Obama's Faith and Mine

I haven't been blogging here much since I got on Facebook and Twitter. Sorry.

But I'm in a dialogue with the Globe and Mail's excellent columnist Doug Saunders about — of all things — religion. It seems to me his notion of religion is determined by contact with mainly theologically illiterate persons. He thinks religious journalists shouldn't be allowed to write about religion because they are obedient to a particular religious institution. I said that people made the same objections to voting for John Kennedy because he was a Catholic; he was supposedly unable to disobey priests.

I was brought up a fundamentalist Christian, but left that church at age 18, with a lot of unpleasant drama. I had actually been brought up to obey unthinkingly, so when I became independent, I had no sense of direction of my own and I couldn't say no to anyone. I couldn't take responsibility for my own wishes and opinions. Religion can be very destructive; I realize that more than most people do. It took me a long time to find my way.

I am certainly not atypical in my Anglican church. In fact, many of us had a series of meetings a couple of years ago to talk about whether we all even believed in God. Lots of (maybe the majority) do not. But they get something out of the church anyhow and know that they belong there as much as anyone else.

As for myself, I am quite sure that any beliefs I am able to formulate about the nature of ultimate reality are completely childish. My mind, and every other human mind, is incapable of comprehending the way in which everything in the universe is causally connected to everything else. We certainly wouldn't be able to comprehend any grand design that would impose, for example, suffering today as a necessary preparatory phase in divine plans for something that is to happen a thousand years in the future.

In his wonderful book, Beyond Belief, Robert Bellah said that the central thing about religion is not the beliefs it promotes, but faith. I don't know what to believe and he has given up all his beliefs about religion, while remaining absolutely devout. Belief is acceptance of a particular proposition about facts. Faith has no content. It is just trust -- a confidence that, even if we cannot understand what is going on, all is actually well.

And I have faith. If I didn't I wouldn't feel so grateful all the time. A dozen times a day I say “Thank you, God.” That's all I know, and I'm grateful for it.

As for American presidents, I don't particularly want to criticize ones whose beliefs are so conspicuously simplistic, but I can say that Obama's strike me as very wise. Here is an article I discovered a year or so ago when someone interviewed him in 2004 about his faith.
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Obama's Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani
Tuesday November 11, 2008

At 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, 2004, when I was the religion reporter (I am now its religion columnist) at the Chicago Sun-Times, I met then-State Sen. Barack Obama at Café Baci, a small coffee joint at 330 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, to interview him exclusively about his spirituality. Our conversation took place a few days after he'd clinched the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat that he eventually won. We spoke for more than an hour. He came alone. He answered everything I asked without notes or hesitation. The profile of Obama that grew from the interview at Cafe Baci became the first in a series in the Sun-Times called "The God Factor," that eventually became my first book, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People (FSG, March 2006.) Because of the staggering interest in now President-Elect Obama's faith and spiritual predilections, I thought it might be helpful to share that interivew, uncut and in its entirety, here.
--Cathleen Falsani

Interview with State Sen. Barack Obama
3:30 p.m., Saturday March 27
Café Baci, 330 S. Michigan Avenue

Me: decaf
He: alone, on time, grabs a Naked juice protein shake

FALSANI:
What do you believe?

OBAMA:
I am a Christian.

So, I have a deep faith. So I draw from the Christian faith.

On the other hand, I was born in Hawaii where obviously there are a lot of Eastern influences.

I lived in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, between the ages of six and 10.

My father was from Kenya, and although he was probably most accurately labeled an agnostic, his father was Muslim.

And I'd say, probably, intellectually I've drawn as much from Judaism as any other faith.

(A patron stops and says, "Congratulations," shakes his hand. "Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you.")

So, I'm rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived.

And so, part of my project in life was probably to spend the first 40 years of my life figuring out what I did believe - I'm 42 now - and it's not that I had it all completely worked out, but I'm spending a lot of time now trying to apply what I believe and trying to live up to those values.

FALSANI:
Have you always been a Christian?

OBAMA:
I was raised more by my mother and my mother was Christian.

FALSANI:
Any particular flavor?

OBAMA:
No.

My grandparents who were from small towns in Kansas. My grandmother was Methodist. My grandfather was Baptist. This was at a time when I think the Methodists felt slightly superior to the Baptists. And by the time I was born, they were, I think, my grandparents had joined a Universalist church.

So, my mother, who I think had as much influence on my values as anybody, was not someone who wore her religion on her sleeve. We'd go to church for Easter. She wasn't a church lady.

As I said, we moved to Indonesia. She remarried an Indonesian who wasn't particularly, he wasn't a practicing Muslim. I went to a Catholic school in a Muslim country. So I was studying the Bible and catechisms by day, and at night you'd hear the prayer call.

So I don't think as a child we were, or I had a structured religious education. But my mother was deeply spiritual person, and would spend a lot of time talking about values and give me books about the world's religions, and talk to me about them. And I think always, her view always was that underlying these religions were a common set of beliefs about how you treat other people and how you aspire to act, not just for yourself but also for the greater good.

And, so that, I think, was what I carried with me through college. I probably didn't get started getting active in church activities until I moved to Chicago.

The way I came to Chicago in 1985 was that I was interested in community organizing and I was inspired by the Civil Rights movement. And the idea that ordinary people could do extraordinary things. And there was a group of churches out on the South Side of Chicago that had come together to form an organization to try to deal with the devastation of steel plants that had closed. And didn't have much money, but felt that if they formed an organization and hired somebody to organize them to work on issues that affected their community, that it would strengthen the church and also strengthen the community.

So they hired me, for $13,000 a year. The princely sum. And I drove out here and I didn't know anybody and started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on issues like creating job training programs, or afterschool programs for youth, or making sure that city services were fairly allocated to underserved communites.

This would be in Roseland, West Pullman, Altgeld Gardens, far South Side working class and lower income communities.

And it was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual view of religion deepened because I'd be spending an enormous amount of time with church ladies, sort of surrogate mothers and fathers and everybody I was working with was 50 or 55 or 60, and here I was a 23-year-old kid running around.

I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church and it's importance in the community.

And the power of that culture to give people strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people courage against great odds. And it moved me deeply.

So that, one of the churches I met, or one of the churches that I became involved in was Trinity United Church of Christ. And the pastor there, Jeremiah Wright, became a good friend. So I joined that church and committed myself to Christ in that church.

FALSANI:
Did you actually go up for an altar call?

OBAMA:
Yes. Absolutely.

It was a daytime service, during a daytime service. And it was a powerful moment. Because, it was powerful for me because it not only confirmed my faith, it not only gave shape to my faith, but I think, also, allowed me to connect the work I had been pursuing with my faith.

FALSANI:
How long ago?

OBAMA:
16, 17 years ago. 1987 or 88

FALSANI:
So you got yourself born again?

OBAMA:
Yeah, although I don't, I retain from my childhood and my experiences growing up a suspicion of dogma. And I'm not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I've got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others.

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt. I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

I think that, particularly as somebody who's now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there's an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

FALSANI
Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA:
Yep. Every week. 11 oclock service.

Ever been there? Good service.

I actually wrote a book called Dreams from My Father, it's kind of a meditation on race. There's a whole chapter on the church in that, and my first visits to Trinity.

FALSANI:
Do you pray often?

OBAMA:
Uh, yeah, I guess I do.

Its' not formal, me getting on my knees. I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. I think throughout the day, I'm constantly asking myself questions about what I'm doing, why am I doing it.

One of the interesting things about being in public life is there are constantly these pressures being placed on you from different sides. To be effective, you have to be able to listen to a variety of points of view, synthesize viewpoints. You also have to know when to be just a strong advocate, and push back against certain people or views that you think aren't right or don't serve your constituents.

And so, the biggest challenge, I think, is always maintaining your moral compass. Those are the conversations I'm having internally. I'm measuring my actions against that inner voice that for me at least is audible, is active, it tells me where I think I'm on track and where I think I'm off track.

It's interesting particularly now after this election, comes with it a lot of celebrity. And I always think of politics as having two sides. There's a vanity aspect to politics, and then there's a substantive part of politics. Now you need some sizzle with the steak to be effective, but I think it's easy to get swept up in the vanity side of it, the desire to be liked and recognized and important. It's important for me throughout the day to measure and to take stock and to say, now, am I doing this because I think it's advantageous to me politically, or because I think it's the right thing to do? Am I doing this to get my name in the papers or am I doing this because it's necessary to accomplish my motives.

FALSANI:
Checking for altruism?

OBAMA:
Yeah. I mean, something like it.

Looking for, ... It's interesting, the most powerful political moments for me come when I feel like my actions are aligned with a certain truth. I can feel it. When I'm talking to a group and I'm saying something truthful, I can feel a power that comes out of those statements that is different than when I'm just being glib or clever.

FALSANI:
What's that power? Is it the holy spirit? God?

OBAMA:
Well, I think it's the power of the recognition of God, or the recognition of a larger truth that is being shared between me and an audience.

That's something you learn watching ministers, quite a bit. What they call the Holy Spirit. They want the Holy Spirit to come down before they're preaching, right? Not to try to intellectualize it but what I see is there are moments that happen within a sermon where the minister gets out of his ego and is speaking from a deeper source. And it's powerful.

There are also times when you can see the ego getting in the way. Where the minister is performing and clearly straining for applause or an Amen. And those are distinct moments. I think those former moments are sacred.

FALSANI:
Who's Jesus to you?

(He laughs nervously)

OBAMA:
Right.

Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.

And he's also a wonderful teacher. I think it's important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

FALSANI:
Is Jesus someone who you feel you have a regular connection with now, a personal connection with in your life?

OBAMA:
Yeah. Yes. I think some of the things I talked about earlier are addressed through, are channeled through my Christian faith and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

FALSANI:
Have you read the bible?

OBAMA:
Absolutely.

I read it not as regularly as I would like. These days I don't have much time for reading or reflection, period.

FALSANI:
Do you try to take some time for whatever, meditation prayer reading?

OBAMA:
I'll be honest with you, I used to all the time, in a fairly disciplined way. But during the course of this campaign, I don't. And I probably need to and would like to, but that's where that internal monologue, or dialogue I think supplants my opportunity to read and reflect in a structured way these days.

It's much more sort of as I'm going through the day trying to take stock and take a moment here and a moment there to take stock, why am I here, how does this connect with a larger sense of purpose.

FALSANI:
Do you have people in your life that you look to for guidance?

OBAMA:
Well, my pastor [Jeremiah Wright] is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for.

I have a number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely.

FALSANI:
Those two will keep you on your toes.

OBAMA:
And theyr'e good friends. Because both of them are in the public eye, there are ways we can all reflect on what's happening to each of us in ways that are useful.

I think they can help me, they can appreciate certain specific challenges that I go through as a public figure.

FALSANI:
Jack Ryan [Obama's Republican opponent in the U.S. Senate race at the time] said talking about your faith is frought with peril for a public figure.

OBAMA:
Which is why you generally will not see me spending a lot of time talking about it on the stump.

Alongside my own deep personal faith, I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion. I am a big believer in the separation of church and state. I am a big believer in our constitutional structure. I mean, I'm a law professor at the University of Chicago teaching constitutional law. I am a great admirer of our founding charter, and its resolve to prevent theocracies from forming, and its resolve to prevent disruptive strains of fundamentalism from taking root ion this country.

As I said before, in my own public policy, I'm very suspicious of religious certainty expressing itself in politics.

Now, that's different form a belief that values have to inform our public policy. I think it's perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values tha tinform my politics that are appropriate to talk about.

A standard line in my stump speech during this campaign is that my politics are informed by a belief that we're all connected. That if there's a child on the South Side of Chicago that can't read, that makes a difference in my life even if it's not my own child. If there's a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that's struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it's not my grandparent. And if there's an Arab American family that's being rounded up by John Ashcroft without the benefit of due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

I can give religious expression to that. I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper, we are all children of God. Or I can express it in secular terms. But the basic premise remains the same. I think sometimes Democrats have made the mistake of shying away from a conversation about values for fear that they sacrifice the important value of tolerance. And I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive.

FALSANI:
Do you think it's wrong for people to want to know about a civic leader's spirituality?

OBAMA:
I don't' think it's wrong. I think that political leaders are subject to all sorts of vetting by the public, and this can be a component of that.

I think that I am disturbed by, let me put it this way: I think there is an enormous danger on the part of public figures to rationalize or justify their actions by claiming God's mandate.

I think there is this tendency that I don't think is healthy for public figures to wear religion on their sleeve as a means to insulate themselves from criticism, or dialogue with people who disagree with them.

FALSANI:
The conversation stopper, when you say you're a Christian and leave it at that.

OBAMA:
Where do you move forward with that?

This is something that I'm sure I'd have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There's the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven't embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they're going to hell.

FALSANI:
You don't believe that?

OBAMA:
I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.

I can't imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.

That's just not part of my religious makeup.

Part of the reason I think it's always difficult for public figures to talk about this is that the nature of politics is that you want to have everybody like you and project the best possible traits onto you. Oftentimes that's by being as vague as possible, or appealing to the lowest commong denominators. The more specific and detailed you are on issues as personal and fundamental as your faith, the more potentially dangerous it is.

FALSANI:
Do you ever have people who know you're a Christian question a particular stance you take on an issue, how can you be a Christian and ...

OBAMA:
Like the right to choose.

I haven't been challenged in those direct ways. And to that extent, I give the public a lot of credit. I'm always stuck by how much common sense the American people have. They get confused sometimes, watch FoxNews or listen to talk radio. That's dangerous sometimes. But generally, Americans are tolerant and I think recognize that faith is a personal thing, and they may feel very strongly about an issue like abortion or gay marriage, but if they discuss it with me as an elected official they will discuss it with me in those terms and not, say, as 'you call yourself a Christian.' I cannot recall that ever happening.

FALSANI:
Do you get questions about your faith?

OBAMA:
Obviously as an African American politician rooted in the African American community, I spend a lot of time in the black church. I have no qualms in those settings in participating fully in those services and celebrating my God in that wonderful community that is the black church.

(he pauses)
But I also try to be . . . Rarely in those settings do people come up to me and say, what are your beliefs. They are going to presume, and rightly so. Although they may presume a set of doctrines that I subscribe to that I don't necessarily subscribe to.

But I don't think that's unique to me. I think that each of us when we walk into our church or mosque or synagogue are interpreting that experience in different ways, are reading scriptures in different ways and are arriving at our own understanding at different ways and in different phases.

I don't know a healthy congregation or an effective minister who doesn't recognize that.

If all it took was someone proclaiming I believe Jesus Christ and that he died for my sins, and that was all there was to it, people wouldn't have to keep coming to church, would they.

FALSANI:
Do you believe in heaven?

OBAMA:
Do I believe in the harps and clouds and wings?

FALSANI:
A place spiritually you go to after you die?

OBAMA:
What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded. I don't presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, the aligning myself to my faith and my values is a good thing.

When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I've been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they're kind people and that they're honest people, and they're curious people, that's a little piece of heaven.

FALSANI:
Do you believe in sin?

OBAMA:
Yes.

FALSANI:
What is sin?

OBAMA:
Being out of alignment with my values.

FALSANI:
What happens if you have sin in your life?

OBAMA:
I think it's the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I'm true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I'm not true to it, it's its own punishment.

FALSANI:
Where do you find spiritual inspiration? Music, nature, literature, people, a conduit you plug into?

OBAMA:
There are so many.

Nothing is more powerful than the black church experience. A good choir and a good sermon in the black church, it's pretty hard not to be move and be transported.

I can be transported by watching a good performance of Hamlet, or reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, or listening to Miles Davis.

FALSANI:
Is there something that you go back to as a touchstone, a book, a particular piece of music, a place ...

OBAMA:
As I said before, in my own sort of mental library, the Civil Rights movement has a powerful hold on me. It's a point in time where I think heaven and earth meet. Because it's a moment in which a collective faith transforms everything. So when I read Gandhi or I read King or I read certain passages of Abraham Lincoln and I think about those times where people's values are tested, I think those inspire me.

FALSANI:
What are you doing when you feel the most centered, the most aligned spiritually?

OBAMA:
I think I already described it. It's when I'm being true to myself. And that can happen in me making a speech or it can happen in me playing with my kids, or it can happen in a small interaction with a security guard in a building when I'm recognizing them and exchanging a good word.

FALSANI:
Is there someone you would look to as an example of how not to do it?

OBAMA:
Bin Laden.

(grins broadly)

FALSANI:
... An example of a role model, who combined everything you said you want to do in your life, and your faith?

OBAMA:
I think Gandhi is a great example of a profoundly spiritual man who acted and risked everything on behalf of those values but never slipped into intolerance or dogma. He seemed to always maintain an air of doubt about him.

I think Dr. King, and Lincoln. Those three are good examples for me of people who applied their faith to a larger canvas without allowing that faith to metasticize into something that is hurtful.

FALSANI:
Can we go back to that morning service in 1987 or 88 -- when you have a moment that you can go back to that as an epiphany...

OBAMA:
It wasn't an epiphany.

It was much more of a gradual process for me. I know there are some people who fall out. Which is wonderful. God bless them. For me it was probably because there is a certain self-consciousness that I possess as somebody with probably too much book learning, and also a very polyglot background.

FALSANI:
It wasn't like a moment where you finally got it? It was a symbol of that decision?

OBAMA:
Exactly. I think it was just a moment to certify or publicly affirm a growing faith in me.

-END-

Cathleen Falsani is author of Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace.
posted by Steve Waldman @ 1:30pm

Waiting to Forgive

My friend Joy Kogawa just phoned me and rehearsed to me a speech that she’s supposed to give in a few weeks. It’s about the memoir she is writing, Gently to Nagasaki, and it offers a spiritually moving glimpse of healing.

Joy’s topic is reconciliation and forgiveness. She contrasts two attitudes toward the bombing of Hiroshima: self-justification and remorse. Most Americans took – probably still take – the view that the bombing was justifiable, reasoning that it ended the war rapidly and spared many American soldiers. I remember feeling elated when I read about the bombing. It was only much later that I was ashamed. Is there any such thing as a “just war”? While it goes on, the fighters always can justify what they are doing. However, the only moral clarity comes from acknowledging that it is also — or perhaps never anything except — evil.

Joy doesn’t take sides. She describes the horror of the American bombings, but also the horror of Japan’s atrocities, especially the “rape” of Nanking. She speaks of the Nazis and the Turks as well: two societies that perpetrated genocide, but then took different stances toward their own actions.

The Germans made it a crime to deny the holocaust. The Japanese, on the other hand, continue to deny what they did. So do the Turks, who refuse to let the Armenians apply the term “genocide” to the slaughter of their kin, and the Americans, who officially claim that Hiroshima and even Nagasaki were justifiable responses toward their enemies.

I have forgiven Germans because they have acknowledged their own wrong-doing. But when I deal with Turks, Japanese, and even many of my own American kin, I sense that reconciliation is incomplete. I cannot restore trust by an act of will. Forgiveness is impossible in the absence of their apology.

That is my own shortcoming. I should be able to forgive Hitler himself by saying, as Christ did on the cross, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” But my spirituality is under-developed. It’s still a work-in-progress, and I don’t think I’ll ever attain such magnanimity.

I know that relationships with friends are constrained. Issues remain unforgiven or unacknowledged. There may be a superficial politeness but no trust or affection.

These days I am particularly aware of my damaged friendships with a Sri Lankan family of five who came to Canada as refugees 26 ago. They became “my” family, for they came to live in my home and stayed, in various combinations, for six years. It became clear that the father of the family had brought the war with him and was fighting it from Canada, probably even using resources of mine. My own motivation had been to protect the vulnerable and give victims a new start in a new land. People who had become dear to me were continuing participants in a war that would claim 70,000 lives, and I did not know what to do about it.

I came to understand how denial works. The wife and children in my Tamil family refrained from confronting their father, refrained even from admitting to themselves what consequences resulted from his activities as a Tiger leader.

I even managed to repress the awareness myself for several years. I knew but did not mention what he was doing. Only ten years or so ago did I pull myself up morally and invite the whole family to dinner to discuss this terrible reality. The husband, wife, and one son came. The other two children declined. The father proudly stated that he would appreciate it if both his grown sons would go to fight for the Tigers in Sri Lanka.

