs, on many issues the differences will be in tone rather than substance. Both sides of Congress are fundamentally America-firsters, but the Democrats see sweet-talking and stroking as more effective means of achieving those ends.

In general, the incoming Democrats will be pro-Israel like those they succeed, but probably much more pragmatic about it. While Republicans tended to march to the massed bands of evangelical Christians and Likudniks, the Democrats have customarily had closer ties to the Labor wing of Israeli politics, which is, arguably, marginally more inclined to a genuine peace settlement.

But they will be better informed than their predecessors. For example, New York Congressman Garry Ackerman, tipped to chair the Middle East and Asia Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee, speaks Korean, and shows an educated interest in Asian affairs.

In that sense, the rest of the world can certainly welcome the new Congress, the majority of whose members actually know that other countries exist and have their own ideas about how to do things.

On other issues, the major Democratic figures want a run-down, rather than an immediate withdrawal, of the US presence in Iraq. They support direct talks with North Korea and Iran, and also support India as a counterbalance to China. They are likely to be tougher, to the point of xenophobia, than the Republicans on investment and trade issues.

This they demonstrated over a Dubai firm's failed bid to to run some US ports and the abortive bid by China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) for control of Unocal, the California-based oil-and-gas group. Democrats are deeply concerned about the trade deficit with China, both as a strategic threat to the US and as a source of unemployment for their constituents.

Now that the Democrats have assumed control of the Senate, the most likely chair of the Foreign Relations Committee is Senator Joe Biden, who is on record advocating direct talks with both North Korea and Iran. Like many of his wing of the Democratic Party with close union ties, he is unlikely to nod through free-trade agreements that risk US jobs, so there may well be some bumps in China-US ties as a result.

Biden is also in favor of giving India a pass for its nuclear program, as indeed is his counterpart Tom Lantos, almost certain to become the chair of the House International Relations Committee. A Holocaust survivor, Lantos is, of course, pro-Israel, but not to the point of taking lobby dictation. After initially supporting the war in Iraq, Lantos has called for an exit strategy and is highly critical of the Bush administration's conduct of the war. Lantos has demurred at Japanese hedging on war guilt, which may lead to problems with the new administration in Tokyo, albeit tempered by impatience with China's amassing dollars.

In the House, with a clear Democratic majority, a whole slew of committees will stand in the way of much of the Bush agenda, and their chairs have pledged themselves to roll back many of the steps of the past few years, notably those that have reduced taxes on the affluent. They will push for an increased minimum wage, more access to health care, and curbs on powerful pharmaceutical companies.

Charles Rangel, the New York veteran, will inherit the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which will bring the power of the purse to reverse the years of Republican domination of the government's social and economic agenda. However, no one is envisaging a Democratic attempt to cut funding for the Iraq war, which would be the most direct way of overcoming presidential authority.

Instead, the buzzword from the centrist Democrats has been "oversight" and the use of the congressional subpoena power to uncover how the Bush administration has mismanaged the war, and to whose benefit. In that context, even while in a minority, Henry Waxman of California has turned the spotlight on the murkier corners of the administration's operations in an admirably dogged way. Recently, he forced disclosure of details of the looting of the Development Fund for Iraq with no-bid contracts by such companies as Halliburton.

Sadly, more often than not, the media were not there when he did it, but as incoming chair of the House Government Reform Committee he can use the bully pulpit to ensure significant attention.

A small cloud on the horizon is the reaction of the financial markets. Rationally, they should be glad that the days of Republican fiscal profligacy are dated. But just as the markets went up on "irrational exuberance", in former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's memorable phrase, they can be equally irrational in their despondence.

With a falling housing market, a rising deficit and a soft dollar, it may not take that much of a catalyst to have them waving their sell orders. A nose-to-nose with China would do it. Of course it would be in no one's interest. But neither was World War I. An unstable situation, like the present US economy, does not have the resilience to take much of a push.

Ian Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Bolton hangin' in there.

Dead Man Talking?

Today's Bush administration decision to nominate Bolton to the lame duck Senate answered my question, "What legal rabbit would they pull out of a hat to keep Bolton there?"

Senator Lincoln Chafee, still a man of integrity despite his defeat, promptly announced that he had not changed his mind about opposing Bolton. Senator Chris Dodd equally promptly threatened a filibuster.

