Meanwhile, Tariq Ali looks at Iraq

Fred Halliday tells a story about the divergent trajectories he and his old friend and comrade, Tariq Ali, have taken:

Tariq and I have known each other for more than 40 years. We were students together in the ’60s. We were active in the opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. And we’ve continued to cross paths in the British Left context.

About 20 years ago I said to Tariq that God, Allah, called the two of us to His presence and said to us, “One of you is to go the left, and one of you is to go to the right.” The problem is, He didn’t tell us which was which, and maybe He didn’t know Himself. And Tariq laughed. He understood exactly what I was saying, and he didn’t dispute it.

Despite the divergence, though, Ali shares a sense of pessimism about future developments:

In my opinion, the Kurdish areas in the north will separate and come under Israeli/American protection. A major part of the south will become an Iranian protectorate, while the middle will be dominated by the Saudis or by Syria. The times of an independent Iraq with its own territorial sovereignty are over. Like Afghanistan, the country is a veritable time bomb.

The whole interview, in French, is here.

Bernard Lewis looks backwards and forwards

Bernard Lewis, at a conference last summer, articulated (WAV) his pessimism about the future:

As you must have gathered, I am somewhat ancient myself, and I have vivid recollections, still, of the year 1940…in England, a year which I began as a very junior teacher at the University of London, and ended as a very junior member of His Majesty’s Forces. I must say that I felt more confident, more optimistic, then, about the future of our struggle, than I do now. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to say this, but I feel I should speak the truth.

We were in a bad way. Our French allies had capitulated and, in effect, changed sides. The Soviet Union, which one might have thought of as an ally against fascism and Nazism, had become Hitler’s most faithful and loyal ally. Stalin collaborated in many ways very loyally with Hitler, up to and including the day that the German armies invaded Russia. He refused to believe his own intelligence, as well as what we provided about impending German invasions. (I have been told by Russians that Hitler was the only man that Stalin ever really trusted. And given the many affinities between the two, that’s understandable.) The United States was still neutral, with very strict neutrality laws, which President Roosevelt was able to modify to a limited extent by adopting the principle of Cash and Carry: we sell you anything you want, provided you pay cash and fetch it yourselves. At a later date, when the cash was exhausted, it was switched to Lease-Lend.

At that time, as I say, we were really and truly alone in a hostile world. But, I remember very vividly that we, generally -- the people of my generation, as well as our elders -- had no doubt that at the end we would triumph, that our cause would survive, and this enemy, though he seemed overpowering, so overwhelming at the time, would be defeated. I don’t have that confidence now…

To me and my eye Fred Halliday, although a generation younger, seems to have kept more even a keel than has Professor Lewis in our post-9/11 planet's murky and unsettled waters. But, looking around in the immediate aftermath of last summer's Israel/Hezbollah war, he saw dangers that reminded him of nothing less than 1914 in Europe:

It is in this multidimensional context, rather than in the memory of earlier bilateral, Arab-Israeli wars, that the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict must be seen. In the perspective of a longer history it can be said to resemble the European war that began in 1914 – another regional conflict long-planned even if suddenly, almost casually, detonated; and one which, once started, drew all the major states of the area into its wake, with dire consequences for all and catastrophic for many. It is a sobering comparison, but nothing in the current pattern of events across greater west Asia makes it extreme. There may be possibilities for progress in the present moment, but currently it is the dangers that are far easier to see.

So, if you happen to be a gloom-doomer, this is the time of the fat, and not the lean.

Meanwhile, in Iraq

Over the weekend it was reported that Americans seriously underestimate the death toll for Iraqi civilians. Nor does it seem likely that the situation will improve if US forces leave. In The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (p. 298), Barack Obama recounts a conversation with reporters during his visit to Baghdad in January of 2006, just after the news had come of Jill Carroll's kidnapping, and the killing of her driver:

Such violence wasn't unusual in Baghdad these days, they said, although Iraqis overwhelmingly bore the brunt of it. Fighting between Shi'ites and Sunnis had become widespread, less strategic, less comprehensible, more frightening. None of them thought that the elections would bring about significant improvement in the security situation. I asked them if they thought a U.S. troop withdrawal might ease tensions, expecting them to answer in the affirmative. Instead, they shook their heads.

"My best guess is the country would collapse into civil war within weeks," one of the reporters told me. "One hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dead. We're the only thing holding this place together."

Senator Obama is presently advocating that American forces withdraw from Iraq by 2008, but Michael Oren warns that

[y]ou cannot withdraw from Iraq and be confident that the enemy is not going to follow you. Because the enemy is going to follow you. America can’t detach from the Middle East because the Middle East is not going to detach from America.