The wife/mother, on the other hand, insisted that her husband and I were on the same side somehow. It was impossible for her to believe otherwise, for she respected my commitment to peace, while also trying to hold her family together. Only once did her denial crumble; it happened when she saw her sister-in-law on TV, a victim of the suicide bombing of the central bank in Colombo. For a day she stayed in her room, angry, but then she resumed her pretense that there was no conflict in her family.

My attempt to work through the dispute failed and the cool politeness between us hardened. I rarely saw the children, who had grown up and moved away. The mother and I grew distant. She no longer phoned, nor did we invite each other to social functions. They all knew that I despised the warrior-father. As a fervent spokesman for the Tigers in Canada, he always justified what he did as “serving my people.”

Only once did he show any insight into his motives. A couple of years ago he brought a friend of his to see me — a spiritually-oriented man who had written a book about Gandhi and other pacifist religious leaders. My Tiger friend mentioned an article I had published in Peace Magazine — an interview with a Christian war correspondent, Chris Hedges.

The impressive thing about Hedges was that he acknowledged his own craving for the excitement of warfare. He had been in every ongoing war during the 13 years of his work for the New York Times, and he titled his remarkable book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. People fighting in a war cannot doubt the significance of what is going on around them, he said. Life seems full and intense; even the colors seem brighter because you know that you may die at any instant. Private life as a civilian may be hum-drum and ambivalent, but in a war everyone has to take sides. Even the journalists take one side or the other and slant their reporting to make “their” side look better than the enemy. It is inevitable. You cannot talk people out of that mind-set while they are actually in a war. People on both sides feel the same aliveness, and both sides feel sure that they are morally justified in whatever horrors they perpetrate. Honestly admitting his motives, Hedges had to promise himself that he would stop going to war. Yet he was missing it.

My Tiger friend reminded me of this interview and said that it had described himself perfectly. He too was a Chris Hedges.

I barely replied. His confession was apparently not an apology. Of course he owed me an apology for having made me, a full-time peace activist, complicit in his war. But he owed huge apologies to the victims of his war — the people blown up by suicide bombers, the children abducted and forced to become soldiers, even the Tamils in Canada who were forced to pay “taxes” to buy the weapons that kept the war going.

But his acknowledgment was no apology, and I had no absolution to offer. He was like a brother to me, but a brother whom I despised for the immense harm he was doing. Despising him was not a spiritual accomplishment on my part; I wish I could forgive without his apology but that is a state of mind that I cannot summon up, even in my imagination. What would it be like for a peace activist to love Hitler? For Christ to love the people who crucified him? How would I behave if I could do that? I am only partly a Christian and certainly am not Christ-like, but I try to be like Gandhi, and I cannot even imagine what his inner experience was like. But I know he always confronted evil instead of acquiescing to it, as I had eventually done.

So now the war is over. The newspapers say it is time for reconciliation. They call upon the government of Sri Lanka to be generous toward the Tamils, and insofar as the president does so, it is by distinguishing sharply between Tamils and Tigers. In reality, almost all Tamils went along with the Tigers, whether they believed in the cause or not, just as the mother and children in my own Tamil family went along with their Tiger. Perhaps they came to believe in him — they never said.

Reconciliation now? Why not earlier? I am writing this after the war. While it was going on, I kept quiet. A producer for the CBC phoned a few weeks ago, asking me to go on The Current and talk about the Tigers. I refused. Yet I am writing this self-revelation now. Why so? During a war, people consider it futile to attempt to stop the animosity. They are right. Wars, once underway, are not terminable by soft words that would “turn away wrath” in other circumstances. Wars underway, not being terminable, have to be fought to the end, until one side is crushed. I just wanted them to hurry the crushing up, bringing the whole thing to a close. But I did not like to say so on the radio.

Now there is a potential for reconciliation that did not exist a month ago, but according to journalists in Sri Lanka, the mutual hatred is more intense than ever before. I don’t think they want reconciliation. Peace is not what they want, but victory – and the hope for victory is not easily abandoned. Usually it subsides gradually, leaving behind a permanent soreness, a hardness of soul.

Or there may be genuine reconciliation. In a world where no one is Christ-like, the only reconciliation that is possible begins, as the Germans did, with the full acknowledgment of their own evil actions. And some of the Germans’ enemies also apologized. (I remember Giff Gifford, for example — the Canadian peace activist who founded Veterans Against Nuclear Arms — who wept publicly when acknowledging having flown in a plane that fire-bombed Dresden.) Reconciliation involves abandoning the proof that your side was right and the other side was wrong -- even if they were.

What I heard this week was a great outpouring of pity for the displaced Tamils being held in tent cities. They are certainly the Sri Lankans suffering most at the moment, but this is not a balancing exercise, where the harm done to either side can “compensate“ for – and hence justify — the evil they have done to the other. Both sides have perpetrated atrocities. The Tigers can never collect enough instances of their own suffering to exculpate their violence. Sorry, but no one who portrays them simply as victims is being truthful. Now is the time to come clean.

I was wrong — terribly wrong — to rejoice when I heard, at age thirteen, that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Forty-odd years later I encountered one of the scarred victims of that bombing at a million-person march in New York City, and we both embraced and wept.

Forty years is too long. Reconciliation begins with forgiveness, and forgiveness must be sought. I want to forgive my Tamil friends. But all I can do is wait.

Defending Democracy Again

Why does democracy need to be defended all the time? And why are the critics of democracy mainly old lefties? It is embarrassing to have to keep justifying democracy when my co-defenders are right-wingers with whom I have very little in common. It is my own friends and colleagues who continue challenging the connection between democracy and peace. Why?

Please tell me, dear friends, why you are predisposed to criticize democracies. What is there about it that irritates you so? To me, there is no higher project than the support of political freedom around the world. I wonder how anyone could possibly wish for anything less than that.

The current flap involves a question from a Science for Peace friend who asks:

“Is the US a democracy? It has made war on quite a number of nations in my lifetime, with horrendous violence (Agent Orange in Vietnam, for example). Does it matter so much that democracies in theory don't make war on other democracies, if they do make war on other nations?”

Let me take her comments in sequence.

“Is the US a democracy?” Answer: Yes, insofar as any society is. Perhaps a few countries are more democratic than the US but the main point is that democracy is everywhere a work-in-progress. One can say that some societies are more democratic than others, but no society is 100 percent democratic. It’s like going East. You can keep going East for the rest of your life and there will still be plenty of East left for you to go toward. We can (and should) keep improving our form of governance forever, but in the end more progress will still be possible. Almost certainly this last presidential election in the US was more democratic than the previous two.

Even more obviously, political freedom varies from one country to another. Does anyone need to be told that it is more unpleasant to live as a citizen of Burma or China or Darfur than the United States or Norway or Canada?

It is widely accepted that global democratization took place in three successive waves. The first began in the early 19th century; at its peak there were 29 countries that can be counted as democratic. With the rise of fascism, the number declined to 12. The second wave followed World War II and crested twenty years later with 36 recognized democracies in the world, then declined in around 1970. The third wave began in 1974 and reached about sixty before beginning to decline. We are now in the slump after that third wave.

There is a clear causal connection between economic development and democracy, though this has seemed more obscure lately, especially since China has developed economically quite rapidly without democratizing. According to Amartya Sen and others, the causal connection runs in both directions, with democracy being especially favorable to economic development.

Scholars of democracy take certain criteria as definitive, and I accept the standards used by Freedom House. It rates each of the 193 countries on two factors: political rights and civil liberties, based on the relevant sections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Basically, democracies are countries in which there are free and fair competitive elections, a rule of law (including protections for the rights of all citizens), access to a free press, academic freedom in educational institutions, and the right to assemble and discuss public affairs freely without intimidation. There also must be freedom for nongovernmental organizations.

To qualify as an electoral democracy, a state must have, inter alia, the following traits:

1. A competitive, multiparty political system;
2. Universal adult suffrage for all citizens (with exceptions for restrictions that states may legitimately place on citizens as sanctions for criminal offenses);
3. Regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security, and in the absence of massive voter fraud, and that yield results that are representative of the public will;
4. Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning.

If you are interested in the methodology of Freedom House’s research, it is described well at this site: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=351&ana_page=341&year=2008

Freedom House’s list of countries in 2008 is as follows:

FREE 1.0 Andorra Australia Austria Bahamas Barbados Belgium Canada Cape Verde Chile Costa Rica Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Dominica Estonia Finland France Germany Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kiribati Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Marshall Islands Micronesia Nauru Netherlands New Zealand Norway Palau Poland Portugal Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia San Marino Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Tuvalu United Kingdom United States Uruguay 1.5 Belize Bulgaria Ghana Greece Grenada Israel Japan Latvia Monaco Panama St. Vincent and the Grenadines South Korea Taiwan 2.0 Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Benin Botswana Brazil Croatia Dominican Republic Mauritius Mongolia Namibia Romania Samoa Sao Tome and Principe South Africa Suriname Trinidad and Tobago Vanuatu 2.5 El Salvador Guyana India Indonesia Jamaica Lesotho Mali Mexico Peru Senegal Serbia Ukraine

PARTLY FREE 3.0 Albania Bolivia Colombia Ecuador Honduras Macedonia Montenegro Mozambique Nicaragua Papua New Guinea Paraguay Seychelles Sierra Leone Turkey 3.5 Bosnia-Herzegovina East Timor Guatemala Kenya Liberia Madagascar Moldova Niger Philippines Solomon Islands Tanzania Zambia 4.0 Burkina Faso Comoros Georgia Guinea-Bissau Kuwait Malawi Malaysia Mauritania Nigeria Sri Lanka Tonga Venezuela 4.5 Armenia Bangladesh Burundi The Gambia Haiti Jordan Kyrgyzstan Lebanon Morocco Nepal Singapore Uganda 5.0 Afghanistan Bahrain Central African Republic Djibouti Ethiopia Fiji Gabon Thailand Togo Yemen

NOT FREE 5.5 Algeria Angola Azerbaijan Bhutan Brunei Cambodia Congo (Brazzaville) Congo (Kinshasa) Egypt Guinea Kazakhstan Maldives Oman Pakistan Qatar Russia Rwanda Tajikistan United Arab Emirates 6.0 Cameroon Cote d’Ivoire Iran Iraq Swaziland Tunisia Vietnam 6.5 Belarus Chad China Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Laos Saudi Arabia Syria Zimbabwe 7.0 Burma Cuba Libya North Korea Somalia Sudan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan

Next, my friend asks: “It [the United States] has made war on quite a number of nations in my lifetime, with horrendous violence (Agent Orange in Vietnam, for example).” Of course, I criticize American militarism as strongly as she does. The Vietnam War is a fitting example.

My friend continues: “Does it matter so much that democracies in theory don't make war on other democracies, if they do make war on other nations?”

Yes, it matters immensely. And it is not merely “in theory” that democracies don’t make war on other democracies. It is an empirical fact. There is an immense and growing body of research on this linkage, which is called “the democratic peace.” I will refer you here to only one book that addresses the subject, but its bibliography is substantial: Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century. It attempts to explain the phenomenon.

The democratic peace research shows that democracies do make war. However, the point is this: A well-established democracy virtually never goes to war against another well-established democracy. This record is incontrovertible — but only if one measures war and democracy consistently. To be well-established, a country must have been a democracy for several years (less than ten, but I don’t remember the exact cut-off figure that peace researchers have used). They classify an armed struggle as a war only if it has resulted in at least 1,000 deaths. Be sure you have ascertained the duration and degree of a country’s democracy and the number of deaths before you dispute the generalization. (I have spent too much time doing the research for friends who haven't checked before challenging me. Look it up for yourself, pal!)

But obviously the consequences of this finding are astounding. If it holds up (and it has for quite a few years now), then all we would have to do to establish international peace would be to convert all countries into democracies. Voila!

And indeed, while the recent third wave of democratization was on the upswing, the number of deaths in warfare around the world declined considerably. According to SIPRI, “In 2007, 14 major armed conflicts were active in 13 locations around the world. Over the past decade the global number of active major armed conflicts has declined overall, but the decline has been very uneven...” (See http://yearbook2008.sipri.org/02/02A)

But so far I have only discussed the impact of democracy on inter-state wars, whereas most of the struggles going on in the world recently have been internal wars. Even here, democracy confers benefits on a country’s citizens, and it is Rudolph Rummel’s great contribution to have explicated the inverse association between democracy and what he calls “democide” — the murder of people by their own state. (See his web site: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/). He gives us this introduction:

“It is true that democratic freedom is an engine of national and individual wealth and prosperity. Hardly known, however, is that freedom also saves millions of lives from famine, disease, war, collective violence, and democide (genocide and mass murder). That is, the more freedom, the greater the human security and the less the violence. Conversely, the more power governments have, the more human insecurity and violence. In short: to our realization that power impoverishes we must also add that power kills.

Through theoretical analysis, historical case studies, empirical data, and quantitative analyses, this web site shows that:

• Freedom is a basic human right recognized by the United Nations and international treaties, and is the heart of social justice.
• Freedom is an engine of economic and human development, and scientific and technological advancement.
• Freedom ameliorates the problem of mass poverty.
• Free people do not suffer from and never have had famines, and by theory, should not. Freedom is therefore a solution to hunger and famine.
• Free people have the least internal violence, turmoil, and political instability.
• Free people have virtually no government genocide and mass murder, and for good theoretical reasons. Freedom is therefore a solution to genocide and mass murder; the only practical means of making sure that "Never again!"
• Free people do not make war on each other, and the greater the freedom within two nations, the less violence between them.
• Freedom is a method of nonviolence--the most peaceful nations are those whose people are free.

The purpose of this web site, then, is to make as widely available as possible the theories, work, results, and data that empirically and historically, quantitatively and qualitatively, support these conclusions about freedom. This is to invite their use, replication, and critical evaluation, and thereby to advance our knowledge of and confidence in freedom--in liberal democracy. It is to foster freedom.

Pray tell, my brother,
Why do dictators kill
and make war?
Is it for glory; for things,
for beliefs, for hatred,
for power?

Yes, but more,
because they can.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Among all the democide estimates appearing on this website, some have been revised upward. I have changed that for Mao's famine, 1958-1962, from zero to 38,000,000. And thus I have had to change the overall democide for the PRC (1928-1987) from 38,702,000 to 76,702,000. Details here.

I have changed my estimate for colonial democide from 870,000 to an additional 50,000,000. Details here.

Thus, the new world total: old total 1900-1999 = 174,000,000. New World total = 174,000,000 + 38,000,000 (new for China) + 50,000,000 (new for Colonies) = 262,000,000.

Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5', then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.”

I recommend Rummel’s web site. I just wish that his observations were recognized and valued by my left and left-liberal friends.

What if You Sit Next to Ellen Tauscher on a Plane?

Or Rose Gottemoeller, Gary Samore, Ivo Daalder, Valery Churkin, Mohamed ElBaradei, or Sergei Ordjonikidze? You would want to lobby them, wouldn’t you? But would you know what to say?

Lucky you. I will suggest a line of conversation about nuclear disarmament with each of these powerful people.

First, Ellen Tauscher. She used to be a California congresswoman but is becoming Obama’s Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. She will participate in the National Security Council, advising the president on arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament.

I suggest that you offer her the peanuts that the flight attendant gave you (pretend you are too allergic to eat them) and say,

“Congratulations on your appointment, Ms. Tauscher. I wonder whether you have read the Draft Nuclear Weapons Convention that has been proposed by ICAN, the organization sponsored by IPPNW? It would prohibit the development, testing, production, stockpiling, transfer, use, and threat of use of nuclear weapons, as well as the production of fissile material suitable for making them. It would require all nuclear armed countries to destroy their nuclear weapons in stages. The last stage would place all fissile material under international control to prevent nuclear weapons ever being made again. I’d be glad to send you a copy of that document.”

After that, you’re on your own.

Second, suppose you meet Rose Gottemueller. She’s an expert on US Russian relations who worked as Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center until recently. Now she is becoming Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance. You might do well to discuss with her the question of Iran’s compliance with the NPT. Say,

“Ms. Gottemoeller, I imagine that Iran is your worst headache at the moment. May I offer you an Anacin? And while we’re on the subject, of nuclear compliance permit me to endorse the approach that President Obama is taking. Evidently Iran is not complying with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has not even signed the Additional Protocol, which would allow the IAEA inspectors to make unannounced visits. Nevertheless, the best approach at the moment seems to be to try and rebuild the tone of the relationship between Iran and the international community. If the hostility can be mitigated, perhaps there can be a new arrangement that will recognize Iran’s security interests. In the longer term, of course, we would hope to establish a new situation with all countries, not just Iran, would put all highly enriched uranium or plutonium under international control. ”

Okay, that should get you started.

Third, let’s suppose you sit next to Gary Samore. He was an arms control negotiator in the Clinton Administration. Now he is the new White House “czar” for preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Probably he will work closely with Vice President Biden, who is supposed to shepherd the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty through Congress. You might say something like this,

“Mr. Samore, the turbulence this plane is going through is probably nothing in comparison to the turbulence you experience every day on the job. I take my hat off to you sir, and wish you every success with your work. It’s a pity that the CTBT never entered into force, but I suppose it will, now that President Obama is supporting it to firmly. And it is thrilling that you and Ms. Gottemoeller have been asked to start immediately to negotiate a treaty with Russia that will replace START in December. I hope the new treaty will reduce the number of deployed nuclear weapons on both sides to 1,000 or even lower. Mr. Obama has committed to retain his deterrent capacity until all the nuclear weapons in the world are finally disarmed together. If deterrence is a major issue, you could probably even reduce the American weapons well below 1,000 if those are kept on ships at sea. That way, any potential enemy could not find them and destroy them with a surprise first strike,”

Certainly this opener should be sufficient to get you off onto a lively conversation.

Fourth, suppose your neighbor on the plane is Ivo Daalder. What would you say? This one is easy.

“Hello, Ambassador Daalder. I see that you are being appointed as the American Ambassador to NATO. Congratulations. Well, sir, I live in a country that is also a member of NATO, and I have a suggestion to make. The Canadian Pugwash Group has been lobbying various members of NATO, suggesting that they require that nuclear weapons be removed from their soil. Probably a year or two ago the United States would have become very angry about any such idea, but now it might work to your advantage. If you could privately indicate to Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey that you wouldn’t mind their demanding the removal of nuclear weapons, some or all of them would probably be happy to do so. That would cause a lot of publicity and make people aware of the current nuclear threat posture,. I think it would strengthen public opposition to nuclear weapons.”

Fifth, suppose you meet Valery Churkin on a plane. Here’s what you should say,

“Ambassador Churkin, it is a pleasure to know that you are representing Russia in the United Nations. You certainly have a long history of contact with Western societies, and I’m sure you have a deep grasp of Russian and American nuclear weapons policies. It was good to read the joint statement of President Medvedev and President Obama recently. They said they have agreed to achieve a nuclear free world in the long run. That’s a wonderful goal. And we can expect to see a new treaty of Strategic Arms Reductions by summer. I want to express my agreement with you on the subject of missile defence. The American plan to deploy missile defence installations in Europe is probably unnecessary and understandably the Russian government opposes it. On the other hand, President Obama is deliberately taking a slow route to making any final decision on this matter. There is probably enough time for Russia to develop a more cooperative relationship with America on such matters of mutual concern in Iran and Pakistan. If you succeed in doing that, probably the missile defences will never be installed. I hope that’s what you plan to do.”

Sixth, let us suppose that you happen to meet Mohamed ElBaradei on a plane. You may recognize him right away, since he is often seen on TV. He is the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate is probably recognized in public many times each day. You might begin by offering him your copy of the International Herald Tribune. Then say,

“Dr. ElBaradei, I have read the speech you delivered recently in Beijing at the Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Energy. Personally, I still wish that the IAEA did not have to promote nuclear energy. With commitment, we could shift over to alternative sources of fuel soon enough. However, I realize that your job requires you to endorse the expansion of nuclear power plants in many new countries, and probably you believe in that, so the real question is, how can access to fissile material be eliminated for would-be weapons makers? I like your proposal for a fuel bank to be managed by the IAEA. Moreover, you said that you want the entire fuel cycle, including the disposal of wastes, to be managed multinationally. That is an excellent idea. And I also support your near-term goal of implementing the additional protocol to the comprehensive safeguards agreements, so the Agency can verify that no undeclared nuclear activities are taking place. Certainly, global nuclear security standards should be made binding, rather than voluntary as at present.”