So one cannot help wondering whether they know something we don't or are just afflicted with an Alamo complex.

In some ways the nomination is almost reassuring. After the White House shoehorned in their candidate in as head of the World Food Programme, I woke up in the middle of the night wondering whether there would be a move to twist the Secretary General's arm to appoint Bolton as Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping (now there's a contradiction!) or to replace previous presidential patronage appointee Chris Burnham as USG for Management.

It is surprising that like some hot gospelling preachers are so obsessed with sin that they can't tear themselves away with it, Bolton's obsession with the UN keeps him wanting to get close to it. So while he says that all Kofi Annan's appointees lose their mandates at the stroke of midnight, he, who never had an official mandate from the US government anyway, wants to eke one out after an election in which the American public overwhelmingly rejected the policies that he has represented so vociferously.

Maybe the UN Association of the USA should offer him a job to keep him out of harm's way while he indulges his fantasies.

One Person, one vote, but how many fixes?

Books I am Reading.
Review from Tribune 3 November

One person, one vote, but how many fixes?
Ian Williams

You Can buy these books here - and help the site
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit polls, election fraud and the official count. Steven Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, Seven Stories Press

Stealing Democracy: the new politics of voter suppression, Spencer Overton, W.W. Norton.


What counts is not who votes -it's who counts them. That was old saw of Tammany Hall, whose spirit is alive and well in the US.
Last week, New York's Sullivan County responded to my attempt to register to vote with a demand for a photocopy of my driving license, or the last four digits of my social security number, before it would put me on the electoral roll. The experience gives some hint of why only some 70% of Americans eligible to vote are actually on the electoral registers. A driving license, access to a photocopier, even the motivation to get a 39 cent stamp and stick it on the envelop, all help winnow out poor and disadvantaged voters.

Spencer Overton goes on to detail how many of those who make it onto the register do not make it to the polls, while Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss show that even if they do, their opinions may well end up being ignored.

These books deal with two sets of problems with American democracy. One is the question of access to the polls-and the second dealt with by Freeman and Bleifuss is what happens if and when the votes are cast. Interestingly, neither of them bother with the third, the financial barriers that now make it almost impossible for anyone not a multi--millionaire, or at least backed by multimillionaires, to become a successful candidate.

But even without dealing with the money that is at the root of much of the feebleness of American democracy, these authors tell chilling tales. Federalism in the US means that there are over 4,600 sets of election regulations nationwide - and many of them were drawn up with Jim Crow

There are great traditions of making voting difficult for political undesirables, and many of the skills honed during the years of Tammany Hall and Jim Crow have been adapted to the modern age of computers and statistics. Spencer Overton considers them all, in a very low-key way. Like many Americans, he assumes the democratic infallibility of the Constitution. He does not mention the Senate, which gives two seats each to huge states like California, and New York, and also to tiny patches like Wyoming and Rhode Island, let alone the Electoral College with its similar bias against large industrial states.

His concern is obstacles to voting, which are indeed a big enough subject in themselves. In Florida and other states, a sentenced felon is off the rolls for ever, a relic of the days when being Black was an arrestable offence in the old Confederacy, and still effective in cutting down the Democratic vote. Across the country, local governments torn between keeping incumbents in office indefinitely, and eliminating as many of the opposition's seats as possible, draw up electoral districts epitomizing the great traditions that added gerrymander to English. Using paranoid-but almost completely unsubstantiated fears of fraudulent voters-mainly Republican local governments make it hard to register and then to vote, knowing that those they repel will be poor, uneducated - and Democratic supporters.

Poor and black districts get few voting booths and machines, and voters face intimidating challenges, ranging from voting day police spot checks on drivers in Florida to lawyers in New York. In the 2004 elections in Ohio, the state that won the election for George W. Bush, black voters had to wait hours in the rain -- only to discover that their ballots would not be counted for a variety of spurious bureaucratic excuses invented by the Republican official responsible for conducting the vote. Poll hours and locations are determined by partisan officials, who will adjust them to deter or encourage whichever groups will give the results desired. And then there the mysterious spurious phone calls and leaflets cancelling the election or moving the polling station that are part of the Republican apparatus of "voter suppression."