There are other risks, too, inherent in this proposal. Nearly three years ago, Goh Chok Tong briefly discussed some of the likely consequences:

If the U.S., for some reason or other, has to depart unceremoniously from Iraq, that has a larger consequence than just the defeat of the U.S. in Iraq by the insurgents. All the terrorists in the world, all the rogue states, will know that the U.S. does not have stamina when it gets into a fight. And worse, your friends and allies will know that you lack staying power, and your friends will begin not to support you, because they are in this with you. Singapore is in Iraq with you. Because of the casualties, the American population is divided. It wants the government to pull the troops out. No friend of yours will stand behind you in the future. So, that's an important point which Americans have got to consider, that it's now no more a Republican battle, or Democratic battle. It is America's prestige which is at stake in the world. Right or wrong, you are in this already.

Sometimes an exit's an exit. But sometimes, Jean-Paul Sartre said it best.

Looking around, looking ahead

Graham Allison has peered into the dark glass, and he thinks (PDF) that the future's more likely radioactive than radiant:

Prior to 9/11, most Americans found the idea that international terrorists could mount an attack on their homeland and kill thousands of innocent citizens not just unlikely, but inconceivable. Psychologically, Americans imagined that they lived in a security bubble. Terrorist attacks, including those on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, occurred elsewhere. These beliefs were reinforced by the conventional wisdom among terrorism experts, who argued that terrorists sought not mass casualties but rather mass sympathy through limited attacks that called attention to their cause.

As we approach the fifth year without a second successful terrorist attack upon U.S. soil, a chorus of skeptics now suggests that 9/11 was a 100-year flood. They conveniently forget the deadly explosions in Bali, Madrid, London, and Mumbai, and dismiss scores of attacks planned against the United States and others that have been disrupted. The idea that terrorists are currently preparing even more deadly assaults seems as far-fetched to them as the possibility of terrorists crashing passenger jets into the World Trade Center did before that fateful Tuesday morning.

[…]

[M]y best judgment is that based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has said that he thinks that I underestimate the risk. In the judgment of most people in the national security community, including former Sen. Sam Nunn, the risk of a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil is higher today than was the risk of nuclear war at the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Reviewing the evidence, Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events like earthquakes, has concluded: "It's inevitable. I don't see any way that it won't happen."

Meanwhile, rather quietly, in places like Berkeley, people like Harold Palmer Smith, Jr. are "thinking the unthinkables":

I've asked my colleagues to think about the unthinkables, and they have done a very fine job. To be fair to the [Bush] administration, a lot of energy is being expended on making sure it doesn't happen. That's wise, but some effort has to go into thinking the unthinkable -- denying the denial. Universities particularly, broad-based universities like Berkeley, are the ideal place to carry on work like that. Furthermore, the Defense Department recognizes that and has sponsored this kind of work, and I think they're very pleased with their product.

[...]

There's no indication whatsoever until there's a blinding flash of light, the proverbial mushroom cloud, and worse yet, if the device is exploded on the ground, then there's all the debris from the weapon and the activated soil, concrete, glass that's around it. It is a big, black plume, and it will move in whatever direction the wind is moving. Those people who are in suburban housing have to move, because exposure to that plume for short periods of time, many minutes to an hour, could be lethal. Those people have to move.

But if we go back now to the Houston experience, everybody is going to be scared to death, and everybody will want to move, in which case nobody can move, which is what Houston showed. That means then that those in the plume will suffer radiation death, and I don't mean cancer thirty years from now, I mean death that day. So, we've formulated a problem which we call selective evacuation, and your guest a few days ago, Professor Smelser, has been a great leader in this. But it's quite simple. Those who will be in the plume should move, and those that would not be in the plume should seek shelter -- the deeper, the better. Unfortunately duct tape would be a good idea, to seal windows and things like that. One has to shelter oneself for periods of many hours, not many days.

So, it is not the Armageddon that we think of, or the nuclear exchange in the Cold War. This is one single nuclear weapon which will have death and devastation but only for perhaps a mile around the weapon, and then we fear this plume, and there, if we do it right and move the people who are in it and keep the other people sheltered, the number of fatalities goes way, way, way down. It's a very humanitarian undertaking, but it's fraught with the technology problems of how do you predict which way it's going to go, and more importantly, the psychological problems: how do you convince people to stay put with a nuclear explosion going off, or maybe equally difficult, how do you make people move, particularly since you may not have the communications system that you would like to have?

There are legal aspects here. There are political science aspects: who's in charge? There are organizational questions. The interdisciplinary nature of Berkeley and its surrounding national laboratories [makes it] ideal for us to look at [the problem]. Furthermore, [it's] better to have a university look at this terrible problem than for the government to do it, because the government then will be telling the people they honestly fear it's going to happen. There is, as we call it, plausible denial when a university and its academic thinkers take it on, but we're undertaking this project for the very reasons that you and I have been discussing.

What I'm interested in is who, if anybody, is really thinking through the chain of events in world politics likely to unfold in the days and weeks and months and years that will follow, if Graham Allison's fears flash blindingly true. (And I mean thinking them through seriously and responsibly, not that Three Conjectures nonsense.)

Bang

bang bang.


BANG.