Seventh and finally, let us suppose you meet Sergei Ordjonikidze on a plane. He is the UN Deputy Secretary General. He runs the UN’s Geneva office, which is where the Conference on Disarmament meets. You could say something like this,

“Mr. Director General, I see we are both drinking red wine. It is so-so but not nearly as good as the excellent wine from your homeland. I wish we could buy Georgian wine in Ontario’s LCBO. Now, as to the agenda of the CD, I am encouraged by the commitment of Presidents Medvedev and Obama. There seems to be new hope for the CD to accomplish a fissile material cutoff treaty. After all, this was agreed as one of the 13 practical steps toward disarmament at the 2000 NPT Review Conference. President Bush had opposed it, arguing that it would not be verifiable, but there is no scientific basis for that opinion. I hope that President Obama’s team will move forward with it. Let me toast the success of the CD with this mediocre, non-Georgian wine.”

Flummoxed by Afghanistan

The news from Afghanistan gets worse and worse, offsetting the brightness of last week’s announcement of Obama’s new approach. (Even that announcement contained worrisome elements, but the overall emphasis was on development, which has to be the most liberal way of solving such predicaments.)

But now there are two ugly stories. Yesterday the Taliban (maybe a Pakistani branch, though I’m not sure) promised some “amazing” terrorist act in Washington D C. And today there’s a nasty real development: The Afghan government has enacted a new law rolling back the progress of women. Now a man can legally rape his wife, and she must have his permission to leave the house, and be accompanied by a male relative.

So here’s the situation. Obama has given up on the goal of turning Afghanistan into a democracy. Most people say it just can’t be done. He has scaled back the goal. Now the purpose of the war is simply to make sure that al-Qaeda cannot attack the US or other countries from bases in Afghanistan. (Never mind that al-Qaeda is actually not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, where NATO fighters are not allowed to go.)

I have a lot of trouble with the idea of abandoning democracy as a goal. I would never have invaded the country to make it democratic — that’s not the way to do it — but I feel a special kind of responsibility for the people whose lives we have disrupted by invading. We broke it, so we have to buy it, as the signs warn in china shops. We have more obligation to fix that society than we might have had if we hadn’t gone into it.

So Obama has stopped talking about the Taliban as the object of our disaffection; it’s al-Qaeda that he worries about. There are logical grounds for this, because until now no Taliban person has been involved in a terrorist act in any foreign country. (So says Fareed Zakaria, whose knowledge I would not dispute.) Likewise, Gwynne Dyer proposes that we get out of Afghanistan and leave the Taliban alone, since he doesn’t think al-Qaeda is capable anymore of attacking the West, and the Taliban have no inclination to do so.

But yesterday there was such an expression of intent. One of them is going to amaze us with a terrorist act in Washington – something bigger even than 9/11.

This may be a reaction against the Petraeus approach: to “peel off” some parts of the Taliban and make friends of them. It worked in Iraq, so maybe it will work in Afghanistan — but maybe not. Anyhow, some of the Taliban may be feeling irked by hearing of this plan, especially if they believe it is possible.

Mostly I lean toward the idea of assisting the development of villages and helping to establish good governance on the local level as a way of liberating the Afghans from the Taliban – an outcome that apparently they would greatly prefer.

Smart people, including not only Petraeus, Dyer, and Amitai Etzioni (whose newsletter I was just reading) say that the wise approach is to deal with the tribal leaders, for it is the tribes that have always governed Afghanistan. Forget trying to clean up the new national government. It’s too corrupt to fix. Just deal with the tribal elders and win over as many of them as you can (as they did with the Sunni elders in Anbar Province, Iraq).

But can we ignore Karzai? Can we forget about creating a national police force or army? I doubt it. At least, Obama has not tried to promote that degree of devolution. But above all, this business of abusing women appalls me. There was a photo of Karzai in London today, sitting face to face with an enormously displeased Hillary Clinton. The guy looked defeated and shriveled up, far weaker than he had seven years ago when he assumed power. Now everyone admits that his government is a totally corrupt failure – but he’s running for re-election, and in order to gain support he has endorsed this horrible anti-woman law.

Can we support him after that? (Assuming that we would otherwise.) I don’t think so. But what is the alternative? If we believe in promoting democracy, some people would say that’s what we should do – help him and the Afghan people get the kind of laws they want, not the laws we prefer. But what kind of democracy violates the human rights of its female population?

I’m sorry but I have no clue. I cannot imagine any solution that I could embrace without qualifications. And that’s just when it comes to Afghanistan. If I were to discuss Pakistan here, I’d really be at a loss!

Fixing Afghiranpakiraq

Everybody is giving Obama advice about solving the problems in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq The basic idea (which he already gets) is that it’s all one big package. It’s not even hyphenated. Some ideas are worth noting that I’ve read today in the New York Review of Books and George Friedman’s Stratfor newsletter. So listen up, Barack!

We'll start with Iraq and work our way eastward. The main thing about Iraq is that you want it to stay intact after you get out of there. To maintain any kind of stability, you have to get the cooperation of Iran, whose leaders actually want Iraq to remain stable too, but would like to have quite a bit of control.

So you have to negotiate with Iran. In fact, while you’re at it, you have three different issues to address when talking to Iran: Afghanistan, Iraq, and nuclear proliferation. So you’d better use diplomacy instead of bluster. You can’t even do that right away because they are going to have presidential elections soon, so you’d better wait until that is handled before you start your direct bilateral talks, without preconditions. But in the meantime, you can start talking more diplomatically. Iranian paranoia about the US is well-founded and requires a lot reassurance.

The best approach, according to Bill Luer, Tom Pickering, and Jim Walsh, is to set up a forum for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and Syria and turn many regional problems over to them instead of having the US dominate everything. Multilateralism is the way to go. There’s room for agreement between the US and Iran on several issues; both countries want Iraq to stay intact rather than be broken apart into separate, sectarian regions, and both want its leaders to be elected popularly. Neither of them wants Iraq to become a battleground for proxy wars.

When it comes to the nuclear issue, the best angle would be to create a multinational consortium to produce enriched uranium inside Iran. The centrifuges are already humming away anyhow. (See the photo.) Why not turn it over to international ownership and management? That way, the Iranians couldn’t divert the stuff into a weapons program without being detected.

And next, you seek Iran’s help with your Afghanistan problem, since you have some common ground with them on that matter too, since they have many interests in Afghanistan, which is on their border. They hate the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which they regard as extremist Sunni groups that directly threaten Iranian Shiites. Moreover, they want to reduce Afghanistan’s opium trade, and to avoid the chaos that would result if Karzai’s government falls. Here again, there is room for cooperation with Iran.

Next we shift our focus to the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan, who share custody of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. As William Dalrymple points out, by now, the Taliban control over 70 percent of Afghanistan. Karzai’s government effectively controls only cities, and is despised for its corruption — a factor explaining the increasing popularity of the Taliban. The US military must bring their supplies in from Pakistan, mainly through the Khyber Pass, which is no longer secure. They are now trying to set up alternative routes through Turkmenistan or one of the other Central Asian countries.

In Pakistan, the Zardari government also lacks control of its country. The ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, created a terrorist group to fight in Kashmir — Lashkar-e-Taiba, the organization that attacked Mumbai in November. It is now beyond the control of the Pakistani state. Only if all the training camps of such groups are shut down can the government regain control over the country.

But some Pakistani military leaders believe that these jihadis are even more effective than their nuclear weapons for defending their country from India. They have been reluctant to close them down, but now these Islamists have even turned their guns against the own creators, attacking the ISI headquarters.

Evidently there are almost no hopeful signs in Pakistan. The only cheery prospect that Dalrymple offers is based on the strength of Sufism. Almost everywhere, the Salafists and Wahhabis are spreading fundamentalist Islam, largely through the Saudi’s widespread establishment of madrasas throughout Pakistan. However, the southern region around Sindh has always been populated with Sufis, and their love-oriented version of Islam remains so popular that fundamentalism has been making no headway there. A RAND Corporation report suggested that Sufism be supported, but it is not clear to me how any foreign support would help that tolerant religion prevail in South Asia. There are no solutions in sight for rescuing Pakistan from its dire situation.

And of course, al-Qaeda’s leaders remain in Pakistan, beyond reach of either the US military or even the Pakistan government. Yet the whole point of invading Afghanistan was to wipe out or capture the al-Qaeda leaders who masterminded 9/11. There is no progress on that front whatever.

George Friedman argues that the US will inevitably lose its war against the Taliban. General Petraeus hopes to repeat the strategy that succeeded in Iraq by splitting the Taliban and enticing some of them to come over to the American side, as the Sunnis in Anbar did in Iraq. Friedman does not think that will happen and basically advises the Americans to give up the fight against the Taliban.

However, al-Qaeda is not at all the same group as the Taliban, and it is al-Qaeda that the Americans are concerned about. The whole point is to make sure that they cannot organize another attack on the US homeland.

According to Friedman, the al-Qaeda group in the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan have managed to keep from being infiltrated by simply not accepting new members. Over time, there has been attrition, but bin Laden’s organization does not replenish itself by replacing members who die. It is declining, therefore — indeed, it probably no longer has any capacity to harm the United States. It issues video messages from time to time but that may be the worst that it is capable of doing.

Of course, it is necessary to pay attention to them, but you don’t need an army to do so. Friedman suggests that the US army will eventually just go home and leave the real job to the CIA. What is required is good intelligence work to discover any potential danger that al-Qaeda or any other group in Afghanistan or Pakistan may constitute for the United States.

I think Friedman is right. The allied armies should quit Afghanistan, leaving in place a number of humanitarian projects that will support the economic development of the country. That won’t resolve any of the egregious social conflicts caused by the fundamentalists, such as preventing equality of rights between the sexes. What the foreigners leave behind will not be pretty.

But what the foreigners did there was not pretty either.

My Generic Christmas Letter, 2008

I sent this to lots of people and intended to post it here but forgot to do so. Now I've received an extensive reply that is worth posting from my friend Arent Greve in Norway. So I'll post my letter and show his as a comment to it -- an extremely important comment in that he has important information about greenhouse gas emissions which I did not know. Be sure to read his comment, therefore. The photo is the harbor of Bergen, with a cruise ship at anchor. Here is my letter:

Dear Friends,

What a thrilling year! Every day big events seem to take unexpected turns, requiring new solutions that we never dreamed of before. The stakes are higher than usual, and there are vast opportunities to make a difference. We’re out of the quagmire, folks! Hallelujah. As Rahm Emanuel says, you don’t ever want to waste a crisis. And we have an abundance of humdingers now.

Climate change captured my attention and wouldn’t let go. As an early enthusiast for carbon taxation , I set up a committee to study the subject over a seven-month series of dinners in a Chinese restaurant. We learned enough to give talks on the subject and produced a dandy power point show just as the Liberal Party swung into action promoting the same idea.

But the timing was wrong. First the price of oil went so high that it seemed cruel to tax people’s fuel at a time like that. Then the price of oil dropped 75 percent just when the recession hit, making it a terrible time to tax anything. So the Liberals lost the election, big time. Most of us weren’t watching the candidates anyhow; they couldn’t compete with the gripping Barack-vs-Hillary show, which was still going on.

I quit the NDP, as loudly as possible, when they opposed the carbon tax proposal, So now I belong to no party, but for a week this month it seemed likely that the opposition parties might form a coalition that the Governor-General would invite to form the government. That was the most exciting week in Canadian politics since I’ve lived here. The denouement has been deferred until next month, but in any case nobody will introduce a carbon tax. Never mind; I have a secret plan to manage climate change anyhow, so I’ve stopped worrying.

Vehicles matter now. I’m trying not to fly on jet planes much, so when I went to Florida for a February vacation I went by train. Then in April I took a ship to Europe as a (probably misguided) alternative. My sixteen nights of opulent sailing fouled the planet more than a jet would have. (Let me talk you out of taking a cruise, if you aspire to live any kind of purposeful life whatever. I just hated it – unexpectedly so, because I had planned to work every day, but my laptop broke down.)

So thereafter I traveled by train everywhere between European cities. In Madeira, Seville, Gibraltar, Sardinia, Rome, Florence, Aix-en-Provence, Barcelona, Paris, and Berlin I rode double-decker tour buses around the city, usually making two or three laps so I wouldn’t have to walk much. That part was great. In Moscow my vehicle of choice was the gypsy cab. You stick out your hand and after two or three cars pass, one will stop and you negotiate a fare if he’s going near where you want to go. I hope North Americans adopt that practice; it’s less polluting than regular cars or taxis.

The purpose of my week in Kyiv and five weeks in Moscow was to interview people about political matters so I can finish the book that simmered on my back-burner for 16 years. I returned home with 35 new interviews and a clear sense of how to finish the book. In January I will start working on it. A month ago I tried out the idea on an audience in the Slavic Studies convention in Philadelphia. (My transportation there: trains and propeller-drive airplanes, which emit less CO2 than a jet. Unfortunately, they don’t fly across the ocean.)

I also came back from Moscow intending to revive the back-channel East-West dialogues that used to take place during the Cold War. They declined over time, though there are sore feelings in Russia – a Cold Warlike hostility worse than I personally experienced during the 1980s. Former liberals are not immune to it. Lots of people no longer want democracy, which they believe they already experienced under Yeltsin. People say the West betrayed them by supporting Kosovo’s independence (which is why they paid us back by recognizing South Ossetia). They consider the Orange Revolution an American attack on Russia and fear the missile defence system that is planned for Czechia and Poland. They especially resent the expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia. I think they are right about some of these issues, but not all of them, so it’s time for us to talk.

Nuclear weapons remain a huge danger. I came back full of new resolve -- to hold a big two-day public international forum on nuclear weapons here In Toronto, with speakers who have influence with both governments – Russia and the United States. So we have a committee now, representing all the most effective peace organizations in Canada. We’ve been meeting three months, hoping to convene it next October. Unfortunately, we’re having fundraising trouble, partly because of the recession. That’s my biggest challenge. If you know any eager funders, please let me know. $100,000 will do nicely.

Fortunately, there’s a new anti-nuke campaign that began in Paris a couple of weeks ago which has the most promise of any so far. It’s called “Global Zero” and you can look it up and endorse it on-line. The wonderful thing is that Obama wants to eliminate nuclear weapons so the possibilities are realistic for the first time in a generation. Polls show that around the world 75% of the human population wants to abolish nuclear weapons.

You may know about the world-wide campaign to establish departments of peace at same level as department of war. I’m active with a campaign to create such a ministry in Canada. There’s a campaign in the US too, led by Dennis Kucinich and Walter Cronkite.

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for Peace Magazine (which I still edit after 25 years!) about the journalist Gwynne Dyer. He has a new book called Climate Wars showing that it is now too late to limit the global temperature rise to two-degrees. Inevitably the world will be entering a runaway feedback situation because (a) the permafrost is melting, emitting methane to the atmosphere. Since methane is 20 times worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2, the process will soon become irreversible. Also (b) the ocean is a sink for CO2, but as it heats up, it can hold less and less of it. Eventually it gets to the point that it is emitting more than it is taking in. So logically we should now recognize that the game is over. Humankind is doomed.


But Dyer is remarkably cheerful, for a sound reason. There are alternatives, called “geo-engineering.” Actually, I came around to that same position over a year ago, but most of my friends are horrified by it. The most common method of geo-engineering is to block the incoming sun rays, so as to prevent the greenhouse effect. (One way would be to spray water into the air from the oceans, making the cloud cover denser, so it would reflect more rays. A second way would be to sow sulphur particles into the stratosphere from jet planes. That would simulate the effect of Mt. Pinatubo; all volcanoes cool the planet measurably.)


Personally, my own geo-engineering preference is by a fellow named Klaus Lackner of Columbia University, who shows the possibility of putting up structures that coated with lime water or some similar mineral that will adsorb the ambient CO2 from the atmosphere, so that it can be buried. For about one trillion dollars, they can reverse the whole planet’s CO2 content. This will give us time to exploit the new sources of energy, such as wind turbines, geo-thermal sources, biofuels from algae, and solar.

So this is my secret plan. It’s only secret because nobody likes to hear it, but this is Christmas and I’m spreading the cheer, like it or not. Humankind has a future. Let’s celebrate!

Happy New Year!

Metta

Metta Spencer mailto:mspencer@web.net
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http://twoaspirinsandacomedy.com
http://www.metta.spencer.name
http://www.peacemagazine.org
http://metta-spencer.blogspot.com
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We Live or Die as a High-Energy Society

I have a long-running, passionately argued debate with a dear friend whose values once were very similar to my own. No longer. Now she has changed her life to a simplified, rustic style that will (maybe someday almost) lower her “ecological footprint” to a “sustainable” level. She sends me little discreet messages encouraging me to follow her example.

But I won’t. I try not to live wastefully in my high-rise apartment condominium, but I cannot claim to be frugal. My main contribution to the environment is to reduce my air travel greatly. (She still flies around the world, surely offsetting any benefits she has bestowed on it by her otherwise reduced standard of living.) If we did a complete audit of our annual ecological damage, I bet mine would not be much worse than hers, though I do drive a car and eat meat.

Still, the reality is that I have chosen to go down with the ship, if that is what will happen. She hopes to survive the upcoming planetary catastrophe. And that is what our dispute is about. I adore this modern urban capitalist civilization. It’s the greatest one that has ever existed, if only by enabling billions of people to survive with increasing comfort and cultural advancement. That’s stunning success! And, as Gwynne Dyer said in a recent lecture in Toronto, we are a high-energy society and we will live or die as a high-energy society.

From my point of view, the challenge is to find ways to live, rather than die, as a high-energy society. The worst failure would be to have to regress to living in local, low-energy communities of the very kind that my friend is trying to create. Marx called it “the idiocy of rural life.” Creativity comes from living in centers of diversity where we're exposed to others very unlike ourselves. To do so requires cities, and universities, and technology that changes all the time.

She wants to live “in harmony with nature.” But nature has never been in equilibrium and never will be. Still, I want to take responsibility for living on our planet and making it work. If we make a mess, we have to clean it up. That doesn’t mean restoring it to some idyllic pastoral condition, for we must keep moving forward rather than trying to establish a new stasis. Always the forward motion is precariously tending toward collapse, but we press forward anyway, and invent new ways of adapting. Human beings have always been forced to innovate; they don't change unless situations require it. Even agriculture would not be adopted if the population didn't outgrow its means of subsistence; hunters and gatherers hate to have to shift to farming because it is hard work -- but that's how we've been forced to progress, thank God.

We live on a tight-rope — and it’s especially thrilling now. Other people say 2008 was a terrible year but I enjoyed it immensely, for it constantly called upon me to innovate. Ethically I must support our urban civilization, rather than to abandon it. If it dies, I will go down with it. But what a splendid challenge! Crises reveal the hidden meanings in life, showing us our responsibility for our world — a high-energy world that will either live or die as such.

So Happy New Year, my beloved ones. This new year will bring brilliant challenges to us all — and we have the extraordinary privilege of being alive at this unique moment of the human journey! Onward, my friends!

People Love Their Dictators

So now Putin-Medvedev have come right out and made it plain. They want a totalitarian state, with themselves at the helm. And it seems that they will get it. They are going to enact a law saying that Russians who criticize their country will be treated as traitors. Since their party holds the vast majority of seats in the Duma, this law will certainly pass. I will be a terrible liability to my friends. If I call them, I could get them into serious trouble, for we would certainly talk about politics and they could not pretend that they approve of many decisions.

What surprises me is the disparity between the fears of the regime and the actual support that it enjoys. Right now there’s a deepening recession and Putin-Medvedev have been handling the discontents in a heavy-handed way. For example they tripled the import taxes on Japanese cars, which infuriated the people of Vladivostok, who use such cars almost exclusively. So there were protest demonstrations and police crackdowns, which cannot win the hearts and minds of Vladivostok’s citizenry.

Some of my Russian friends have been wishing for aneconomic crisis, for they believe only poverty will turn public opinion against Putin-Medvedev. All I can say is, be careful what you wish for. Economic distress can breed fascism or God knows what. It’s not necessarily going to turn people into freedom-loving democrats.