When the votes are counted is where Overton overlaps with Freeman and Bleifuss. Without the stridency of the conspiracy theorists, but with considerably more assiduity than many in the media, they examine the evidence of the 2004 elections. As Woody Allen said, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't following me. There is an immense amount of paranoia, from both the left and the right, in the US, but there is also much more dangerous amount of complacency and deference from the media.

Although on election day exit polls showed a clear lead in key states for Kerry, as the official count was tabulated, it was converted into a lead for Bush. The exit polls are not common or garden opinion polls. Thousands of voters in each state are approached on their way out of the polling booths and asked who they voted for. Paid for by a consortium of media outlets, they are highly accurate, not least since they do not assess intentions, but record facts. The US has used exit polls o challenge election results in places like Ukraine and Georgia. Because of three hour time difference between East and West coast, the pollsters have a moratorium on releasing their findings, since it was claimed that calling the results based on East Coast results would stop westerners voting.

Later on election night in 2004, the exit poll figures were "adjusted" to coincide with the declared results, but accidentally the unadjusted poll numbers were posted on CNN's website and downloaded as the day went on. The authors, perhaps wisely, do not go deeply into the motivation - whether the pollsters were conscious abettors of fraud, or just trying to cover their professional rears in the face of an unprecedented discrepancy. In any case, they skewer the official excuses made later.

Freeman and Bleifuss and others subjected the discrepancies to exhaustive statistical analysis. The states where the biggest discrepancies occurred were those under Republican control, and where electronic voting machines had been used. The makers of these machines, coincidentally, were in many cases Republican donors themselves, and refused to allow scrutiny of their software. They do not usually leave any kind of paper trail, so a recount will always produce whatever count has been programmed in.

There is plenty of ground for suspicion, but as the authors say, the US media has a Catch 22, it will not investigate without proof - handed on a plate, and anyone who investigates is ipso facto a paranoid kook. Why didn't the Dems make more fuss? Well for one, they were not entirely innocent themselves - JFK's victory scarcely bore scrutiny. Sadly, America's chattering classes are shocked, shocked, at the very thought that anyone could question the integrity of a government that lied its way into Iraq, runs secret prisons, has done away with judicial process on wiretaps and tortures people kidnapped from around the world. Trust in a government is stretched to credulity when it is extended to a party which staged riots in Florida to stop the vote being counted in 2000, and then used a packed Supreme Court to discard the Republican shibboleth of states rights to declare Bush the winner, without counting the Florida votes.

Reading these books, one cannot help feeling that if Venezuela ran an election like this, the US would be calling for international teams to monitor them. Of course, even British politicians, whether it was by building council homes - or selling them, tried to influence elections with the type of social gerrymandering, that I often suspect motivated Margaret Thatcher more than ideology. The poll-tax meant that many natural (old) Labour voters made themselves scarce when the electoral registers were drawn up, and one cannot help but wonder at the effect of expensive ID cards if they are demanded before voters can cast ballots.

Buying off a Landslide

This article is from this week's Tribune in London, where I try to dissect the mysteries of Mid-Terms for British readers.

Well Done Bernie Sanders!

Joe Kennedy supposedly told his son "Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide." Karl Rove and the Republicans seem to have bought off the prospect of a Democratic landslide with their disciplined and well-financed campaigns to drive away voters, but such is the strength of public feeling against them that they could not buy off an actual defeat.

Only one third of the Senate was up for election, as opposed to the entire House of Representatives, hence the Democratic victory in the latter. It is interesting that while TV and agency commentators gloried in the victory of pro-war Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman who had lost the Democratic nomination in the primaries to anti-war Ned Lamont, they scarcely mentioned Bernie Sanders (once interviewed for Tribune), an avowed Socialist, who won the Senate seat for Vermont from the Republicans with a comfortable majority-a landslide in fact.


Lieberman's victory depended on Republicans voting for him, and more of them did than Democratic supporters. Interestingly, in the House seats in Connecticut, there were Democrat gains in the slipstream of the Lamont campaign. Also among the surprise gains was the first Muslim in the US Congress Democrat Keith Ellison who won a House seat from Minnesota.

In the House contests, it was the unctuous piety and "social conservatism" of the Republicans that did for them. A whole slew of incumbents lost because of domestic disputes, mistresses, gay lovers and dipping the till, which, while normal behaviour for many Americans, was hardly consonant with the Republicans' vigorous profession of evangelical pulpit values. The sleaze factor underlay the Iraq war to lose many of the seats.

Almost as shocking was the loss of Rhode Island moderate Republican Lincoln Chafee, who was to the Left of many Southern Democrats on many issues. He had for example opposed the confirmation of John Bolton as UN Ambassador. But he was thrown out by a surprisingly large margin because he was in George W. Bush's party. Indeed canny Republican candidates had ducked and dodged to avoid a supportive campaigning visit from the President.

The election also accentuated the regional divide that was apparent in 2004. Democrat gains were mostly in the East and West Coasts, and on the band along the Canadian border leading to the striking divide that led some facetious souls such as myself to call for secession from the Confederacy and unification with the Dominion to the North.

The removal of moderate North Eastern Republicans from places like Vermont and Rhode Island, concentrate the party of Lincoln to its new and ahistorical core in the old Confederacy. It will be interesting to see whether this makes it more or less radically conservative. Rick Santorum, the Senator for Pennsylvania was resoundingly defeated. He was third ranking Republican, despite having views that would have put him with the lunatic fringe anywhere else in the world.

Will Republican strategists learn the lesson from their defeat and shake off their intense conservative radicalism, or will their retreat to the redoubts of the Confederacy cement them as the successors of the Ku Klux Klan, a more sophisticated version of the Old Southern Democrats?

Often forgotten, but crucial to frustrating the Republican consolidation of power are the state and local elections that were on the same ballots. These returned hugely important states such as Massachusetts, Ohio, New York, Arkansas, Colorado and Maryland to Democrat control. In the US, it is the states that control the voting district boundaries, and the voting regulations, so we can expect some reciprocation from new Democratic incumbents to dismantle former gerrymandering practices, and cast down the voter suppression regulations passed by Republican governments, which would help to enhance a Democratic majority in the next elections.


By a happy demographic accident, the new control of the House means that the all-powerful Committee Chairmanships, which go on seniority, will go to a generation of Democrats that precedes the Clintonian New Democrats. They are mostly liberals of the tail end of the FDR generation and onwards, epitomized by the new Speaker of the House (and first woman in the job) Nancy Pelosi, who promised a radical, and designedly vote catching domestic legislative agenda that would begin immediately, and which would challenge the Senate and the White House to risk severe further losses in the future if they disagreed.

The Democratic victory is enough to put the brakes on the White House war chariot – if not enough to stop it in its tracks. Theoretically, the new majority could simply refuse to pay for the Iraq war-but that is extremely unlikely to happen since so many of them voted for it. The best we can hope for perhaps is closer scrutiny of what the White House and Pentagon have been doing, remarkably unchallenged by Congress, which should certainly call some of the dogs of war back to their kennels.

As Henry Cabot Lodge said of the United Nations when it was founded, the election results will not take the US to Heaven, but it will certainly reduce the chances of going to Hell, both for Americans, and for others across the globe who were in the sights of the White House's aggressive overseas agenda.

Bolton's last meal? We hope!

It would also be useful to get the deja vue all over again syndrome by checking on Bolton's activities back in 1992
and for more details on Shiner look at the assiduous work of Matthew Lee at Inner City Press