But the Russian government is paranoid. They believe that the rest of the world (mainly the US, of course) is funneling money and wild ideas to various pro-democracy movements trying to stir up a color revolution in Russia. I wish that were possible, but clearly you can’t run a color revolution unless the people want it. The guys in Washington can’t foist it on a reluctant populace. And the truth is, the Russian populace adores Putin.

That’s not unusual. Most dictators in the world are loved by the people. Stalin was adored. So were Hitler, Mao, and today still Fidel Castro – even by millions of Canadians who say they are democrats. So Putin is still their guy, even though he suspects otherwise. Last week he wanted a rule saying that presidents could hold office for six-year terms. Nobody objected, so it passed. Now he wants to keep Russians from talking to foreigners, sharing ideas that might be critical. And that law too will pass.

I wrote an e-mail to Ludmilla Alexeeva, offering to do anything possible to help her. She’s a beautiful old lady, respected and loved by all Russians for her life-long activism on behalf of human rights. She is opposing this law as strongly as possible, but it won’t help.

When I visited her in the spring she was the most optimistic person I met in Moscow. She was convinced that within fifteen years Russia would be a democracy. The people are changing, she said, and soon will be able to hold their government accountable.

I didn’t argue with her; after all, I was there to interview, not to debate her. But I knew that democracy cannot be claimed under all possible circumstances, just because the people are “ready” for it. Dictatorship is a trap. When people are prevented from communicating, they cannot plan ways of getting rid of a regime that they dislike. And nothing keeps Putin-Medvedev from blocking communication to the outside at any time. This new measure shows it.

So what can we do to help Russians retain their freedom? From one point of view, it is really up to the people to dissent, to protest, for themselves. But when the trap snaps shut, or the gulag prison door slams shut, they cannot accomplish this alone.

Sergei Kovalev, the wise old dissident, told me that freedom will not come from the top down, nor from the bottom up, but largely from sideways. We, living outside the country, have various ways of helping Russian democrats — both by supporting civil society there and by having our own government put pressure on them. They don’t necessarily want to be pariahs in the world, though Putin and Medvedev are seething with resentment, for reasons both valid and invalid.

The challenge is for Obama to do superlative negotiating. He will have to walk a fine line, not allowing himself to betray the human rights that must be upheld, but also not allowing himself to criticize Putin-Medvedev so strongly as to confirm their paranoia. He cannot get around to those negotiations for a long time, since the economy and other domestic issues must come first. I’m afraid that Hillary Clinton will just exacerbate matters unless he gives her explicit orders to be as friendly as possible.

But I couldn’t do it. I don’t know many people who could. And that scares me.

As a private citizen, all I know to do is work with the press to focus attention on this. I have sent a couple of e-mails to journalist friends and I will send more. Contact me if you have any good ideas.

Hurrah for Loose-lipped Spies!

Now that Deep Throat has died, another unsavory side of the Watergate story is coming out. George Friedman of Stratfor pointed it out — though I suppose he is not the only person who has realized what had happened. Anyway, Friedman’s article is the only version I have heard.

It seems that Mark Felt (see photo) had been the number three man in the FBI, deeply loyal to his boss, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was feared by everyone in Washington because he collected all the dirt he could, using his own agents, and could have blackmailed almost everyone. And when Hoover died in 1972, the number two man retired, leaving Mark Felt as the de facto head of the FBI. However, Nixon did not appoint him as the official head – a slight that must have rankled.

Felt got even. Though he could have gone to the justice department with his information about the illegal actions of Nixon’s “plumbers,” he chose instead to leak the information to two young journalists on the Washington Post. According to Friedman, Woodward and Bernsteinunderstood what was happening, and so did their boss, Ben Bradlee — that instead of uncovering the secrets themselves, they were being spoonfed the story by the head of the FBI, which was spying on the president of the United States and using the information to settle a personal score. By keeping Deep Throat’s identity secret, they were also keeping hidden a part of the story that seems just as important as the facts they disclosed. What was the FBI doing, spying on the US president?

Only about four years ago did Mark Felt disclose his own identity. Presumably, at that point anyone else could have published the revelations that Friedman has now released. His analysis is speculative, yet it would be hard to think of an explanation other than the one he proposes. The FBI had been collecting evidence — spying on the president and his staff. That inference needs no additional investigation, for it apparently speaks for itself. And to Friedman it is a shocking story.

He goes on, at the end of his story, mulling over the ethical conundrum for journalists facing this kind of situation. It applies to himself as well, for he heads an organization, Stratfor, that trades in “intelligence” — sort of a commercial CIA. He writes,

“In intelligence, we dream of the well-placed source who will reveal important things to us. But we also are aware that the information provided is only the beginning of the story. The rest of the story involves the source's motivation, and frequently that motivation is more important than the information provided. Understanding a source's motivation is essential both to good intelligence and to journalism. In this case, keeping secret the source kept an entire -- and critical -- dimension of Watergate hidden for a generation. Whatever crimes Nixon committed, the FBI had spied on the president and leaked what it knew to The Washington Post in order to destroy him.”

What ethical principles should guide journalists? And how do those principles differ from the ethics of spies? I’m not sure. What's the difference?

I remember having a conversation once with Bill Epstein in the cafeteria of the United Nations. We were talking about spies, but he used the term casually and without apparent disdain. He had worked throughout his long life at the UN and knew plenty of spies, and he said that he thought spying was good. The more information that individuals and countries have about each other, the better it is. We should encourage spying.

I wouldn’t want to make that into a general principle, for there must be plenty of exceptions, but in general I think it’s true. Partly I take that position because if I were a spy, I would not keep information secret. I am just not good at that. I don’t have much of a sense of privacy about my own personal matters; I gossip quite freely; and I have leaked confidential information from a hiring committee once or twice in my life. I should be ashamed, but I’m not. Don’t tell me your secrets because I will almost certainly blab. And that's probably a good thing.

There’s a story in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine about Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary. It seems that the Obama team is absolutely leak-proof. That’s supposed to be good, and because I trust Obama, I will accept the assumption that it is indeed good. But not everyone is good, and in general I think it’s excellent for journalists, spies, and gossipy friends to reveal all the dirt that they can find out in Washington, whatever be their motivations.

Just think: Colin Powellhad been duped so much that he unknowingly gave a deceptive speech in the UN about Iraq’s supposed WMDs. Somebody should have told Powell. How much trouble we would have been spared, had the truth been revealed before Bush attacked Iraq!

So hurrah for loose-lipped spies!

It’s Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, Dummy!

My two all-time favorite journalists are Gwynne Dyer and Doug Saunders. Coincidentally, both of them have offered surprising analyses lately about the war in Afghanistan. And neither of them suggests any answer to the question that their analyses immediately brought to my mind.

I’ll start with Dyer, whom I don’t read very often anymore because no Toronto paper carries his syndicated column. But he gave two lectures here on November 11 and I went to them. Most of his comments seemed directed toward dispelling myths that have been created to justify the current war in Afghanistan — such as the notion that the Taliban had invited Osama bin Laden to their country as a launching pad for his 9/11 attack on the United States. Or the notion that the US and other allied armies carried out a successful war (at least initially) against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In fact, says Dyer, the country was in the midst of a civil war between the Taliban (mainly a Pashtun group) and various ethnic groups from the northern region. The Taliban administration of the day did welcome bin Laden (who, along with about 40,000 other Arab volunteers, had heroically helped them fight against the Russians in the 1980s) but they almost certainly were not involved in planning his attack on America and probably did not even know about it before it happened.

After 9/11, it was not the US troops who came in and conquered al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Instead, it was about 500 CIA fighters. They arrived with money to pay the Afghan militias, who did all the fighting on the ground. The CIA also instructed the helpful US planes which enemy targets to bomb. That military operation went well, sending bin Laden and his gang fleeing over the border into Pakistan. After the fighting was over, the full panoply of US and allied troops came in to smash al-Qaeda’s empty camps and set up an occupation regime, installing the northern leaders as the new government. In effect, the US was joining an ongoing civil war, taking the side of the northern minorities — Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras — against the Pashtuns. The Taliban are the force fighting for Pashtun power, and they have regained control of most of southern Afghanistan.

Thus, according to Dyer, we are involved in an Afghan civil war, fighting against people who are not terrorists. Yes, al-Qaeda are terrorists but they were defeated in Afghanistan and the survivors are now in Pakistan. Even President Karzai is, quite reasonably, trying to make a deal with the Taliban. We should support that solution simply by going away and leaving the country to the Afghans.

As Doug Saunders points out, the war that we’re supposedly fighting in Pakistan is quite a different war — one that is actually over. That war was authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, to defend against the al-Qaeda attacks against the US and other countries. But can any future terrorist attacks be launched anymore from within Afghanistan? No. Saunders has gone around Afghanistan asking US, Canadian, and British military leaders how many al-Qaedafighters they were seeing inside the country’s borders. They all said, “none.”

Moreover, al-Qaeda could not re-establish itself in Afghanistan because the Taliban do not even sympathize with them. Saunders quotes one Afghan politician as saying,

“Only 20 percent of the insurgents who form the core of the Taliban are fighting the ideological war. The rest are aggrieved tribes who have been mistreated by some government official or drug trafficker or some foreign intelligence operators or by the transnational al-Qaeda terrorists. It also consists of unemployed youth and criminal groups. All these are alliances of convenience. They are fighting for different reasons.”

In the bloody areas where our troops are fighting, their Taliban enemies regard al-Qaeda, not as an ally, but as another foreign invader. Saunders quotes several other journalists who have traveled around interviewing the Taliban fighters; they see no sign of al-Qaeda sympathies.

Canadian soldiers are supposed to fight the Taliban insofar as they are going to let al-Qaeda operate again, and there is only one branch of Taliban that fits that description: one in the far southeast led by Jalaluddin Haqqani. It doesn’t hold much territory or popular support.

So what’s the point of staying there? If anything, the presence of foreign troops in the country is exacerbating the opposition to themselves. Saunders cites an American expert in the area who says that the presence of large numbers of foreign troops is providing the terrorists with an enemy, making it easier for them to recruit others as terrorists.

Saunders writes. “Al-Qaeda is gone, and not likely to return. To the extent that it is still around, it’s because we’re attracting it. If both those statements are true, then no matter how ugly it looks, the war’s over.”

So Dyer and Saunders agree: We should just go home and leave the Taliban alone. They pose no danger to the rest of the world.

That sounds reasonable to me. Yet it offers no answer to the obvious question: What about bin Laden and al-Qaeda? They are in Pakistan. Are they capable of organizing another attack against a foreign country? Why not? A different group from Pakistan just attacked Mumbai, so why couldn’t al-Qaeda do even more?

I asked Dyer whether it would be possible for the US to go capture or kill bin Laden, then leave the Taliban alone. He said, “Whether or not you get bin Laden, leave the Taliban alone. Getting Osama doesn’t matter.”

Well, I think it may matter — and so does Barack Obama. If you listen closely to what he says about moving the war from Iraq into Afghanistan, it is not the Taliban that he talks about fighting. It’s al-Qaeda. As a US political leader, I don’t think he can ignore bin Laden. In general, the hunting of terrorists is not a military operation, but a matter for the police and various intelligence-gathering agencies to carry out. When it comes to al-Qaeda in Pakistan, that may not be the case; military action may be required. (At least the Pakistan police seem not to be up to the job.) Obama said last summer that he would kill or capture Osama if, as US president, he finds out where he is. Although this statement provoked a controversy, I rather doubt that Pakistanis in general would react badly against such a raid —despite the supposedly favorable attitude of public opinion toward bin-Laden. But what would it take to capture or kill Osama? I would like an answer.

I take satisfaction from Dyer’s and Saunders’s advice regarding Afghanistan. But it doesn’t tell me how to solve the real problem — al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

France is Larger than Russia or Canada

I went to a conference of geographers this weekend and learned one fascinating fact: France is larger than either Canada or Russia.

The reasoning goes this way: All the land that is more than, say, 1.5 miles away from a road is useless. Nobody lives there. You can't farm it or mine it. It does nothing for you and might just as well be absent. So imagine a map that erased all that land. France would remain almost intact because there are roads everywhere. But huge chunks of Canada or Russia (such as the taiga shown here) would vanish, leaving those countries even smaller than France. And for practical purposes, that land is already absent, or (even worse) useless. It just prolongs every trip across the country.

Maybe we'll find things to use in those places sometime -- but when we do, we'll have to build roads to get to them.

Isn't that interesting? It was the most intriguing thought I encountered all weekend.

The Widest Cleavage

For a long time I felt puzzled, trying to figure out the main basis on which people are taking sides in the current US presidential election. Now I know.

The most obvious political cleavage is based on race. Some people will never, ever vote for a black person. I don’t think it’s possible to guess with much accuracy how widespread this kind of racism is, but it will surely affect the final tally to some degree. I ran into two men on a cruise ship this spring whose racism horrified me. (In one case, I got up from the table and moved away, since I would not sit with someone as insulting as that hateful man.) Polls in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio during the primary race showed that about 15 or 20 percent of the white voters said that race is a factor in their voting decision.

According to Andrew Hacker’s article in the September 15 issue of The New York Review of Books, the courts have been making some decisions that in effect will make it harder for blacks to vote. In Indiana, for example, all those registering to vote must now produce a government document showing their photograph. Most people fulfill this requirement by showing their drivers licence, but blacks disproportionately lack such a licence. They can go to a special office and obtain a state ID card, but that usually involves a lengthy trip. This requirement will inevitably reduce the number of black voters in Indiana.

The Help America Vote Act was designed to increase, rather than decrease, the opportunities to vote. However, it requires states to keep their voter lists up to date by eliminating the names of people who die or move away. This is sometimes done by mailing a letter to everyone on the roll, then deleting the names of all those whose letters were returned in the post. Since blacks tend to move more than whites, they are also more likely to have their registrations removed by this procedure.

Finally, there are laws in some states that disenfranchise felons for life. Since blacks are more likely to spend time in prison, they are also more likely than whites to lose their right to vote in that way.

On the other hand, this year huge numbers of citizens — especially Democrats — are registering to vote. The Republican registrations are flat. I believe that Obama’s supporters will be remarkably effective in getting those people to the polls on voting day, possibly thereby offsetting the racist effects of the aforementioned legal decision.

Anyway, the impact of race on this election is going to be different from all previous periods, for — as Obama has pointed out himself — there are two different cultures within the black community, and the one favoring Obama is the younger generation. That distinction became very clear when Jesse Jackson unknowingly whispered into a live radio mike that he (and many other older blacks) would like to castrate Obama.

It is young, educated blacks, not those who came through the civil rights movement, who are keen to support Obama. And culturally they resemble educated white Americans. Racism is not necessarily the top issue on their political agenda, nor is it paramount among young, well-educated whites. Because Obama is so extraordinarily sophisticated, he is not running as a black man, but simply as an American. And many other blacks respond to him as such — including Colin Powell, who said on TV yesterday that he has still not made up his mind how he will vote, but his decision will not be based on race.

So racism is not the main cleavage in the electorate.

Yet there is a cleavage – a deep, wide one. That became apparent when McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate. The tensions between those who support her and those who do not is more intense than between Obama's and McCain's supporters – or even between Obama's and Hillary's supporters. What is that tension all about?

Some say that it’s based on the hostility between rural and urban cultures. There’s something to that idea, I suppose — at least when it comes to gun control. I have been told that hunting is important to rural people in ways that I cannot understand. This moose-hunting habit of Palin’s is meaningful to those of rural background. To be sure, she talks about small towns as if they are poles apart from cities. I wouldn’t know.

But I can’t believe that this election is a fight between rural and urban Americans. That is even less the main issue than is race. Instead, it's about "elitism"

I got a clue from Ned Temko’s article in the Guardian (Sept. 8 issue) about Adlai Stevenson. Yes, that’s it! Obama’s too much like Adlai, the Democratic candidate who was defeated twice by Eisenhower. The voters could not forgive him for not knowing the name of a popular comic strip character, as I recall. They called him an “egghead” — meaning an “elitist.” Temko wrote:

“One thing, above all, sealed Stevenson's sorry electoral fate. It was the image that he was somehow too smart, too eloquent, out of touch with "ordinary" Americans. In different contests at different times ever since, that same rap has helped defeat a train of other Democratic candidates: Eugene McCarthy's anti-war crusade in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, and most recently John Kerry last time around.

“America has changed profoundly since Stevenson's day (even in crashing down to defeat, he carried the then "solidly Democratic", and solidly segregationist, south). But many of those changes – the electoral divide between a now solidly Democratic eastern seaboard and much of the rest of the country, and the rise of evangelical politics and the profound culture clash between Democrat and Republican – has made what a leading newspaper columnist called the "Adlai egghead" problem more, not less, of a challenge for Barack Obama.”

Certainly, that’s the main cleavage in America today: between educated and uneducated Americans. More people will vote against Obama because he is “elitist” than because he’s black.

I have trouble understanding that point of view. Why would a voter want a president who is like himself or herself? I want a president who is smarter than I am. Fortunately, Obama is. He’s vastly smarter than I am. McCain is not. Definitely Sarah Palin is not. I’m not even sure that Joe Biden is, but at least he’s not dumber than I am, so he will do.

But why would ignorant people want their leader to be ignorant too?

I am a democrat — lower-case as well as upper-case — not because I think democracies make better decisions than autocracies, but just because democracy is a superior way of living together in a group. It’s a system that gives human beings the space to fulfill their excellence. It honors human rights, human dignity.

But my new insight discourages me. If people do not want to fulfill their excellence, if they don’t admire intelligence and ethical insights in a democracy, then what is democracy good for? If people want Sarah Palin because she’s just like them, and they don’t want Barack Obama because he’s better than they are, what hope is there for democracy? And what justification is there for upholding it?

Dialogue on Democracy Promotion

I have received an e-mail comment on my previous blog, “Is it Moral to Promote Democracy?” from a friend (whom I’ll call “CD” because I haven’t asked his permission to name him in a public way). My reply here will be in the form of boldface insertions within the text of his letter. However, the most important comment should come first. I was astonished to read, at the end of his letter, CD’s comment:

“You know that you & I agree on the acceptability --and near
moral obligation-- to support democratic movements within other countries. I'm not reneging on that conviction.... You write as though beaming a reasonable news broadcast into Burma were part of an array of measures to be deployed in promoting democracy round the world, along with humanitarian intervention like bombing the bridges across the Danube.”

I have to express my astonishment that someone I have known for many years could misunderstand me so. I am completely committed to nonviolence. At no point, either in my essay or anywhere else, have I ever said I approve of bombing as a way of assisting people to obtain their freedom. Please, CD, re-read my essay carefully and you will see that I do not approve of any coercive intervention to promote democracy. I can only assume that you have accepted the prevailing assumption that to promote democracy is necessarily to promote the bombing of Serbia. Not so! Nonviolence is the only acceptable way of helping people in another society gain their freedom. Now, with that issue out of the way, let me proceed to reply to each point in his letter.

Metta, it is really sad to be so profoundly out of sympathy with your essay, after so often supporting you. I deplore your position. Strange though this is, it ought not to surprise you,
because much that I say below I've said to you before. Yet it may strike you as new, for it surely doesn't seem to have had any impact! First but not most central is the bizarre array of sources
you invoke. Political reality: if you want to forge an alliance including supporters of Science for Peace and of Peace Magazine, you really can not include Samuel V. Huntington among your standard-bearers. Huntington was among the most prominent academic apologists for all the wars we have opposed over a half-century. His doctrine of clash of civilizations is nothing but a convenient rationalization of fighting any chosen enemy outside the Western alliance. His
social science may not be pure bunk, but it includes enough bunk to horrify many observers (I can give you amusing references).

Let’s disentangle this. I do not accept Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, nor indeed most of his earlier work. I used to know him at Harvard when he was the inspiration behind the horrible “village pacification“ strategy in the Vietnam War. TheClash of Civilizations notion mistakenly equates democracy to Western civilization. As Amartya Sen has pointed out, various Asian civilizations have developed democratic institutions in the past.

However, I was not referring to either of these aspects of Huntington’s biography, but rather to his book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. It is not an ideological tract but rather an empirical analysis of the trends in the rise and fall of democracy over time. The findings have stood the test of time and rigorous criticism by other social scientists. I may dislike the man’s politics but that doesn’t permit me as a political sociologist to discount this book, just as you cannot discount the work of another mathematician whom you dislike personally. Social science literature includes hundreds of other papers and books dealing with the “third wave” discovery, and so far as I can see, no one has significantly challenged his findings.

Similarly for Freedom House. Lee Lorch made the relevant observation that H. Gideonse was a leading Red-hunter in the 1950s and Freedom House never repudiated this campaign by one of its presidents.

I don’t know Mr. Gideonse. I do know that Freedom House was founded by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt and was chaired for a long time by Bayard Rustin, a black American who followed Gandhi. (See Rustin's photo.) I will insert at the bottom of this post the most recent ratings of the world’s countries and I invite you to look it over. At a dinner party recently, I brought it out and asked people to assign their own rankings to all the countries with which they were personally familiar. Our own rankings were surprisingly similar to those of Freedom House.

And I am very dubious about Freedom House's ability to titer democracy of a state. I am dubious that such ratings are of much use, but especially I am suspicious of the criteria FH applies.
You ought to ask this, as you choose to rely on their ratings so. Seeing FH's Cold War alignment, I would check for pro-Washington bias. Did you? What did you find?

There is a long section on methodology under the “Freedom in the World” analysis section of their web site. It is too long to quote. All I can say is that it has been spelled out in excruciating detail, evidently attempting as much objectivity as possible. They work with extensive check-lists and they name about 50 professional analysts, giving a paragraph about their backgrounds. They appear to me like the staff of any other really good academic journal, except many times as numerous. Nothing raised my eyebrows.

I'm sure we will differ, not only on the procedure of making these ratings, but also on the scores specific states get. Why would I leap to that conclusion, despite often agreeing with you on
specific issues in the past? Let me just give one example: the conclusion you reach (in agreement with T. Homer-Dixon, whose side I less often find myself on) that democracies make war never against other democracies, only against non-democracies.

I am glad to know that about Tad. I have had strong differences with him in the past because he did not appear to care anything about democraticization. I hope you are right that he accepts the Democratic Peace findings. But why wouldn't he? Virtually everybody in political science and peace studies does.

Come now! Let us assume that FH's criteria, whatever they are, guarantee the USA falls
always and forever in the ranks of the democracies. (You will surely concede that I am not being over-cynical in assuming that! And I bet you can document it, though I have not.)

I have not gone back through all the US’s previous rankings, but at present, it scores 1 along with 47 other states, including Kiribati and Nauru. I cannot evaluate the degree of political freedom in all those countries. Some of the reports cover pages and pages of incidents, positive or negative. Others are sketchier. For example, here’s their capsule appraisal of Kiribati: “Kiribati (2008) Capital: Tarawa. Population: 100,000 Political Rights Score: 1 Civil Liberties Score: 1 Status: Free Overview: Independents took the majority of seats in the August 2007 parliamentary elections, but President Anote Tong and his Pillars of Truth party secured a second four-year term in the October general elections.“

And yet the USA made war on democratic governments in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1953, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, in Chile in 1973, in Haiti at least once (the expulsion of Aristide and cancelling of elections), in Grenada in 1985, in Panama at least once, etc. For counter-examples not involving the USA, I might wait for you to tell me who else beside the USA is regarded as democratic by Freedom House.

See above.

But why bother? Your generalization (and Homer-Dixon's) is preposterous. War is complex and needs to be studied in detail.

Do you suppose that war has NOT been studied in detail? I wish people realized that there is a field of research called Peace and Conflict Studies, which could and should be an independent discipline, for we who do the research and teach in it actually know a few things. In fact, the Democratic Peace theory (or empirical generatlization) has been analyzed in hundreds, possibly thousands, of other studies. I discussed it with Hanna Newcombe in the interview that I published in Peace Magazine a few years ago. She has followed it closely and agrees that it is extremely well supported. She mentions the example of India and Pakistan and Germany and France. Although these states have frequently gone to war with each other, neither have done so when both were democratic. Researchers have gone beyond trying to determine whether it is true or not, turning instead of studies that attempt to explain the mechanism behind the fact. The most recent work that I’ve been reading on the subject is a 512-page book, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century by Paul K Huth and Todd L. Allee. It summarizes the whole literature on the subject, citing hundreds of sources. I can lend you my copy if you are interested. Now let me turn to some of the touted exceptions. The conflicts that you mention were all ones with less than 1,000 persons killed. This is the long-established definition of a war, which was developed by the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. Two of the countries that you mention, Grenada and Panama, were not democracies when the Us invaded them. grenada was a one-party dictatorship. Panama was a military dictatorship under Noriega. The other countries you cite, Iran, Guatemala and Chile, were democracies. US action against them was not in the form of a war, and not just because of the casualties count. What the US did was give assistance to undemocratic groups in these countries to mount a coup. The theory of the democratic peace does not suggest that this type of plotting will cease when there is more widespread democratization. The situation in Haiti is more complex. The US intervenes to bring Aristide’s party back to power. Despite the US involvement here, backward and forward, Aristide’s party, if not he personally, is still in power. The same is true in Nicaragua. The US aid to the contras just forced a fair election, which the Sandinistas lost. They were subsequently re-elected and are now running the country again. (I owe these observationx to my friend John Bacher.)

Second, I don't agree at all that the danger to democracy in North America is the tyranny of the majority.

You are right. That’s one danger that has been handled pretty well since Tocqueville wrote his amazing book, Democracy in America. We have Bills of Rights and judicial institutions that protect minority rights and civil liberties. My main point was that it is not enough to have a system of “majority rule” to count a country as a democracy; for it to be civilized, there have to be rules protecting the groups that are out-voted.

The danger to democracy in North America is the tyranny of the ultra-rich and
their henchmen.

Yes, that and voters' political cluelessness. I am watching the Republican Convention with the sound off while I write this. This Palin woman seems to be a real asset politically, which certainly points out Americans’ worst problem, that they have such limited awareness. And Canada is gearing up for an election too, with another major problem: We will divide up the votes among four leftist or centrist parties and leave the election for Harper to win.

You know this, Derek Paul knows it, all the protesters against NAFTA and its clones know it. The defence against their selling off of the public good and the destruction of the planet is democracy-- reasserting the right of the people to make laws which the rich are bound by (even if those laws are in contravention of the treaties the G8 have made without consulting the
electorates, and even if those laws include things blasphemous to the plutocrats, like progressive taxation). Our present rulers don't make destructive decisions out of stupidity or bad luck
(though stupidity and bad luck may aggravate the destruction); they make destructive decisions out of greed.

At least partly so. I don’t know how to fight that.

You know that you & I agree on the acceptability --and near moral obligation-- to support democratic movements within other countries. I'm not reneging on that conviction. Nevertheless I am distressed by the context in which you put it in this essay. This is my third main disagreement with your line of thought. You write as though beaming a reasonable news broadcast into Burma were part of an array of measures to be deployed in promoting democracy round the world,

Isn’t it?

along with humanitarian intervention like bombing the bridges across the Danube.

Where the hell did I say or even suggest THAT? Never in my life have I supported such a thing. Why do you imagine that I do?

Michael Ignatieff might agree with you. You can't expect us to.

I stood up and argued with Michael Ignatieff at the Munk Centre before he had even returned to Canada to run for office. I said that it might have been possible to mount a nonviolent resistance against Saddam Hussein – there were Iraqi expatriates in the Netherlands who were preparing to do that – but he and the other supporters of the war did not even give that option a moment’s thought, according to the essays he had been publishing almost every week in the NY Times Magazine. He said, “That would be the most irresponsible thing I can imagine!” (Like, yeah, somebody might have got hurt!) I was so carried away with my criticism that they had to tell me to sit down and stop talking. But after ward I followed Ignatieff to his car and talked to him the whole time about supporting nonviolent opposition movements inside dictatorships. Having made myself known as a fierce opponent of his, I did not accompany the group that went to lobby him for the Department of Peace because I didn’t want to screw up the possibility of getting him on board. So don’t tell me I am like Michael Ignatieff! That is ridiculous and completely unsubstantiated. You are making things up instead of reading what I wrote.

Furthermore, those Michael Ignatieff now serves won't invite you or the Norwegians to sit down at the policy planning table with them and decide whether to send news broadcasts or missiles into Iran; so you won't get an opportunity to argue that broadcasts are better.

True. We’ve got a lot of work to do to fix our own democratic shortcomings. There’s no reason, however, why we can’t do that while also encouraging others for whom the task is even harder.

The kind of promotion of democracy you want to work at has no resemblance in principle to Huntington's or Fukuyama's, let's face it.

No I think that Huntington and Fukuyama would probably agree fairly well if we all sat down and tried to classify different countries into two or three categories in terms of their degree of democracy. Freedom House does an adequate job. If you don’t like it, try the Economist, which made a list of its own. It correlates pretty well with Freedom House’s 2008 rankings, which I show below.

Please, free your vocabulary and your theoretical considerations from their pious jingoism.

Please give my article another reading. You have distorted the hell out of it. I make it very clear that assisting nonviolent democratic opposition movements to gain their rights is entirely different from imposing democracy on another society, whether violently or through some other coercive pressure.
Peace, CD
Peace to you too. Metta

Combined Average Ratings – Independent Countries 2008
FREE 1.0
Andorra Australia Austria Bahamas Barbados Belgium Canada Cape Verde Chile Costa Rica Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Dominica Estonia Finland France Germany Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kiribati Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Marshall Islands Micronesia Nauru Netherlands New Zealand Norway Palau Poland Portugal Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia San Marino Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Tuvalu United Kingdom United States Uruguay
1.5
Belize Bulgaria Ghana Greece Grenada Israel Japan Latvia Monaco Panama St. Vincent and the Grenadines South Korea Taiwan
2.0
Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Benin Botswana Brazil Croatia Dominican Republic Mauritius Mongolia Namibia Romania Samoa Sao Tome and Principe South Africa Suriname Trinidad and Tobago Vanuatu
2.5
El Salvador Guyana India Indonesia Jamaica Lesotho Mali Mexico Peru Senegal Serbia Ukraine
PARTLY FREE
3.0
Albania Bolivia Colombia Ecuador Honduras Macedonia Montenegro Mozambique Nicaragua Papua New Guinea Paraguay Seychelles Sierra Leone Turkey
3.5
Bosnia-Herzegovina East Timor Guatemala Kenya Liberia Madagascar Moldova Niger Philippines Solomon Islands Tanzania Zambia
4.0
Burkina Faso Comoros Georgia Guinea-Bissau Kuwait Malawi Malaysia Mauritania Nigeria Sri Lanka Tonga Venezuela
4.5
Armenia Bangladesh Burundi The Gambia Haiti Jordan Kyrgyzstan Lebanon Morocco Nepal Singapore Uganda 5.0 Afghanistan Bahrain Central African Republic Djibouti Ethiopia Fiji Gabon Thailand Togo Yemen

NOT FREE
5.5
Algeria Angola Azerbaijan Bhutan Brunei Cambodia Congo (Brazzaville) Congo (Kinshasa) Egypt Guinea Kazakhstan Maldives Oman Pakistan Qatar Russia Rwanda Tajikistan United Arab Emirates 6.0 Cameroon Cote d’Ivoire Iran Iraq Swaziland Tunisia Vietnam
6.5
Belarus Chad China Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Laos Saudi Arabia Syria Zimbabwe 7.0
Burma Cuba Libya North Korea Somalia Sudan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan

Is it Moral to Promote Democracy?

I just received another one of those letters. A concerned peacenik friend of mine is suddenly feeling uncertain about whether it is okay for us to be helping to spread democracy. As it happens, this is the issue that I went to Russia to investigate, and I’ll write the final chapter of my book about it. For now, let me try to state my position.

We are in a period now that is aptly called a “backlash against democracy promotion.” I ran into these misgivings everywhere in Russia — and, much to my distress, I hear it expressed among my progressive Canadian friends too.

There are two very different narratives about the spread of democracy that apparently clash. The positive narrative had been accepted almost everywhere in the world until recently, especially among left liberals, but obviously there is no longer any consensus about it.

Let me back up a bit and start with Samuel Huntington, who famously charted the course of democratization in 1991. He found that democracy has became established in the modern world in three successive waves, each one followed by a reverse wave or slump as some of the democratic countries regressed to authoritarian rule.

The first wave began in Western Europe and North America and lasted from 1826 to 1926. A second, shorter wave occurred after World War II, largely reflecting the end of colonialism. This was followed by another decline of democracy in the 1960s and early 1970s. The third wave — the largest of all — began in 1974 when the Portuguese dictatorship ended and became even stronger after the 1989 collapse of Communism. Only during the past few years have we entered the current post-third-wave reversal of democracy.

The most meticulous counting of democratic states is carried on by Freedom House, an organization that Eleanor Roosevelt (see photo) and Wendell Willkie founded in 1941 to advocate democracy, freedom, and human rights. It supports much research and, for the past 36 years has surveyed all countries, rating each state on two scales — political rights and civil liberties — with 1 representing the most and 7 representing the least freedom. Each country’s score is based on about 200 items, many referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is assigned by dozens of analysts and consultants, some in the New York headquarters and some overseas. As a summary measure, it classifies these countries as “free,” “partly free,” or “not free.”

The historic trend is definitely encouraging. In 1900 one could have counted fewer than a dozen democratic countries in the world. In 2007, however, Freedom House rated 92 countries as “free,” while deeming 60 “partly free” and 43 as “not free.”

However, the short term trend is disappointing. According to a report that Freedom House released on July 2, “the year 2007 was marked by a notable setback for global freedom. Furthermore, results for 2007 marked the second consecutive year in which the survey registered a decline in freedom, representing the first two-year setback in the past 15 years.”

Moreover, these numerical changes are matched by an ideological shift; democracy is simply not as popular today as fifteen years ago, when Francis Fukuyama announced that it had become the only form of government that is recognized as legitimate world-wide. In those post-Communist years, even the most wretched regimes were calling themselves democratic and hoping no one would notice their violations.

The Case for Democracy

I am a democrat. I will neither disguise my political commitments nor pretend to be neutral when presenting the two contrasting analyses of democracy. The positive narrative is far easier for me to tell than the critical one.

Yet I’ll admit readily that decisions made through democratic procedures are not necessarily wiser than the judgments that dictators make. The United States, for example, has a deservedly bad reputation in the world now because of the ghastly policies of its duly-elected government. (Okay, so Bush Jr. wasn’t really elected democratically. I take back that example. But you will agree that other legitimately elected governments often make mistakes. I’m thinking of the current Canadian government, for instance, which has done little to prevent climate change.)

The reason for preferring democracy is not that the policy outcomes are reliably superior, but rather that it allows for maximum freedom and greatest scope for human rights and political equality. Participating in even an imperfect democracy is better than being subordinate to an authoritarian ruler.

And all democracies are imperfect, to some degree or other. The creation of democratic institutions is a work in progress. The possibilities for improvement are infinite, even in those states that now score 1 on Freedom House’s seven-point rating scheme. Democratization is like going East. If you travel East forever, there will still remain plenty of East ahead of you. Nevertheless, some countries are east of others and some countries are more democratic than others. Such comparative differences matter.

Democracy has not always been admired. Indeed, as Michael Mandelbaum points out, “for most of recorded history, even including much of the history that followed the French Revolution liberty and popular sovereignty were widely seen not only as separate, but as incompatible.” Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous travelogue, Democracy in America, was a search for ways to protect liberty from the “tyranny of the majority,” an issue that still becomes worrisome at times. Today we recognize that proper democracy must include, as a defining trait, measures that protect the rights of minorities from rule by the majority. Free and fair elections are not sufficient to qualify a state as democratic.

With the aforementioned caveats, I insist — and probably most people around the world agree today — that democracy is the only acceptable approach to governance, and that nothing less should be tolerated by any population. I can think of no higher calling than the work of assisting people who live under a dictatorship to gain maximum control over the conditions of their own lives.

To be sure, cultural relativists of all types argue that only arrogant Western imperialists prize democracy, but this is not the case. There are other excellent grounds for preferring accountable, representative democratic governance over other systems.

For one thing, democracy goes hand in hand with economic development A higher GDP per capita correlates with democracy. Indeed, as Adam Przeworski has shown, not one of the richest democracies has ever been observed to fall into authoritarianism. This association is so strong that many scholars believe that as economic development progresses, democratization becomes inevitable — if we support a country’s economic growth, political liberalization will necessarily follow.

However, correlation does not prove causality. For one thing, you also need to know which variable is supposedly the cause and which the effect. Does democracy cause capitalism, or does capitalism increase the prospects for democracy? In attempting to answer this question, one 1998 study used Freedom House’s longitudinal data and found that the answer is the latter. A high GDP/capital increases political freedom, but not the converse. Political freedom (democracy) does not increase GDP/capita. If your country gets rich, it has a good chance of becoming democratic. But if it becomes democratic first (as occasionally occurs) you should not necessarily expect it to become rich as a result — though it may.

Still there is another advantage that you will almost certainly gain if your oppressed country becomes democratic: greater opportunity for peace. Probably the best-established connection that I have ever observed as a social scientist between two variables is that fully-established democracies do not go to war against other democracies. Violence may occur in a fledgling democracy, but rarely in a well-established one. Democracies go to war against authoritarian governments, and authoritarian government go to war against each other, but democracies do not go to war against other democracies. Imagine this: If all countries became democracies, that would put an end to international warfare! There still might be internal (“civil”) wars, but even those are less severe than in un-democratic regimes. And, as Rudolph Rummel has shown, the incidence of “democide” (the killing by a government of its own citizens) is exceedingly high in dictatorships, but vastly reduced in democracies. Hence democratization is an immensely valuable peace-building measure. It is probably the most promising project for peace activists to undertake.

One might even assume — and I do — that helping the repressed inhabitants of an authoritarian or totalitarian country to gain democracy through nonviolent means would be a magnificent gift to humankind. But that view is not shared everywhere, either in liberal democracies such as Canada or in authoritarian systems such as Russia. There are many misgivings now in this “backlash” period, on several different grounds.

Is There a Case Against Democracy?

Quite often I find myself speechless when I hear some of my good friends talking about democracy. I am a left-liberal on the political spectrum and most of my friends have similar sentiments, so it stuns me to hear their dismissive attitude toward democracy. Some of them are democratic socialists whose values can be traced back to their youthful affairs with Marxism. Others seem to be animated by worthy aspirations toward tolerance. They regard the affirmation of democracy as akin to some kind of religious fundamentalism, whereas any broad-minded person should, in their opinion, regard all other political systems as equally valid, much as a tolerant person regards other religions as equal to her own.

Certainly the main basis for their misgivings about democracy consists of the deplorable behavior of several democratic countries internationally. Since international law is under-developed, the leaders of states don't have to be responsive to foreign opinion. Regrettably, therefore, some countries that Freedom House would rate as excellent democracies internally are not necessarily good citizens of the world. The most egregious example of illegal and immoral behavior nowadays clearly is the Bush administration in the US. It portrayed its cruel, selfish war in Iraq as a generous effort to bring democracy to the Iraqi people oppressed by Saddam Hussein. Others, more plausibly seeing Bush's policies as plain military aggression, insist that democracy cannot be imposed on another people. The debate in the West nowadays is framed as a dispute over the morality of “democracy promotion,” with the right wing claiming that their military actions represent the moral high road, and with many left-wingers sputtering in confusion, no longer even defending the assistance to nonviolent pro-democracy movements abroad.

But there is a strong case against “imposing democracy” on other people. To be sure, the victorious Allied armies did impose democracy on Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II, but no sane person would choose military force today as an ideal way of spreading democratic institutions. Indeed, the ongoing war against Iraq has tainted the very notion of democracy, even to many Americans themselves.

Nevertheless, people living under an authoritarian regime almost always do long for freedom. What is our moral responsibility toward them?

This is not the same challenge as the situation of a powerful country forcing democracy upon another people who do not want it. Instead, this is the offer of assistance to a population that is eager to use nonviolent means of freeing itself from a dictator. Is such assistance right or wrong?

Surely no one would have objected morally to helping people in occupied Europe resist Nazi orders. Surely today no one would object morally to helping the Burmese liberate their elected president, Aung San Suu Kyi, and put her in office. Surely!

Accordingly, most liberal democracies in Europe and North America maintain organizations that are funded (but not directed) by the state, and which assist the development of democracy in authoritarian countries. There are also private foundations, such as the Soros Open Society Fund and the MacArthur Foundation, which assist pro-democracy movements, but the main controversies concern the role of democratic governments in doing so.

And many do. To mention only couple of examples, Norway supports a radio station that broadcasts accurate news in all the Burmese languages into Burma, against the wishes of the dictatorial junta. Also, the American organization, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), funds training in election monitoring, exit polling, and the organizing of civil society groups. Several Canadian organizations support civil society organizations in a number of countries. The first president of the main Canadian group, Rights and Democracy, was Ed Broadbent, who told me that its only restriction of grants was that applicants must be committed to nonviolence.

These opposition movements do not seek to oust every illegitimate ruler but only to pressure them to follow basic principles of democratic governance. Only if such reasonable demands for reform are rejected do the movements seek to bring down the dictators. However, when such decisive struggles become inevitable, the local movements often receive training and funding from foreign foundations to prepare for their grassroots campaigns. Thus the popular movement in Serbia that brought down Milosevic was funded by several foreign organizations, as also were the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia.

Although I admire them, such pro-democracy movements are not necessarily very successful. For example, Serbia’s post-Milosevic regime has hardly been an illustrious democracy, nor are those regimes now governing Ukraine or Georgia, though most people living in those societies evidently consider themselves better off than before. NED allegedly supported the monks’ protests in Burma, which was crushed, and also a nonviolent movement in Belarus that never made any headway against the dictator Lukashenka.

Nevertheless, I have no ethical ambivalence whatever about assisting a pro-democracy movement. In fact, I consider it morally obligatory; I could no more ignore the plight of a population trapped in a dictatorship than I could walk past a fellow human being caught in a bear trap. My support, however, comes with four obvious qualifications.

First, the movement should be absolutely nonviolent. Second, it should clearly represent the wishes of a large part, normally a majority, of the population. It would be foolish, for example, to support a group in Russia that was trying to oust Putin, because he was extremely popular. After all, a pro-democracy movement must represent the people themselves, not some foreign government or foundation. Fortunately, it is usually obvious who is in charge, for when a million people surround the parliament, demanding that the dictator resign, it is never because some foreign institution paid them to show up.

Third, I do not believe it is ever legitimate to finance one political party in a country, even if it is gravely handicapped in an electoral contest. This would constitute interference in the democratic process itself, which would surely violate the very principles that the movement seeks to institutionalize. Although it is sometimes a difficult distinction, the outside funders should limit themselves to funding campaigns and political education, not specific parties.

Fourth, there are certain preconditions for the success of a new democratic regime and these should influence decisions about when to support movements abroad. It may be necessary to work on the preconditions before supporting direct demands for fair elections or other reforms. For example, certain Iraqi expatriates wanted to organize a movement to oust Saddam Hussein, but the US pre-empted this move by invading their country. However, even if they had succeeded (which probably would have taken several years) the long-suppressed tension among Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds probably would have erupted afterward, just as it did after the US invasion of Iraq. It would have been necessary to hold meetings among these groups far in advance, to resolve the problems before they could arise.

Likewise, in Burma a democratic government will have to address tensions among the numerous ethnic groups, which ideally should be worked through before such a democratic government takes office. Every new democracy will encounter difficulties, but it is sometimes possible to forestall them.

Bearing in mind these three caveats, the value of supporting grassroots movements for human freedom seems incontestable. Indeed, a study, “How Freedom is Won” by Adrian Karatnycky and Peter Ackerman adds weight to this conclusion. These authors used data on transitions to democracy collected by Freedom House over a 33-year period. They found that 67 countries (over one-third of the world’s countries) had undergone a transition from a closed or tyrannical system toward democracy. Of those, civic resistance had been a key factor in 50 cases – i.e. 70 percent of the transition countries. The most important discovery, in my opinion, is that the new democracies that had emerged from grassroots, civic movements were more likely to be still democratic, five or more years later, than those whose democracy had been conferred upon them by their leaders without any civic movement. Conclusion: people should take charge of winning democracy for themselves if they want it to last. Outsiders can help only help.

Russia is a case in point because the people did not demand democracy; Gorbachev gave it to them. Then they failed to keep it. Soon the presidents of three of the Soviet republics staged a coup, removing their countries from the Soviet Union and thereby forcing it to collapse. Within two years, Boris Yeltsin shelled the parliament of his country, became an “elected monarch,” rigged the elections, and chose his own successor, while nevertheless calling himself a champion of democracy. At no time did the Russian people object to his actual abrogation of democracy. On the contrary, they now say that they don’t want democracy, since they believe they experienced it under Yeltsin and want no more of it. They prefer the order and stability that has prevailed under Putin’s authoritarian presidency.

Moreover, their negative attitude toward democracy is colored by the hostility between Russia and the United States. My Russian friends are keenly aware of the geopolitical competition between countries. They point out that the US administration has strategic reasons for supporting each of the opposition movements against other governments. For example, Russians see the “color revolutions” in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia as instigated by a US administration that simply wants to harm Russia. Some of them (including individuals who have previously supported nonviolent “people power“ movements in India, the Philippines, and even in Russia) now refer to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine as an instance of “mob rule.”

The same goes for all the other places where the NED is supporting grassroots activists; thus they see the democracy movement in Burma as supported by the US because Burma has gas fields that the US wants to control. According to this critique, only when a strategic interest is at stake do Western governments offer their support to democratic opposition movements.

So disturbed was Putin by the “color revolutions“ that he instituted a variety of measures designed to prohibit any financial contributions to Russian civil society organizations by outside groups that foster, e.g., education for participatory democracy. Moreover, Russia has organized several other authoritarian regimes to jointly combat such movements. The most vital requirement of grassroots democratic opposition movements consists of technological means of communication; realizing that fact, the autocracies now rely on surveillance and censoring as a means of keeping control. They are becoming quite successful at impeding the work of pro-democracy activists, whom they portray as dangerous, unpatriotic fifth-column subversives.

In Moscow recently I was offended several times when my friends criticized me for being a tool of the US government in fostering nonviolent pro-democracy movements. Yet I do not argue against their interpretation of many US policies. Probably it is true that the Bush administration has ulterior motives, seeking to destabilize and weaken the governments of certain countries by funding opposition movements against them.

Thus, in such cases, both narratives may be true. The majority of the people ruled by a dictator usually want freedom — and in my political activities I will always try to help them get it. At the same time, every government has other motives of its own, which sometimes may surprisingly coincide with mine. If the US government actually craves Burma’s gas and oil and therefore funds the supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi, that’s not my motivation, but nor does it diminish my moral responsibility to help the victims of repression in Burma.

I have told two narratives about democracy, both of which are substantially true. According to the positive narrative (which I accept fully), the world will be better when political rights are guaranteed everywhere. The second narrative says that George W. Bush has his own immoral reasons for trying to bring that about. There is no contradiction between these stories.

It is a rare occasion which such contrasting purposes fit together harmoniously to support the same line of action. This is one of those times. For the sake of all those people living under tyrannies, I intend to make the most of the convergence while it lasts.

Al Gore Did Not Clarify Much

I’ve been reading the big speech that Al Gore made this past week. Bless him! (See photo.) He’s a wonderful man and without his leadership we’d really be facing almost certain catastrophe. This week he issued a huge new challenge, but without making it clear what would be involved. Below, I will show the entire text of his speech, which is available on You Tube and his own web site, Algore.com. However, before doing so I want to make my own comments, which are based on some facts I recently heard Amory Lovins (see first photo) make in an interview with Charlie Rose. I transcribed his remarks.

Gore’s plan calls for the United States to (a) reduce its carbon dioxide emissions so as to halt global climate change, (b) rebuild its industrial base and create new jobs by (c) getting off oil imports and abandoning the use of all fossil fuels, which will require the development of renewables, which in turn will create jobs and save the US economy.

These are all realistic objectives. However, Gore sums it up this way: “Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.”

Actually, that is probably not as hard as most people suppose — but it won’t solve the whole problem. Why? Because electricity in the US is now generated about half from coal, one-fifth from gas, one-fifth from nuclear, and the rest from renewables. Only two percent of America’s electricity comes from oil, even today. Moreover, both coal and nuclear power are so expensive that investors have almost given up developing new plants from these sources.

Instead, the world already is turning to “micro-power“ — which consists of renewables and the co-generation of heat and electricity together for use in buildings and factories. (Co-generation costs half as much as generating heat and electricity separately.) Even if we met Gore’s stated challenge — which is limited to the production of electricity — that would not reduce our dependence on oil at all.

Still, that does not mean it will be easy. Half of the US electricity comes from coal, and the challenge would be to replace it with renewables and “carbon-free sources.” Does that include nuclear? He doesn’t say. Probably he thinks nuclear is a nasty business, but necessary. However, as Lovins points out,

“...nuclear would displace coal, which is our most abundant fuel. But it turns out that both nuclear and coal, and indeed gas plants, are in real trouble in the market because they cost too much to run or build or both, and their lunch is being eaten by the alternatives, that we are told can never amount to much.

“Take 2006, the last year for which we have full data. In that year, nuclear, world-wide, added less capacity than photovoltaics added, or a tenth what wind power added, or a thirtieth what micropower of all kinds added. ... So that, actually, nuclear, if you built more of it, would make climate change worse. It’s so expensive that it would give you two to ten times less carbon reduction than if you bought efficiency and micro-power instead, and you’d get that result 20 to 40 times slower....

“In 2006, micro-power pulled ahead of nuclear in global electricity production. It’s not a fringe activity anymore. It’s a sixth of the world’s electricity, a third of the new electricity. In China, which has the world’s most ambitious nuclear goals, what you don’t often hear is that their distributed renewables, not counting hydro, are seven times nuclear and growing seven times faster. China is the world leader in this stuff. Take last year, 2007. Renewables, other than big hydro, got $71 billion of private capital invested. Nuclear, as usual, got zero. It’s only bought by public planners with a draw on the public purse. The US, China, and Spain each installed in 2007 more wind capacity than the world installed nuclear capacity. The US in 2007 installed more wind capacity than it has added coal capacity in the past five years put together. Micro power and efficiency now have upwards of half the world market. The central stations – coal, nuclear, and so on -- that we’re told are indispensable, probably have less than half. They cost too much. They have too much financial risks, so capitalists aren’t interested...”

Okay, what I infer from Lovins’s statements is that the trend is already moving in the exact direction that Gore is proposing — at least as far as electricity production is concerned. It’s just a matter of speeding up a process that is going that way anyhow because of market forces. It does not seem terribly daunting, when looked at from that angle.

However, electricity is not the whole issue — not by a long shot. What worries Gore most, he explains this way: “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet.”

And indeed, oil is the biggest challenge. But oil has nothing to do with electricity. About 70 percent of US oil goes for transportation.

Now, there are solutions to that problem too, as Gore says: solar, in particular. But it sounds a lot harder to implement them within the ten-year time frame that he proposes. He has one key proposal, to be sure: electric cars. If we switched to electric cars, we’d be using vastly less oil, but more electricity, so we’d have to do better than simply replace coal (and maybe nuclear) sources to generate electricity, but we’d also have to make a lot more of it. Okay, let’s go for that. I'm on board!

But can we make the switch to all-electric vehicles within ten years? Maybe, but that will be hard. It would require something beyond ordinary market forces; we’d presumably have to order people to replace their vehicles within ten years, which would not be a popular move, even if the car companies could switch their production over that soon. I think this is where the biggest obstacles lie. We just need to be aware that electricity and the use of fossil fuels for other purposes (heating, transportation, manufacturing, etc) are two different matters and cannot be solved with the same mechanism.

On the other hand, there is another factor that Gore does not name: efficiency. Lovins counts the gains in efficiency as especially important. If we can run our cars, planes, and trucks with one-quarter of the energy now required, we’ll reach the goal easily. And according to Lovins, such efficiency gains are entirely feasible.

Hence I am far from criticizing Gore. What he is proposing may be attainable. I certainly hope so. But it certainly requires a degree of political leadership that has been lacking until now. I’m hoping that Obama may exert that kind of dynamic push.

Here’s Gore’s speech:

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more - if more should be required - the future of human civilization is at stake.

I don't remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly.

The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse - much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland's largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City.

Two major studies from military intelligence experts have warned our leaders about the dangerous national security implications of the climate crisis, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of climate refugees destabilizing nations around the world.

Just two days ago, 27 senior statesmen and retired military leaders warned of the national security threat from an "energy tsunami" that would be triggered by a loss of our access to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.

And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn't it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory, longer droughts, bigger downpours and record floods. Unprecedented fires are burning in California and elsewhere in the American West. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation that makes kindling for mega-fires of the kind that have been raging in Canada, Greece, Russia, China, South America, Australia and Africa. Scientists in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University tell us that for every one degree increase in temperature, lightning strikes will go up another 10 percent. And it is lightning, after all, that is principally responsible for igniting the conflagration in California today.

Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that's been worrying me.

I'm convinced that one reason we've seemed paralyzed in the face of these crises is our tendency to offer old solutions to each crisis separately - without taking the others into account. And these outdated proposals have not only been ineffective - they almost always make the other crises even worse.

Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges - the economic, environmental and national security crises.

We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.

But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we're holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.
The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.

In my search for genuinely effective answers to the climate crisis, I have held a series of "solutions summits" with engineers, scientists, and CEOs. In those discussions, one thing has become abundantly clear: when you connect the dots, it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices. Moreover, they are also the very same solutions we need to guarantee our national security without having to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

What if we could use fuels that are not expensive, don't cause pollution and are abundantly available right here at home?

We have such fuels. Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world's energy needs for a full year. Tapping just a small portion of this solar energy could provide all of the electricity America uses.

And enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to also meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy, similarly, is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity for America.

The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses.

But to make this exciting potential a reality, and truly solve our nation's problems, we need a new start.

That's why I'm proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It's not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.

Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans - in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.

A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But here's what's changed: the sharp cost reductions now beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power - coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal - have radically changed the economics of energy.

When I first went to Congress 32 years ago, I listened to experts testify that if oil ever got to $35 a barrel, then renewable sources of energy would become competitive. Well, today, the price of oil is over $135 per barrel. And sure enough, billions of dollars of new investment are flowing into the development of concentrated solar thermal, photovoltaics, windmills, geothermal plants, and a variety of ingenious new ways to improve our efficiency and conserve presently wasted energy.

And as the demand for renewable energy grows, the costs will continue to fall. Let me give you one revealing example: the price of the specialized silicon used to make solar cells was recently as high as $300 per kilogram. But the newest contracts have prices as low as $50 a kilogram.

You know, the same thing happened with computer chips - also made out of silicon. The price paid for the same performance came down by 50 percent every 18 months - year after year, and that's what's happened for 40 years in a row.

To those who argue that we do not yet have the technology to accomplish these results with renewable energy: I ask them to come with me to meet the entrepreneurs who will drive this revolution. I've seen what they are doing and I have no doubt that we can meet this challenge.

To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to consider whether the costs of oil and coal will ever stop increasing if we keep relying on quickly depleting energy sources to feed a rapidly growing demand all around the world. When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down.

When we send money to foreign countries to buy nearly 70 percent of the oil we use every day, they build new skyscrapers and we lose jobs. When we spend that money building solar arrays and windmills, we build competitive industries and gain jobs here at home.

Of course there are those who will tell us this can't be done. Some of the voices we hear are the defenders of the status quo - the ones with a vested interest in perpetuating the current system, no matter how high a price the rest of us will have to pay. But even those who reap the profits of the carbon age have to recognize the inevitability of its demise. As one OPEC oil minister observed, "The Stone Age didn't end because of a shortage of stones."

To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I respectfully ask them to consider what the world's scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we don't act in 10 years. The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis. When the use of oil and coal goes up, pollution goes up. When the use of solar, wind and geothermal increases, pollution comes down.

To those who say the challenge is not politically viable: I suggest they go before the American people and try to defend the status quo. Then bear witness to the people's appetite for change.

I for one do not believe our country can withstand 10 more years of the status quo. Our families cannot stand 10 more years of gas price increases. Our workers cannot stand 10 more years of job losses and outsourcing of factories. Our economy cannot stand 10 more years of sending $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries for oil. And our soldiers and their families cannot take another 10 years of repeated troop deployments to dangerous regions that just happen to have large oil supplies.

What could we do instead for the next 10 years? What should we do during the next 10 years? Some of our greatest accomplishments as a nation have resulted from commitments to reach a goal that fell well beyond the next election: the Marshall Plan, Social Security, the interstate highway system. But a political promise to do something 40 years from now is universally ignored because everyone knows that it's meaningless. Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.

When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.

To be sure, reaching the goal of 100 percent renewable and truly clean electricity within 10 years will require us to overcome many obstacles. At present, for example, we do not have a unified national grid that is sufficiently advanced to link the areas where the sun shines and the wind blows to the cities in the East and the West that need the electricity. Our national electric grid is critical infrastructure, as vital to the health and security of our economy as our highways and telecommunication networks. Today, our grids are antiquated, fragile, and vulnerable to cascading failure. Power outages and defects in the current grid system cost US businesses more than $120 billion dollars a year. It has to be upgraded anyway.

We could further increase the value and efficiency of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution, and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid.

At the same time, of course, we need to greatly improve our commitment to efficiency and conservation. That's the best investment we can make.

America's transition to renewable energy sources must also include adequate provisions to assist those Americans who would unfairly face hardship. For example, we must recognize those who have toiled in dangerous conditions to bring us our present energy supply. We should guarantee good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner displaced by impacts on the coal industry. Every single one of them.

Of course, we could and should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.

In order to foster international cooperation, it is also essential that the United States rejoin the global community and lead efforts to secure an international treaty at Copenhagen in December of next year that includes a cap on CO2 emissions and a global partnership that recognizes the necessity of addressing the threats of extreme poverty and disease as part of the world's agenda for solving the climate crisis.

Of course the greatest obstacle to meeting the challenge of 100 percent renewable electricity in 10 years may be the deep dysfunction of our politics and our self-governing system as it exists today. In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness.

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they're going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it. If we keep going back to the same policies that have never ever worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to move in that direction anyway because some of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests that know how to make the system work for them instead of the American people.

If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term.

However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.

Many Americans have begun to wonder whether or not we've simply lost our appetite for bold policy solutions. And folks who claim to know how our system works these days have told us we might as well forget about our political system doing anything bold, especially if it is contrary to the wishes of special interests. And I've got to admit, that sure seems to be the way things have been going. But I've begun to hear different voices in this country from people who are not only tired of baby steps and special interest politics, but are hungry for a new, different and bold approach.

We are on the eve of a presidential election. We are in the midst of an international climate treaty process that will conclude its work before the end of the first year of the new president's term. It is a great error to say that the United States must wait for others to join us in this matter. In fact, we must move first, because that is the key to getting others to follow; and because moving first is in our own national interest.

So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge - for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. It's time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric. We need to act now.

This is a generational moment. A moment when we decide our own path and our collective fate. I'm asking you - each of you - to join me and build this future. Please join the WE campaign at wecansolveit.org.We need you. And we need you now. We're committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership.

On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.

I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket's engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.

We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.

Why They Hate Gorbachev

Imagine that you have been in prison all your life. The guards feed you but there’s no possibility of freedom. But then along comes a warden who unlocks the door and leads you out of the prison. Do you thank him?

For eighteen years I’ve been contemplating this question. The fact is, of course, that most Russian people hate Gorbachev and are completely baffled when a foreigner expresses immense admiration for him, as I do. (Yes, he’s just human, but his ratio of good to bad decisions is overwhelmingly constructive.)

During my recent stay in Moscow, I interviewed only one admirer of his, the scholar Dmitry Furman, who regards Gorbachev as the greatest political leader Russia ever had. Or to be more accurate, he thinks Gorbachev may be an even match with someone whose name I didn’t recognize. (I should track that guy down.) In my opinion, MSG is not surpassed by any other political leader in world history; probably he is matched only by Gandhi, who was an altogether different type. So I am always astounded that Russians themselves don’t see that.

The puzzle began for me when I read the memoir of the hydrogen bomb designer and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov. (What a combination of qualifications!) He had been under house arrest in Gorky for years when he was unexpectedly released. One day a telephone man came to the Sakharov house and installed a phone. The next day that phone rang and it was Gorbachev telling him that he was free to move back to Moscow and resume his good work. Sakharov notes, with evident pride, that he hung up on him.

Thereafter, the relationship between Gorbachev and Sakharov was testy, for reasons that I could not fathom. At the end Sakharov was giving a speech in the Congress of People’s Deputies (the new democratic parliament). Though he had used up the time allotted to each speaker, he wanted to keep going but Gorbachev was chairing the meeting and cut him off brusquely. Sakharov went home and died during the night.

That final unpleasant scene is often adduced even today as the basis for disliking Gorbachev. As for myself, I keep wondering why he hung up on Gorbachev and never tried to cooperate with him. One of Gorbachev’s closest associates once explained it to me by referring to a Russian proverb: “Two bears cannot live in one lair.” But that isn’t really an explanation. It’s just another way of phrasing the puzzle. The two men were pursuing similar goals. They both wanted democracy and a government that respected human rights. Gorbachev was extraordinarily democratic and he jettisoned the tyrannical system that had prevailed for seventy years. Yet he and Sakharov never became allies – nor do ordinary Russians even today honor their liberator. How strange!

But now I think I understand. I can see two different explanations for the Russians’ lack of gratitude to Gorbachev for overturning tyranny. One explanation applies to Sakharov and the other dissident human rights workers. The second explanation applies to ordinary Russian citizens.

First, the dissidents believed passionately that their sacrifices were necessary in order to get a free and decent society. Most protesters were sent to prison camps (from which only about half would emerge alive), though Sakharov was kept under house arrest instead. Despite their heroic endurance of abuse, dissidents had no discernable influence whatever on the decisions made in the Kremlin. (One dissident did insist to me that somehow they had “forced” the party leaders to change, but I have never seen any evidence to that effect.) In any case, these protesters were true martyrs; they knew that they would be treated as criminals but they believed that what they were doing was necessary. I call these courageous people “Barking Dogs.” They could not bite, but they courageously made a commotion to stir up the population.

They were not, however, the only people who believed that the communist regime needed to be changed markedly. In fact, there were far more individuals who took a different course of action toward that goal. I call them “Termites” because they worked quietly within the Party, developing ideas for reform that they hoped someday to implement. Gorbachev was a Termite par excellence, just as Sakharov was a Barking Dog par excellence. Gorbachev believed that only the general secretary of the party could institute real reforms, and he was acquainted with many like-minded Termites who shared his values and principles.

Oddly, the Termites and the Barking Dogs were enemies and remained so throughout the turbulent 1980s and even beyond. Theirs was a highly-charged ideological fight about how best to promote social change. One dissident with whom I spoke even referred to the reformers inside the Communist Party as “whores.” Although today, such a controversy sounds abstract and theoretical, the stakes were extraordinarily high. Their whole lives had been constructed on the basis of their opinions on this subject. It was painful for Sakharov to acknowledge that Gorbachev had “given” freedom to the Soviet people, for he believed that he and his fellow dissidents had won it through their noisy protests. Therefore he continued to view Gorbachev as some kind of self-serving opportunist, wholly different from the “barking” moral exemplars such as Sakharov himself and his allies. I can understand their lingering antagonism, though it is only stubborn pride.

But now let us consider the attitude of ordinary Soviet citizens who had not struggled against totalitarianism. Gorbachev had flung open the prison doors and urged everyone to come out and build a new, democratic society together. Why did most people not feel grateful for that? It took me longer to understand them than the disgruntled Barking Dogs. But now I do understand them. This is the second explanation.

The answer finally came to me after I had heard liberals and former dissidents in Moscow predict that it would take between fifteen and fifty years for Russians to be able to live in a democracy. I considered that a terribly insulting thing to say about one’s own society. But Lyudmilla Alexeeva explained it to me in our interview. (See her photo, along with the director of the EU-Russia Centre.) She is an old lady now, having struggled as a Soviet dissident for many years. And now she is optimistic, for she believes that the mentality has been developing very quickly. The society is far from being democratic, but it is changing and within fifteen years people will be ready. She told me,

“It’s our way to democracy. It’s a long way, of course because we were a totalitarian country for three generations. It’s not so easy to forget it, you know. For Germany, for example, it was much easier because it was only twelve years. But we were a totalitarian country more than 70 years. We forgot the free way to live. ... Remember the first World War, revolution, civil war, Stalin’s terror, industrialization in Stalin’s time, the Second World War. In the Second World War we lost 26 million people. That’s the official figure; I would believe it’s much more.... We have democratic problems because those who were the best people were destroyed during the terror, during the wars, and so on.”

I started to ask, “The quality of the people around you?” She replied,

“Entirely changed. They are more vulnerable to fear now. Of course! Of course! ... Many features in our characters were formed by our tragic history. ..We will be a democratic country but we cannot do it so quickly. We cannot! Be more patient! ... In fifteen years, I believe we will reach democracy.... People now are very different from those in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, people couldn’t do anything for themselves. Either the state did something for the people or it wasn’t done at all. For example, I would like to have a good apartment. If the state didn’t give it to me, I could not have it. It was impossible. We lived in such a way for three generations. And when the Soviet Union was crushed, we were like kids. We didn’t know how to do anything.”

We were not speaking about Gorbachev in this conversation, and I doubt that Lyudmilla Alexeeva herself resents him; she is one of the most generous-spirited persons I have ever met. But later I kept recalling her words, which actually provided the second explanation for the widespread hatred of Gorbachev.

Suppose you had been in prison all your life. You would not know how to take care of yourself. If suddenly your jailer unlocked the door for you and your whole society, you would be afraid, knowing that chaos awaited you outside. The institutions were not ready for you to take care of your own needs. Gorbachev was that kind jailer, conferring freedom on people for whom it was unfamiliar. No wonder they hated him! In fact, their fear was well-founded. The Soviet economy was in a shambles, and genuine poverty followed the collapse of communism. This was not entirely the fault of Gorbachev; militarism had already depleted the country’s wealth, and his rapprochement with the West improved their prospects – but only after a terrible transition.

Bill Clinton’s campaign manager was right in ways that apply to Russia too: “It’s the economy, stupid!” A ruler’s popularity is determined, above all, by the financial well-being of his society. The most imminent danger after leaving the prison of totalitarianism was simple hunger. At some points during Gorbachev’s term of office, the world price of oil was $7 per barrel. Today it is $143. We should not be surprised that Putin is wildly popular and Gorbachev was not.

Should he have known better? Should he have realized the difficulty of the transition that he launched? Perhaps. And, had he known what lay ahead, should he have kept the prison door locked? Of course not! (I hope you agree with me.)

When I visit Moscow it is with a longer perspective than that of the Russians I meet. They are reacting to the immediate predicaments that they face, day by day, and they are grateful to any ruler who makes their lives more comfortable and prosperous, even if less free. For me, the question is a more general one. I want to know how to oust any totalitarian state, wherever it arises — or, in the case of today’s Russia — an authoritarian state. Political tyranny is far harder to overcome than an economic downturn.

The Russians have learned little about freeing a society from the trap that is totalitarianism. And today this question does not interest them as it interests me. I want democracy for them. They do not wish it for themselves. It’s too difficult. But I think Medvedev may be a genuine democrat. During his first two months in office, he has been unlocking lots of doors again. And in fifteen years — who knows?

Bulgakov’s Haunts

Today is Saturday and I have been invited to the countryside, where unless it rains we will inspect the country estate of some long-dead nobleman. The past remains especially present here in Russia. I think it is because Moscovites have so much empty time to fill while out of doors and are surrounded by architectural reminders. They spend about three hours every day traveling, or even more if you count the lengthy trips to their dachas.

I think it’s a pity. Traveling is just time that is subtracted from the real projects of living. You cannot do anything useful or even think constructive thoughts while walking across cobblestones or wiggling your car through traffic or jumping onto the next step of a fast-moving escalator without falling. So Moscovites must live even shorter lives, for practical purposes, than those already statistically abbreviated by poor health and alcohol.

I think Russian men live to the age of 65, or even less, and if you take off 3 hours per day from that, it must reduce their usable life expectancy to about 62.5 years. It would seem to me that the most important thing to do for Russia would be to reduce travel time, but Moscovites seem not to think about that. They are willing to go to their dachas at least once a week, and to take taxis or subways great distances for their meals. There are excellent subways, but they don’t stop as close together as the ones in Paris or New York. I think the cheapest solution would be to put up fast cable cars above the street instead of digging more subways. The subways here are extremely deep; they served as air-raid shelters during World War II.

Another thing is the stress of the traffic! I have to give credit to these free-lance taxi drivers: they have amazing skills. If you stand beside the street with your hand out, approximately every fifth car will stop and roll down the window on the passenger side. You negotiate about where you want to go and at least half the time, they agree to take you there – for half the price of a “real” taxi. These entrepreneurs are all male, of course, and they demonstrate their acrobatic prowess by zipping fast through the tangle of cars with only two or three inches to spare. There are no relevant lanes and no speed limits, and often all the cars have to make a U-turn together. Many streets are ten or more lanes wide – though the concept of a lane is lacking – and drivers tailgate recklessly.

Pedestrians cross these streets by tunnels. There is a logical reason why such cabs are called “bombers.” But the idea is a good one. We in Toronto should start sharing rides with people so readily, for the sake of our climate – which is not, however, the motive of these bomber guys.

Unfortunately, women traveling alone never use such services and even consider a regular taxi risky. And for everyone, the tension must be bad for the health of the population. I try to remind myself to breathe smoothly and unclench my fists. Fortunately, I don’t think my blood pressure is a problem, but the experience can’t extend anyone’s life expectancy.

The bomber drivers seem to cover the whole spectrum of society, and their cars vary just as widely in age and national origin. Our last driver was Turkish, Ignat guessed, and his car was a rattletrap, but a trip offered three days ago was by a distinguished lawyer with a beard and a fine car.

His eight-year-old grandson sat in the back seat with me, wearing a spiffy tuxedo and ponytail. To my embarrassment, he had to inform me that he was a boy, not a little girl, and a violinist to boot. They were returning home after a concert where he had played Bach, Vivaldi, and Mozart. We talked in English about his career plans while up in front the grandfather told Ignat that the boy is a genius, not only as a musician but also as a mathematician. Grandfather himself had been involved in a famous case twenty-five years ago, defending a dissident who was persecuted. Ignat was surprised that I didn’t know about the case, since it had been covered in the world newspapers of that period. The lawyer has quit his practice since then, but he was not afraid to speak frankly about political matters. Nothing has got that bad, fortunately.

Besides the traffic, the most spectacular thing about Russia (and also Ukraine) is the proliferation of magnificent restaurants. Ignat is afraid to take me to the average fast-food joint (he believes we would get food poisoning) so I am sure that my sample is far from representative, but I have been eating superb food every day – usually in a restaurant with a spectacular décor. Two days ago it was a Belgian restaurant that offered about 100 Belgian beers in a supposedly ancient monastery. Our waitresses were nuns, wearing burgundy habits.

The next day I was invited to lunch at the Kremlin – or rather to a new tower that had been built outside the walls, in precisely the same style as a real Kremlin tower. My molded vegetable salad was served by another waitress wearing eighteenth-century garb and I chose the Siberian borsht instead of the Ukrainian one. I take borsht often, sometimes twice a day.

Yesterday after I had interviewed Vladimir Petrovsky, he told me that our café was a famous one that the novelist Bulgakov had frequented. Indeed, the opening scenes in his book “The Master and Margarita” were set here.

Ignat then led me a few blocks to Bulgakov’s house, which is a café now, but it was full already. People sat at small tables listening to a guitarist play and sing, so we wandered through the other rooms where Bulgakov’s belongings and photos were displayed. He was writing during the NEP people and into the 1930s, at a time when everything had been free.

He was the son of a noble philosopher who became an existentialist – at least if you count the kind of religious existentialism that was common in Russia before Sartre turned the movement in the direction of atheism. I came home and started reading The Master and Margarita, which I had bought two weeks ago but had not opened yet.

I loved the interview with Vladimir Petrovsky. He thinks about the world as a whole system, instead of a set of contradictory nations and empires.

He was the under-secretary general of the United Nations, specializing in disarmament and for nine years he ran the UN in Geneva. Now he sees that a totally different set of problems have arisen and require different approaches from everyone. He believes that the dialogues between East and West have diminished, with serious consequences, and liked my idea of trying to revive them. The earlier institution such as Pugwash, IPPW, and the Dartmouth Group may still exist, but lack energy. He thinks that instead of trying to revitalize them, we need new structures that don’t remind people of the Cold War.

I said I’d try to organize an international forum for the public on nuclear weapons in Toronto, and he wants to stay in touch and work on that with me. I think of it as outreach to the public, which has lost any awareness of the nuclear danger, and he thinks of it as a brainstorming session for new ideas. Both can happen. I don’t know whether DFAIT still gives money for such events. I’ll try.

Petrovsky also said that he is concerned about climate change – which pleased me immensely, since few of the Russians I have met do believe it is dangerous and caused by human activity. (Even the guy at Greenpeace took that position, along with Sergei Kapitza, who has the country’s most popular TV show on science) and yet, yesterday the official spokesman of the Russian government changed his tune and now says it is real – this presumably because the new president Medvedev had taken that line on the same day in Europe.

Medvedev even issued a DECREE: that Russia will reduce its carbon emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. Being a dictator sure does simplify things! On the same day, the Democrats had to withdraw a much weaker bill from Congress because the coal producers and gasoline users would make it impossible for it to pass. On the other hand, a decree may not amount to anything real at all; it may have been issued only to impress Europeans with Russia’s good intentions.

Petrovsky is an exception. I am troubled by discussions with so many people who are struggling with conspiracy theories. Russians always talk about “provocations” and “provocateurs” – and no doubt there are such people. But once you start suspecting others of having hidden motivations, there is no end to the kind of paranoia you can get trapped inside. The only solution, of course, is to try to make others trust you by consistently telling the truth.

These people have a history in which it was often terribly dangerous to tell the truth, and equally dangerous to take others at face value. And as Lyudmilla Alexeyeva said, it is going to take a long time for Russians to get over their sixty-year-long history (much longer than Nazi Germany).

They are unable to do things for themselves because they were always supposed to wait for the state to tell them what to do and provide for their needs. Now they are learning how to take some initiative, chiefly through experience with civil society organizations. She says they are learning fast.

Regrettably, I see the other problem as worse – the suspicion that hidden motivations are behind everything that is going on, and that there are agents who actually orchestrate situations so as to trap others into doing things that they would not want to do. I talked to an FSB agent (actually, a nice guy) who claimed that almost all of the dissidents were informers because they had been intimidated into serving as provocateurs. Imagine believing that your enemies (or even your friends, against their will) would blow up people on their own side so as to pin the blame on YOU. That stuff does happen in Russia, and people mistrust each other because they know it happens.

But of course the Russians how have excellent reasons for mistrusting the US because of the encroachment of NATO and missile defence systems,not to mention Iraq. They see all US positions as reflecting a desire to harm Russia. Kosovo’s independence, for example, was granted just because Russians identify with the Serbs and feel wounded when the Albanians are considered as entitled to self-determination. (I myself don’t like the idea of granting Kosovo independence, but mostly because I think separatism is generally a bad idea, with bad consequences, but for Russians, the reason is that American hates Russia. So there’s a real revival of Cold War thinking here, even among people who are struggling with the ideas and trying not to get deluded. If Obama becomes president he may make the US more trustworthy, but it will still take a while for Russians to overcome their fears.

I meet mostly liberal people, but I can see how hard it is for them, since their habit is to look for hidden motivations. I had a dream the other night about it. There were wires under the carpet, all linked together in a tangle of nodes which could not be sorted out.

Yet there are conspiracies even in the West. Jeez—probably there is some real basis for doubting the official explanation of the September 11 tragedies. But I just don’t want to get into that kind of mentality because there’s no way to put an end to it once it has taken over your mind. I think it may take as long as Alexeyeva says for Russians to be straightforward, trustworthy and trusting people.

Now I must get ready to go to the countryside.

Letter from Moscow

Tonight I will have dinner with a leader of the brave “Mothers of Soldiers” committee. I’m doing one or two interviews almost every day. Yesterday it was Yuri Dzibladze, a democracy and human rights organizer, and Andrei somebody at Greenpeace. Before that it was Sergei Kapitza and Mikhail Lebedev of Pugwash, and before that Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of Yabloko Party. There had also been wonderful conversations with the stalwart old dissidents Lyudmilla Alexeeva (pictured here), Sergei Kovalev, and a current dissident Lev Ponomarov (who was seen on TV being beaten upon on the street by cops a few weeks ago). And a bunch of younger political activists. Dmitry Furman was wonderful. Georgi Arbatov is sick (he just turned 85), and so is Andrei Kortunov, but there will be others. Keep your fingers crossed about an interview with Gorbachev. It didn’t happen this week but may next week.

By now the overall picture is very clear; the variations that I observe are just differences in personal perspective. The current Russia government is even worse than I had expected – everyone tells me so -- and I already knew fairly well what to expect. But there are optimists and pessimists. The optimists (notably Alexeeva) believe that democracy may come in 15 years. Most say at least fifty. All of them base their greatest hope on the emergence of civil society organizations, though these are actually going under instead of gaining strength. Everyone says things are getting worse, not better, but a couple of people cherish some slight hope that Medvedev may be an improvement over Putin. Alexeeva says that the mentality here is developing much faster than it did in other countries. She points for example to the existence of a car owners association, which started originally to protest against a government plan to ban right-hand drive cars, which are common in the far East because they are imported from Japan. Now the association is protesting against the practice of turning off the street signal lights to let high officials drive through a clearing in the traffic. That’s a truly political action – but so far it has not got anywhere. We have been stalled in traffic repeatedly near the White House or the Kremlin – once for 1.5 hours during the evening traffic jam.

I am actually hoping to interview someone who is an apologist for the Putin regime. Probably it cannot be Yevgeny Velikhov, who will be away, but that would break my heart anyhow. He was one of the most passionate disarmament advocates, extremely effective under Gorbachev, and now he heads some big GONGO (government-organized NGO) designed to draw attention away from genuine civil society organizations. The members are elite citizens appointed by Putin, representing nobody. Mainly the way of repressing NGOs is to choke them with bureaucratic paper work and incessant inspections, plus taxing them until they cannot get anything done.

Nobody calls the system totalitarian – only authoritarian – though it ranks six on Freedom House’s seven-point scale of freedom, where China ranks at the very bottom, seven. Everyone knows about Freedom House. So far, the Internet is still quite free, and there are a couple of radio stations and one newspaper. No decent TV, though. By command, the TV shows are mostly Comedy Club and comic family sitcoms. Sergei Kapitza still runs his science show, though. I call him Russia’s David Suzuki, but unlike Suzuki he is never critical of the regime and has no fire in his belly at all. I sat in his wonderful old dacha (near Stalin’s country home) interviewing him while a plasma-screen TV set was showing a handsome couple having sex. Eventually he got up and switched it off, but without seeming at all perturbed by the content. (His wife had mildly observed that it’s unfortunate they show these programs in the daytime when children can watch.)

Nobody in Russia is at all worried about climate change. Certainly neither Kapitza nor the Greenpeace guy, who both said that it may turn out to be advantageous for Russia, which is such a cold country! And I have tried to buy copies of Al Gore’s DVD but it is nowhere available, nor was it for sale in Kiev. I am told that both Pugwash and IPPNW are “dead” in Russia and I evoked no interest when I reflected on ways of reinvigorating either one.

It is hard for me to gauge whether the anxieties that I observed are realistic or psychological pathologies. I am guided everywhere by a young couple who fear all kinds of possible dangers that I ignore. They always warn me to lock the door behind them when they leave and not open it to anyone until I have found out who is there. They will eat in almost none of the available restaurants (for sanitation reasons) and warn me against buying fresh food from the kiosks that line the street. There are some real grounds for caution, of course. The girl was assaulted and almost raped two months ago when she was returning home at 4 am through a wooded, secluded path. I saw the path and think that Toronto women would also avoid walking there in the middle of the night. But her assailant was a Central Asian, and this event has turned her boyfriend into an openly avowed racist. He was spouting off about it yesterday in ways that made me cringe.

This computer loses Internet connection every day, and it takes half an hour to fix it. I have asked him why he won’t take it to the shop but he says it was purchased by his stepfather, who would have to go with him and take his passport. Then they would take all day and not really fix it anyhow. So he has wasted 30 or 40 hours since I’ve been here fiddling with the computer. Is that realistic? I don’t know.

In other ways, however, he is liberal --keenly interested in politics but he will not join any group because it would harm his career. One day he says he will – but he has to choose very carefully when to do so, since he believes he can make no contribution now and might get beaten up or killed for any public activity. He wishes he could teach history in high school (he has an MA in history from Moscow State University) but says it’s impossible to earn a living that way in Russia, and that there are no professional jobs, so he will go into business, though he knows he is not good at that kind of thing.

Now I’m going to try to phone Vladimir Petrovsky. I once interviewed him at the UN when he was under-secretary general for disarmament. He’s leaving for Geneva soon and I hope to see him before he leaves. It may sound as if I’m having a miserable time, but I’m actually enjoying it all immensely.

Illicit Ideas in Russia

I started coming to Russia in about 1982, during a particularly difficult period in the Cold War. The NATO countries were deciding to install new Intermediate Range Nuclear Missiles and nuclear cruise missiles in Europe in response to the Soviet placement of new SS20 missiles. Both of these developments increased the danger of nuclear war, whether by design or misunderstanding. A great disarmament movement was going on in the West to prevent this exacerbation, and I was totally engaged in it. I had established a voluntary information service to help coordinate the movement in Toronto, and had begun publishing a monthly newspaper, which soon became Peace Magazine. I still edit it.

Several times I was invited to Moscow as a guest of the Soviet Peace Committee, to participate in a dialogue about peace and disarmament issues. For some years thereafter, I kept coming about once a year, often in connection with other peace conferences in Europe organized by the European Nuclear Disarmament movement (END), Pugwash, or the Helsinki Citizens Assembly.

My initial host, the Soviet Peace Committee, was what might be called a GONGO today – a government-organized NGO, and the Soviet participants inevitably spoke in favor of Soviet policies, but guests were free to speak our own minds. Many Soviet citizens donated regularly to this organization, which was therefore vastly better funded than any peace group in the West.

I was aware, however, that there was at least one peace group in Russia that was a counterpart to our own in being completely independent. This was called the Trust Group – short for “The Group to Establish Trust Between the USSR and USA.” However, its members were not allowed to sit in the conferences and discuss policy issues with us, but indeed were severely persecuted for their activities. They might be beaten up on the street; they might lose their professional jobs; they might even be framed for a crime and sent to a labor camp or a mental hospital for a lengthy sentence. Most Trust Group members did not like to be called “dissidents,” and in fact they did not publicly criticize official Soviet policies, but undertook activities that would seem uncontroversial in the West. For example, they once organized a display of peace art, but the police broke it up and confiscated all the paintings.

To do their trust-building work, the group needed contact with Westerners, and I never failed to visit them when I came to Moscow. They rightly maintained that unless citizens of our two countries had some reliable contacts on the other side, we would be too suspicious to support negotiated solutions to threatening military build-ups.

I think that’s still an important insight. Contact and familiar relationships are essential for good, accurate understandings of each other, though authoritarian governments try to suppress such contacts in order to control the population. Hence, though the Soviet Peace Committee officials were perfectly prepared to let us foreigners argue against their positions, they absolutely objected to our contacting members of the Trust Group. Indeed, after the KGB learned of the friendships I had developed with Trust Group members, they expelled me from the Soviet Union in 1985. I did not come back for six years.

By then Gorbachev’s reforms were well under way, and the members of the original Trust Group had also been expelled, so that their group no longer existed. The Soviet Peace Committee had changed too. Its building had been turned into an Italian restaurant, most of the officials had taken academic jobs, and the remaining one or two presented themselves in interviews to me as heartfelt democrats.

By that time, 1991, I had already been conducting interviews in preparation for a book about the transition that Gorbachev was bringing to Russia. I understood that it was greatly stimulated by conversations with foreigners, and I also wanted to explain how alternative ideas had developed in hidden places for many years before they could be freely expressed in public.

The question had captured my attention during the first visit to Russia, when I had found several Soviet officials with whom I had conversed to be unaccountably receptive to the ideas that we Western peaceniks expressed in the meetings. For example, I had mentioned in one intervention some new facts about the “permissive action links,” the safety lock system that prevented the unauthorized explosion of Western nuclear warheads. I had acquired this information only from a newspaper or TV show, since I was no expert on the subject, and I was flabbergasted when a senior military analyst followed me outside, shook my hands warmly, and assured me with effusive gratitude that my news would be carried forward and discussed at the highest levels. Why was I taken more seriously by these Soviet officials than I would have been in Canada or the United States?

In another intervention at that forum, I spoke about the importance of human rights, politely noting that public opinion in the West would continue limiting the prospects of military treaties so long as Soviet citizens were known to lack the freedom that we ourselves enjoy. To my surprise, a Soviet official approached me privately after the dialogue and congratulated me for my insight, urging me to keep speaking about this matter on every occasion, for the topic is immensely important.
Two of my Canadian friends recounted similar experiences. They had spoken frankly in favor of democracy or freedom of speech in a dialogue, and later had received silent but unmistakable signals of approval, such as winks, broad smiles, and thumbs-up.

What was this about? Respectable Soviet citizens were being beaten or jailed merely for expressing support for peace and disarmament, whereas we foreign peaceniks were being treated as secret allies for overtly criticizing the official practices of the Soviet state. What I decided to explore, therefore, was the distribution and sources of illicit ideas among the Soviet population.

As I interviewed people over the next several years in Russia, I was surprised to discover that people who agreed in their opposition to their country’s policies often disagreed strongly on matters of tactics. I considered that unfortunate, since both groups had much to contribute.

I began to classify Soviet individuals within four categories, which I will treat here as a distinct typology, though of course any one person might not fit exactly into any one of these types.

I distinguished four groups: Ordinary citizens, Hard-liners, Barking Dogs, and Termites. I cannot quantify their numbers with any precision. However, in 1985 there were about 287 million Soviet citizens. Most of them we can call “ORDINARY CITIZENS.” Regardless of what views they held, they did not expect them to count and they generally complied with the expectations of authorities. Of these 287 million only a few hundred were overtly dissident – the BARKING DOGS who protested against injustice and foolish government practices, usually without expecting to achieve any real changes thereby.

Also, there were approximately 20 million members of the Communist Party, the great majority – probably 19 million -- of whom supported the official policies. We can call them HARD-LINERS.

However, according to various estimates, there were about one million party members who were dissatisfied with Soviet militarism and political repression, and who wanted democratic reforms. They did not believe it possible to achieve these reforms by expressing their opinions publicly, for they thought that change could only come from above, but they tried quietly to work within the system to prepare for the changes that they expected would eventually come.

We can call this category TERMITES. Like their namesake, they burrowed silently within the power structure. It was the Termites who greeted Western peace activists and supported our ideas. Termites existed in the Party, the armed forces, and the institutes. Knowing that it was dangerous to publicly oppose those in power, they secretly went about their work, generating ideas that might be adopted later, for they supposed that change could arise only from above. Some such private unorthodoxies had been going on at least since the time Khrushchev delivered his famous denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. They became more numerous after the tragic crackdowns in Hungary and especially after the Prague Spring in 1968. The goal of the termites was to outlive their reactionary opponents. Indeed, many of them became the originators of perestroika later on, but they would not have had enough opportunity to develop adequate proposals when their time did arrive.

The Barking Dogs were the dissidents – discontented Russians who believed that true change must arise from the grass roots by changes in public opinion and refusal to comply with immoral or unreasonable orders. These citizens were natural-born democrats. They considered that everyone is obliged to take responsibility for his own actions and tell the truth, whether or not others like what one says.

Oddly, there was almost no contact between the Barking Dogs and the Termites, nor did they have much respect for each other. (One dissident in an interview with me referred to the other group as ‘whores.’) The limited amount of communication that flowed between those two groups was conveyed largely by third parties -- notably certain international peace activists who maintained contact with both sides.
The Dissident community of the 1970s demanded, above all, that human rights should be respected. The basis for their claim was the Soviet Union’s acceptance of an important new document, the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords. Few Westerners realized how much it meant to those living in repressed Eastern bloc societies.

After several years of negotiations, the Soviet government had successfully obtained an important concession as a trade-off for signing the Accords. The Western signatory states agreed not to challenge the boundaries of any European states that had been established after World War II. If this concession disappointed the peoples who had been incorporated into the Soviet empire, they could at least take comfort from the Soviet acquiescence to a number of humanitarian articles that promised::

• equal rights for ethnic groups; the freedom to choose one’s place of residence and to leave and reenter one’s country;
• freedom of conscience; the right to know one’s rights and to act in accordance with them;
• the inadmissability of cruelty or the degradation of political prisoners’ dignity;
• freedom of information and contact among people;
• the right to a just trial;
• socio-economic rights; and
• the improvement of controls over compliance with the humanitarian articles.
•
The Helsinki Final Act proved useful to the internal Dissidents, who promptly organized groups to monitor the Soviets’ compliance to its terms. In 1976, Andrei Sakharov called the press conference at which Yury Orlov announced the creation of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. This small organization inspired the creation of similar groups throughout the Helsinki region, which comprised all the states that signed the Accords.

The Moscow branch would become the main node of communication among the other Helsinki groups that formed in major cities throughout the republics. Orlov, a physicist who had been exiled from Moscow for 15 years as a penalty for previous expressions of dissent, intended to take the Soviet authorities at their word, for the document called upon the citizens of the signatory countries to help their governments observe its terms. Human rights activists were ready, as citizens, to do precisely that. However, instead of becoming recognized as “helpers” supporting the Soviet government to mend its ways, the Moscow monitors continued to be some of its most prominent victims.

One important task that the Helsinki Watch organization undertook was to expose the mis-use of psychiatry as a means of political repression..The Helsinki Watch organization collected proof concerning these abuses and appealed to the international community of psychiatrists.

A key objective of dissidents was to live much as if they were free, thereby setting a public example for others and, by making conspicuous the abuse heaped on them, show that the state held power by violence, not by the glad consent of the governed. Instead of keeping their activities secret, Dissidents sought publicity and got it, with the help of the Western press.

The most famous dissident was the father of the Soviet Hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, who was kept under house arrest in Gorky with his wife but who returned to Moscow in time to serve briefly as a distinguished political leader before the Soviet Union was dissolved. He had gained so much respect by then that almost everyone wanted to be considered a dissident.

Later, several important organizations were formed to keep bright the memories of people who had been persecuted throughout the darkest days of totalitarianism. The most important of these groups is Memorial, which not only keeps lists and documents about the victims of the Gulag, but to some extent defends people today against new forms of injustice.

GOOD PLACES FOR TERMITES
In the dark days, there were certain places where free discussion was somewhat more possible, and in these locations new ideas were explored. In academia, the exact sciences were not suppressed as much as the social sciences, with certain scandalous exceptions, such as the official protection of Lysenko, the persecution of the plant breeder Vavilov, and the limitations imposed on the great physicist Petr Kapitza by Beria.

Access to certain books was granted strictly on a “need to know” basis, and questionable books were kept in a closed section of the library. People working there were able to have especially stimulating conversations because of belonging to this privileged group. Later there was a series of numbered white books that were distributed to a list of only 300 high level Party officers. This exclusiveness made them especially popular. People loved to boast at private parties about the books they had read from this list.

For some years, Academic City, located in Novosibirssk, was a place where social scientists were relatively free to pursue their studies, especially of economics and agriculture. In Moscow there was IMEMO, where some bold studies were done, especially analyzing the comparative military strength of the USSR and the United States.

In Moscow also there was a secret, luxurious, isolated centre called the Institute of Social Sciences, where the students were Party cadres from Third World countries. They were not allowed to socialize with ordinary Russians, but lived in isolation Yet because they were familiar with the real outside world, their instructors had to give them more accurate information than they could have mentioned to students in other academic institutions.

The most important center that developed Termites was in Prague. The Soviet staff of that publication Problems of Peace and Socialism whom I interviewed (including Gennady Gerasimov) recalled it as the best university they ever could have attended. Everything was open for them to read and discuss there, and they formed networks that supported each other throughout the rest of their careers. The staff there included Rumyantsev, Shakhnazarov, Gerasimov, and Ambartsumov, plus:

Georgy Arbatov (Academician, Member of the Central Committee, Head of the U.S.A. and Canada Institute and close adviser to Andropov, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev);

Anatolii S. Chernyayev (who would become Gorbachev's aide);

Ivan T. Frolov (later an editor of Kommunist and also of Pravda, Frolov became a leading specialist in environmental issues);

Timur Gaidar (a reformist economist whose father was a famous writer of children's stories and whose son, Yegor, would become the architect of “shock therapy” economics under Yeltsin);

Richard Kosolapov (later Editor of Kommunist and one of the few people on this list who could not be called a reformist);

Yuri Karyakin (a writer, social commentator);

Otto R. Latsis (reformist historian who wrote a book about Bukharin. He was repressed, then elected to the Central Committee of the CPSU);

Merab Mamardashvili, (a former classmate and friend of Gorbachev's at Moscow State University, who would become an eminent philosopher);

Konstantin I. Milkulski (who would become an academician);

Marina Pavlova-Silvanskaya ( A journalist with important contacts to Eastern European dissidents, especially Polish Catholics);

Vsevelod B. Rybakov (a consultant in the International Department of the Central Committee, who then worked for President Gorbachev);

Aleksandr S. Tsipko (who was later to work at International Department of the Central Committee, and as Deputy Director of Bogomolov’s institute);

Alexander I. Volkov (who would later work at Gorbachev Foundation);

Yegor V. Yakovlev (a journalist who would become head of Moscow News, then head of Russian television after the 1991 putsch attempt;

Vadim Zagladin (Specialist on East-West relations who would become first deputy head, International Department of the Central Committee, part-time adviser to President Gorbachev).

Gorbachev himself never had an opportunity to work at Problems of Peace and Socialism. However, he was a “Termite” par excellence, and had been exposed to the ideas of Eurocommunism. From his university days his roommate was Zdenek Mlynar, a dissident Czech law student who shared his commitment to democratic socialism. Mlynar was active in the Prague Spring and later in the Velvet Revolution. The two men remained best friends throughout their lives and published a fascinating transcript of some of their conversations later as a book. I think it is the most revealing glimpse of Gorbachev’s true brilliance.

INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS
For many years, the opportunity to travel abroad was a rare treat permitted to only high-level Party members. There were, however, several international organizations that attracted serious members of the power structure. In these private conversations opinions were shaped in ways that came to be reflected in Soviet policy.

Pugwash was an especially significant venue for discussions of military policy, especially regarding nuclear weapons. In July 1966 Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and nine other eminent scientists had signed a manifesto calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons and proposing that scientists should assemble in a conference to consider the perils caused by these weapons. The industrialist Cyrus Eaton responded by holding such a meeting at his seaside home in Pugwash, Nova Scotia for 22 scientists. This organization has continued functioning until the present. Soviet scientists valued the opportunity for free discussions, which on several occasions led them to change their minds.

One example of this influence involved the discussion of the anti-ballistic missile treaty (ABM). In the mid-1960s, both the US and USSR were considering creating a system for defending against incoming ballistic missiles. Soviet Academician Millionshchikov , who had high status politically as well as scientifically, attended some Pugwash meetings where Western members persuaded him to oppose the idea. As a result, the ABM Treaty was concluded in1972. It helped restrain the nuclear arms race until President George W. Bush withdrew from it and is now planning a missile defence system, to be based in Poland and the Czech Republic.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War was another significant network. It consisted of doctors all around the world who were worried about the impossible health consequences of a nuclear war. The founding co-presidents of the organization were Bernard Lown and Yevgeny Chazov, two cardiologists who had long known each other professionally. Chazov was the attending physician for the Soviet leaders, with whom he could discuss these topics. However, it was mostly Lown who seems to have had the most impact. He kept pressing Gorbachev to adopt a disarmament approach that involved taking “unilateral initiatives” rather than attempting to seek equal concessions from the US negotiators before making any commitment. Lown claimed that the US would reciprocate with comparable concessions, and the result might be something of an “arms race in reverse,” with each party following the example set by the other in reducing its weapons. (Unfortunately, the US was not as quick to reciprocate as Lown supposed and some Rusians reasonably wonder today whether Gorbachev did not give away too much without getting a commitment, say, for the US not to expand NATO.)

LATER DEVELOPMENTS
After being deported, I waited six years before returning to the Soviet Union, after which time I returned every year or two until 1997 to interview people about the changes, and then, after another hiatus of eleven years, today in 2008. During my absence the coup took place; the Soviet Union was dissolved; people fell into extreme poverty; the state industries were privatized and then essentially stolen by a few oligarchs;;Yeltsin shelled the parliament; stole some elections and a lot of money, then appointed Putin in exchange for amnesty from prosecution. Russia waged two wars against Chechnya. The price of oil increased enough to make Moscow rich and Putin popular; and the budding democracy was replaced by authoritarianism. Russia’s political future appears bleak. There are renewed tensions between it and the West, some of which must be blamed mainly on the United States. The missile defence plan, the expansion of the European Union and NATO, the recognition of Kosovo as an independent country, plus of course the attack on Iraq, all have worsened the prospects for peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

But to me the saddest trend since the Soviet Union ended is that democracy and human rights are declining in popularity, both in Russia and even in the West. Democratization takes place in waves. There have been three, and now we are into a period of decline after the post-communist upsurge in democratization.

Where twenty years ago there had been numerous personal contacts between Western peace activists and Soviet citizens, these have declined. In part this is because everyone is now free to travel independently, so there is no special privilege involved in doing so. Also, Pugwash and IPPNW meetings do not appear so urgently necessary as before. (This is a mistaken impression, for actually, nuclear weapons are as threatening today as ever, though few people realize that fact.)

But why the ambivalence toward democracy? Western governments and foundations are as committed to assisting democracy as ever before. There are the Soros and the MacArthur Foundations, plus government funding agencies in the US, Norway, Germany, Britain, and several other countries. These are not, however, trusted in the way that private personal visits to the Trust Group, Pugwash meetings, or IPPNW conferences had been. Instead, these foundations are large bureaucracies, administered by a paid professional staff who work from nine until five, then go home. Foreign funding is often helpful, but it’s no substitute for personal, informal contacts and discussions.

Moreover, the upsurge of nonviolent pro-democracy groups that actually caused the ouster of a dictator has raised fears in Russia that an Orange Revolution will occur here too. To forestall that, Putin’s government has made it nearly impossible for NGOs to receive foreign money for purposes that are in any obvious sense political.

In fact, there is no genuine basis for apprehension about that possibility inRussia. Putin and his chosen successor are too popular for that, however undeservedly. . Besides, “Color revolutions “are not conducted by mercenaries, but instead by citizens who have their own reasons for wanting a democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy does not fund political parties, but only sponsors such democratic capacities as exit polls, trainings for election monitors, and civil society organizations that help stimulate public awareness and participation.

Nevertheless, many liberals in the West remain troubled by the misiguided American attempt to “export democracy” to Iraq. As a result, the notion of “democracy promotion” has acquired a sinister meaning. Because of this ambivalence, even the protection of human rights is often seen now as an infringement or imposition.

But the Termites were wrong: change often does come from below. In fact, Adrian Karatnycky and Peter Ackermann have carried out a thorough analysis of the 67 cases of democratic transition that had been followed by Freedom House over a 33 year period. They found that “people power” movements do matter, because nonviolent civic forces are a major source of pressure for decisive change in most transitions. In 48 percent of the cases, nonviolent popular fronts were highly active, often steering the changes. Such nonviolent revolutions were far more likely to still be democratic five years or more later, unlike the case with “top-down” transitions that were launched and led by elites.

Notice that Russia, unlike some of the Central European states, received its democracy from the top down. Accordingly, we observe that today, on a seven-point scale of freedom, Russia’s rank is six, just slightly better than China’s, which is seven.
The message is, if Russia is to become truly democratic, it must be done by Russians themselves. Others can help, but the actual work needs to be stimulated by Barking Dogs.