Bush Crony to Head UN's Food Program
Ian Williams
The Nation 8 November

As Americans voted Tuesday in what may well be a referendum on Bush Administration policies at home and abroad, US Ambassador John Bolton once again breached UN protocol in New York, this time by prematurely announcing the appointment of former Washington Times editor Josette Shiner to head the World Food Program. Shiner, currently under secretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs, is tasked with pushing American business interests abroad. (A longtime member of Washington Times owner Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, Shiner left the paper in 1997 and the Church in 1996.)
The Bush Administration's practice of favoring of ideological and dynastic loyalty over competence was responsible for FEMA's abysmal performance during Hurricane Katrina; with Shiner's appointment, it may well contribute to similar debacles worldwide. Shiner's main qualification for the Bush appointment was the many years she spent insuring that Moon's Washington Times flew the flag for the most atavistic brands of conservatism in the nation's capital. The other main candidate for the position was another American, the experienced and competent Tony Banbury, head of WFP in Asia.
Americans have long regarded the World Food Program as their own--and with some justification. It was conceptualized by the Eisenhower Administration in 1960 and launched in 1962 as a means of recycling American agricultural surpluses, and because the Kennedy Administration was at loggerheads with Dr. Binay Ranjan Sen, then director of the Food and Agricultural Organization.
The WFP has done some good work, regardless of the marred altruism of its origins, but Oxfam and other critics have raised serious questions about the economic effects on local agricultural viability of throwing free subsidized US food surpluses into countries. Those questions are likely to remain unanswered as Shiner advances the interests of US agribusiness.
Technically, the UN Secretary General makes all these appointments, but until recently, the international body always appointed whomever the US President wanted. Another Bush appointee, Christopher Burnham, who is UN under secretary general for management, overlooked the oath that an international civil servant such as himself takes on appointment to give up national loyalties and actually thanked Bush for his appointment in 2004. "I came here at the request of the White House....My primary loyalty is to the United States of America," Burnham told the Washington Post.
As conservatives in Congress have complained about managerial reforms at the UN, the one issue on which they stay resolutely silent is the patronage system by which the five permanent members of the UN Security Council control the UN's senior positions, setting the customary low standards for all other countries seeking nepotistic appointments for their nationals. Britain and France have generally named technically competent and often, for them, disappointingly independent people for the positions. But the United States has largely considered UN posts to be an extension of the presidential spoils system. These positions are not subject to senatorial confirmation, so the White House can appoint anyone it likes.
Last year, somewhat belatedly--and only after confirming an American, Bush nominee and former US Secretary for Agriculture Ann Veneman, as the head of UNICEF--Kofi Annan had a burst of independence. Annan and his deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, announced that merit and competence would be the measure for candidates for future high office, in place of the traditional "permanent five" nominations for his high-ranking officials. He replaced the British under secretary general for political affairs with a Nigerian, Ibrahim Gambari in a gesture greeted with a little cynicism by African diplomats who had waited nine years for their time in the sun.
The Shiner appointment is an abrupt reversal of this short-lived independence. It is a political disaster in its implications for the United Nations and reform, although it does us the favor of revealing the hypocrisy of John Bolton's earlier insistence that every Annan nominee should be fired as soon as his term finishes at the end of 2006. Bolton has made it plain that such limits do not apply to the Shiner appointment.
With an election that may break the Republican lock on the US government, his own tenure ending and John Bolton's unrenewable term as ambassador about to finish, it is intriguing why Annan should bow to American pressure.
He has always realized the importance of trying to keep Washington engaged in the United Nations for the organization to function, but on the face of it, if ever there was a propitious time for a declaration of independence, this was it.
In a recent interview with The Nation, Annan addressed the issue of appointments. "It is the new Secretary General's responsibility. He's the one who will have to put together his team and the people he has to work with. Obviously in doing that I am sure he will consult member states where it is necessary, but the appointment of senior staff should be the responsibility of the Secretary General without interference. He is the one who will determine whether everyone leaves or he keeps some of them for continuity while he's pressing for change." Technically the WFP job is filled by the Secretary General after consulting FAO director Jacques Diouf, but the Secretary General has the trump card.
Annan did consult his successor, Ban Ki-moon, about the Shiner appointment, who seems to have approved, but Annan's people insist that this was his own decision, which UN staff say was made in the face of strong administration pressure. One only hopes that there was some unwritten trade-off with the White House to make it worthwhile for the organization.
The issue goes beyond Shiner's competence. Washington is pushing for a US general to take over peacekeeping operations, which would destroy the political credibility of UN peacekeeping as a neutral force. Ban may use the Shiner appointment to fend off American demands--or this appointment could be a precursor of many more successful conservative infiltrations into the world body.

No Entry to Heaven - But Bar the Gate to Hell

The prospect of breaking the Republican stranglehold on American government is heartening but we should bear in mind what Henry Cabot Lodge said about the UN in its early days. With the Democrats the way they are, we may block the road to Hell-but there are a lot of dead ends on the way to Heaven!



A Congress with a softer touch
Asia Times November 8
By Ian Williams

NEW YORK - The latest Gallup Poll suggests that the Democrats will take control of the US House of Representatives on Tuesday, and possibly even the Senate. The non-partisan Cook report suggests 30 to 36 Democratic gains in the House, four to seven in the Senate and six to eight governorships.

But there is a lot of small print attached to the prognosis, and even more to prognostication about its effects on the world.

Among the millions of voters, many will be deterred. The Republican Party not only has a finely honed machine for getting out what it considers its own natural voters, stock-owing, sport-utility-vehicle-driving, gun-owning white Christians who shop at Wal-Mart, it also has a viciously effective machine for driving away potential Democratic voters, Latins (except Cubans in Florida) and blacks, and finding ways to prevent them from voting.

The mechanics of voter suppression, purging voter rolls, moving and under-equipping opposition-area polling booths, challenging voters from the wrong racial group and insisting on identification despite court orders, make US democracy seem very fragile. There are times when one wonders whether victory should be handed to the side with the most money, or the most lawyers.

Although it would be a foolhardy Democrat who started the victory party before the last vote was tabulated, the party's success in the elections would be even more of an achievement in the face of Republican tactics that, to be fair, are refined versions of what the old southern Democrats practiced for more than a century.

Balancing the dubious gains of the impending execution of Saddam Hussein are the oozing mudslides of scandal over the Republican Party, both financial and sexual, finalized this weekend when Ted Haggard, the former president of the evangelicals who had called frequently and loudly for anti-gay legislation, was outed as a frequenter of a male prostitute. This may inhibit the enthusiasm of the normally enthusiastic evangelicals for voting. But what may matter is who does the counting, not who does the voting.

So what will change? It will not only be the federal legislature that is changing hands. The signs are that the Democrats could gain control of many state capitols. As many as six to eight governorships could go to the Democrats, which could be deeply significant in the long run.

It has been Republican local government that has gerrymandered congressional seats and practiced voter suppression. The question is whether the loose and fissiparous Democrats have the spine and the discipline to emulate what their predecessors did in office, to re-district Republican seats out of existence and practice voter encouragement to cement their power.

Nationally (and thus internationally), will there be a change in foreign policy as a result of the change in the complexion of Congress? The answer has to be that there will probably not be nearly as much change as many people hope.

First, White House sources are busily leaking that, in between claiming complete confidence that they will maintain control, they will fight "to the death" any attempt by mere elected legislators to frustrate presidential will. Indeed, even with his own party in control, President George W Bush has unconstitutionally usurped authority to declare, even as he signs a bill, that he will not implement it.

The Senate, which may well stay in nominal Republican hands, has recently been much saner than its Republican majority would suggest - and it is the Senate that has more power over foreign affairs, on treaty ratification, confirming ambassadorial appointments and so on. Even with a nominal Republican majority, it has not yet confirmed John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, for example.

The more reality-challenged Republicans have tended to be in the House, and may well lose there. But sadly, on foreign affairs, their Democratic opponents have often gone along with xenophobia. On the key issue of the Iraq war, there is certainly unlikely to be a majority for an immediate withdrawal. The House, both sides, tends to do what the pro-Israel lobby wants, up to a point.

The clear test will be whether that point marks a spot before military action is taken against Iran, or even North Korea. Most Democrats know that the voters who put them into power would not be happy with this, so it may well be that the chances of war are reduced.

Much of the difference will be in degrees rather than acute changes of direction. The Democrats will be less likely to think that China trade is necessarily good for their voters, but that did not stop Bill Clinton being a major proponent of free trade. With an ear to Israel, the Democrats have not always had much time for the United Nations, but even if their views are often every bit as America-first as their rivals, they do tend to be more aware that the rest of the world does not always share that position and see that water-boarding, whether on a national or personal level, is not always the best way to win people or countries around.

That may dampen some of the wilder plans of the White House, but it is difficult to see any striking initiatives coming from Congress, and even more difficult to see them succeeding.

However, even dampening wilder plans will be a major step forward, and it will be interesting to see the dynamics of the relationships within the administration if Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were to use the leverage of Congress to get her allegedly more pragmatic way in the cabinet. Will tension with Iran and North Korea be relaxed? Possibly. But once again, it will not be a major change in policy, more a change of emphasis, with the interventionists in the White House continually pushing to get their way and create facts that would demand Democrat support.

In the end, as Franklin D Roosevelt showed in action and Bill Clinton showed in inaction, the big difference is what a determined president in the White House can push through. Whatever one thinks of the effect or the intent, Bush, scorned and despised by many, has introduced tremendous and unprecedented changes in US government and society. Two more years could still see a lot of changes, but perhaps fewer if his congressional base is captured.


(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication