New Statesman (U.K.)

Change We Can't Believe In | New Statesman

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:49:00 -0400

... but this will only, in the words of Steven Hill of the New America Foundation, "push fuel efficiency by 2020 to a level that European and Japanese cars ...

Jacob Hacker in the New Statesman (U.K.) | 'The Plot Against Liberal America'

Communications — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:05:00 -0400

"Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-centred at exactly the same time that American society has grown more unequal," the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written. The resources and organisational heft of the well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the organisational resources of middle-income Americans . . . have atrophied. The resulting inequality has greatly benefited the Republican Party while drawing it closer to its most affluent and extreme supporters..." LINK

New Statesman Cites Barry Lynn on Free Market, Grocery Sector

Communications — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:21:00 -0400

Groceries were always the best illustration of the merits of free markets. How ridiculous it would be if we decided collectively - by annual ballot, say, or by entrusting the decision to some Whitehall bureaucrat - which fruits and vegetables the shops should stock and in what quantities. A system whereby competing retailers offer individual consumers a daily choice is obviously better. Yet we are close to driving the free market out of the grocery sector...For example, as the all-party parliamentary group for small shops pointed out in a report last year (High Street Britain: 2015), retail is usually a good sector in which to start up your own business because the entry barriers are very low. Many budding entrepreneurs have used retail as a stepping stone to other sectors. An important form of self-help and enterprise is therefore disappearing. So is a source of innovation. Supermarkets now sell some organic food but I doubt they would have done so without the example of independent retailers.

Most notoriously, the supermarkets screw their suppliers. We sometimes forget that choice matters (or ought to matter) as much to us when we are selling as when we are buying. In the US,… more

The Man Who Changed His Mind

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Like an aristocrat in reduced circumstances, Francis Fukuyama carries around a title that is a source of both prestige and ridicule. The title belongs to his most notorious work, The End of History (1992). To be fair, the thesis that it describes is considerably wiser and more interesting than the title suggests, and Gramscian rather than Leninist in the style of its liberal capitalist teleology.

When The End of History was published, Fukuyama's views fitted perfectly with the general triumphalism that followed the end of the cold war. Now he has managed once again to insert himself into the American zeitgeist, but a very different one. His latest book displays no triumphalism, but chimes equally well with the growing sense of unease in America about where the Bush administration's reckless policies are leading the country. These are policies that Fukuyama formerly supported, but has since publicly disowned.

George W. Bush is currently facing the lowest public approval ratings of his presidency. According to recent polls, Americans want a Democrat-controlled Congress, as opposed to a Republican one, by a margin of 50 to 37 per cent; 67 per cent of Americans think that the Iraq war "was not necessary for the defence of the United States"; and 59 per cent believe that US resources would have been better used to pursue al-Qaeda and help Afghanistan.

Confronted with such figures, the propaganda bulwarks of the Bush administration have, in recent months, often vanished from view behind the mass of intellectuals and journalists trying to jump off them. A rabble of former public advocates of war in Iraq has belatedly condemned the US government for how that war has been conducted. In what The American Prospect has rightly termed "the incompetence dodge," they have explained that they could not have been expected to know how badly the Bush administration and the US military would carry out the brilliant strategy for which they had argued so shrilly in the run-up to war.

Another tactic has been to blame the war exclusively on the neoconservatives, as if it had not been supported by numerous public figures -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- from outside that movement. In fact, some of the harshest and most unscrupulous advocacy of the war came from intellectuals attached to the leadership of the Democratic Party. None the less, the charge against the neocons is fair enough in itself and, given the way things are going in Iraq, seems likely to sink them not just in the eyes of history but also, much more importantly (from the perspective of would-be intellectual apparatchiks), in the eyes of future government employers.

To be fair to Fukuyama, if he was among the first to call for war in Iraq, he was also among the first to jump ship. He advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein both before and immediately after 9/11, but as war approached he became increasingly worried. Before the 2004 elections he declared that, in view of Bush's record, he would not vote for him again as president.

Today, Fukuyama clearly hopes to play a leading role in shaping a new US foreign-policy consensus in the remaining years of Bush's lame-duck presidency and the agonisingly slow run-up to the next presidential elections. To that end, he has been instrumental in helping set up a new foreign-policy magazine,The American Interest.

In After the Neocons, based on lectures given at Yale University last year, Fukuyama formally breaks with the present neoconservative grouping, though not wholly with the neoconservative tradition: "I have concluded that neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support...rather than attempting the feckless task of reclaiming the term, it seems to me better to abandon the label and articulate an altogether distinct foreign-policy position."

Fukuyama's new book, as well as his claim to shape US foreign policy, therefore stands or falls by the answers to two linked questions. First, has he really broken with neoconservative thought or has he only cast off a "label" that has become politically inconvenient? Second, has he really crafted a foreign-policy position that is not only "altogether distinct" from that of the neoconservatives but offers something genuinely new and useful to the US debate?

The answer to the first question is that Fukuyama has significantly broken with the neocons. Although he continues to argue for "the use of American power to achieve moral purposes," his arguments also now contain traditional conservative elements -- scepticism, stewardship, prudence -- that have been absent from the neoconservative lexicon, at least since the end of the cold war.

Fukuyama strongly criticises the unreal expectations and the lack of knowledge and research that led to the dreadful failures of analysis and planning in Iraq. He makes a number of highly cogent criticisms of weaknesses that have in recent years affected the thinking not merely of neoconservatives, but of the US establishment as a whole.

Among these is what he calls the "universalisation of the experience of the east Europeans [during and after the collapse of the Soviet empire] to other parts of the world." This outlook ignores the unique circumstances that made possible the east European combination of rapid democratisation, successful economic reform and pro-US foreign policy.

Fukuyama also makes one very useful recommendation, in an area that has once again been neglected by the US establishment. This is the need to accompany attempts at spreading democracy with a vastly greater commitment to international development. As Fukuyama rightly says, development policy needs to be directed not only at strengthening economies, but also at building up the state institutions that are necessary for stable economic growth to take place and for democracies to take root in the long term. He calls this "realistic Wilsonianism."

All of this is eminently sensible, and indeed -- if I may say so with what I hope is pardonable bitterness -- many have been arguing these positions for considerably longer than Fukuyama. But when it comes to crafting a new US foreign policy, his work suffers from a severe disability -- one that affects all too many American commentators.

This is its lack of detail concerning controversial questions. Fukuyama wisely advocates a limited, "Bismarckian" approach to the exercise of US power. But what does that mean in practice when it comes to the defence of Taiwan, the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union and a choice of war or detente with Iran? Above all, what settlement does he advocate for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Fukuyama has a powerful intellect, and has been responsible for some interesting and valuable contributions to contemporary thought, especially concerning the origins and conditions of economic development. But until he and other leading public figures in the US are prepared to take tough and unpopular stands on critical issues, all the intellectual brilliance in the world won't save their country from sliding into one disaster after another.

Power Struggle

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

How did 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard become a continental superpower with global reach? The Dominion of War purports to answer this question. In their introduction, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton promise an alternative to self-congratulatory, jingoistic accounts of US history: "Ours begins with the proposition that war itself has been an engine of change in North America for the past five centuries and indeed has largely defined that history's meaning."

The authors argue that US expansion across the continent, and the naval expansion and US participation in the world wars that followed, were not responses to real geopolitical dangers, but the product of purely domestic forces of "imperial ambition." It is an argument that depends entirely on the premise that the United States has been free from genuine great-power threats for most of its history. If this were true, it would certainly be interesting, but Anderson and Cayton fail to acknowledge--far less refute--any of the evidence that undermines their arguments.

Two examples must stand for many others. The authors write: "Great Britain and the United States ceased to compete militarily after 1815, leaving Mexico, which declared its independence from Spain in 1821, as the last remaining obstacle to the domination of the United States in North America." This is misleading at best. Though the US and the British empire did not go to war after 1815, the geopolitical competition between the US and Britain lasted until the late 19th century, when the threat of imperial Germany produced the Anglo-American rapprochement.

After American settlers and their native allies broke off Texas from Mexico in 1836, Britain and France negotiated with Mexico in an attempt to contain the US by blocking the annexation of Texas. British negotiations with the Republic of Texas frightened Congress into annexing it in 1845. When, as a result, Mexico declared war on the US, Commodore Sloat of the US navy, under secret orders from President James K Polk, seized the port of San Francisco, very shortly before Admiral Seymour's British fleet sailed into the harbour.

The geopolitical purpose of the US annexation of Texas, the American portion of the Oregon territory, California and the south-west was to prevent the encirclement of the US by states governed by or allied with the British empire, and to control the major Pacific ports important for trade with Asia in a mercantilist world. Indeed, Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, sought to make California a British protectorate.

In a 520-page book, Anderson and Cayton somehow can find no space to discuss the Anglo-American rivalry that shaped US policy towards Texas, Oregon and California, except a single sentence that mentions the US-British Oregon Treaty of 1846. A close equivalent would be a treatment of the Cuban missile crisis as a bilateral conflict between the United States and Castro's Cuba, with no mention of the Soviet Union or the larger Soviet-American rivalry.

Nor can readers learn anything from Anderson and Cayton about the intense German-American naval rivalry that began in the 1880s and which underlay the Spanish-American war and the seizure by the US of Caribbean and Pacific islands, including the Philippines. The first mention of imperial Germany comes in connection with the Zimmermann Telegram of 1917, in which the Kaiser's government promised to support Mexican territorial claims on the US if Mexico went to war with the US as Germany's ally. One would never know, from reading The Dominion of War, that the fear that Germany would succeed in its ambition to control the Philippines was a prime motive in the bloody and inhumane American conquest of the former Spanish colony; that, in 1899, an Anglo-American force and a German-backed native government fought a brief battle in Samoa; that the chief of the German admiralty declared that Mexico's grant of coaling stations to Germany in 1907 would "be a thrust... into the very basis of the Monroe Doctrine;" and that "Operationsplan III," devised between 1898 and 1906, provided for German naval attacks against New York and Boston in the event of a war between Germany and America, while the German Pacific fleet, based in Asia and Latin America, would attack American and British shipping.

Everywhere, even in Africa, the World is Running out of Children

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 31 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

It is not hard to understand how most of us form the impression that overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. Turn on your television and you see asylum- seekers slipping across border fences, or throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East. We hear of child soldiers in Africa, the disappearing rainforests of Brazil and melting polar ice caps -- all caused by a human population that has nearly doubled in the past 40 years. We shake our heads when we read that, every year, the earth gains another 75 million human beings while losing approximately 27,000 plant or animal species.

Yet, beneath the surface of events, something else is happening. Though world population is still rising, it is doing so at barely half the rate of the late 1960s, and is now heading, many demographers believe, for absolute decline. The United Nations Population Division estimates that the number of infants and toddlers in the world (ages 0-4) will begin to contract within little more than ten years. The number of children under 15 will begin to decrease in little more than 20 years. This means, strange as it may sound, that all subsequent population growth will be due to increases in the numbers who survive to older ages. By 2050, there will be 35 million fewer children in the world than today, and 1.2 billion more people aged over 60.

Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria predict that total population will reach nine billion, mostly greying souls, by 2070 and then start to contract with compounding force. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically.

The new demographic currents in the world get stranger. During the second half of the 20th century, the median age in the UK increased by little more than three years, to 37.7. During the first half of the 21st century, according to UN forecasts, it will increase another 6.1 years. Yet this is nothing compared to the hyperageing occurring in Iran. There, before mid-century, the median age will increase by 20 years, according to UN projections, leaving more than half the population aged over 40.

Virtually anywhere one looks in the developing world -- Egypt, Iraq, Mexico -- the pattern is the same. Today, televised images from China show hordes of humanity crammed into tenements or camped out in railroad stations. Yet China's working-aged population will begin to shrink within ten years. By mid-century, 30 per cent of China's population will be aged over 60, and its total population could easily be less than it was in 1980. Even Africa is ageing at nearly double the rate of the US, and during the remainder of this century it will likely grow older than Europe is today.

Countries such as Italy and Japan at least got a chance to grow rich before they grew old. Most developing countries are growing old before they get rich.

Why is this happening? The primary reason is a dramatic fall in birth rates that began in western Europe in the 1930s and is now spreading to every corner of the globe. Since the start of the 1970s, while fertility rates were falling by 27 per cent in the industrialised countries, they were plummeting by 46 per cent in what the UN terms "less developed nations". The average woman in the world now bears just 2.69 children, down from more than 4.48 in 1970. That change is sufficient to cause rapid ageing of the population, particularly in regions where fertility has fallen most dramatically, such as the Middle East. If fertility rates continue to fall, as nearly all demographers believe they will, global population decline becomes almost inevitable.

It is easy to explain why children have become scarce in developed countries. In today's advanced economies, many people are not even done with school, much less established in a career, before their fertility (or their partner's) begins to decline. Then there is the rising cost of raising children. A recent survey found that parents in Britain spend on average

Power Mad

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 31 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

With the pomposity of an elder statesman who quotes himself as an authority, Niall Ferguson observes in his latest book:

Writing in the dying days of the Clinton administration, I Concluded -- somewhat heatedly -- that "the greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it". Little did I imagine that within nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of 11 September, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated.

Ferguson, who was recently made a fellow of the right-wing Hoover Institution, could hardly have chosen a more inappropriate time to volunteer to act as court historian of the American neo-cons. Of Iraq, he writes that the US's "colossal economic and military superiority was swift and cost few American lives: just 91 combat-related fatalities between the start of the war and President Bush's declaration of victory". Yet the US death toll is nearing 800, and most Americans now think the war was a mistake. Ferguson continues: "The war against Iraq therefore ended up being much more a war of humanitarian intent than anyone had anticipated." In the light of revelations of the systematic use of torture by American interrogators, such a conclusion looks ridiculous.

Ferguson raises, only to dismiss it, the view that the US is not an empire but a giant nation state that plays a hegemonic role in world politics. He cites Thomas Jefferson's description of the US as an "empire of liberty". But "the most brilliant British historian of his generation" (the Times) should be aware that, in Jefferson's era, "empire" had not acquired its modern connotation of one people ruling coercively over another, and merely meant "state", "domain" or "realm". Ferguson claims that the American annexation of Texas and California from Mexico demonstrates the imperial (as opposed to merely expansionist) nature of the US. However, all US states have entered the Union with privileges identical to those of the older states; the American south-west is not a colony or protectorate.

In the Orwellian newspeak of Ferguson, words and concepts mean whatever he wants. Thus, America's cold war alliance system in Europe and east Asia was an "empire", while 19th-century Britain's dirigiste colonial economic schemes were examples of "economic globalisation". Indeed, Ferguson uses "free trade" and its cognates to describe three very different things: free trade proper (voluntary trade among independent polities); coerced trade (like that imposed on 19th-century China and Latin American by the British empire); and statist imperial schemes (as were carried out in directly administered British colonies). You wonder how he can keep a straight face when describing the inhuman British coolie trade -- which, he concedes, "lay somewhere between free and unfree labour" -- as an example of the "international mobility of labour" fostered by a benevolent imperial Britain.

In the aftermath of the atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq, Ferguson's often-expressed fear that the US will not be tough enough on the subjects of its "empire" seems particularly shocking. But he goes still further, suggesting that US prisons be emptied to supply cannon fodder for the neo-British empire he proposes:

If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army

Bush's Martyrs

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

''Keep the soldiers happy," the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, on his deathbed, reportedly advised his successor. At the moment, this is a challenge that President George W Bush is struggling to meet. Most US military officers were opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a project concocted and supervised by civilian appointees such as the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the staff of the vice-president, Dick Cheney. Prolonged deployments of National Guard units are making the families of America's "weekend warriors" angry and stressed, and morale is reportedly low among America's overstretched career soldiers. As American and coalition casualties climb day by day in Iraq, Bush's boasting on the flight deck of the USS Lincoln looks ever more like hubris. And the likelihood of Bush's Democratic opponent in the November presidential election being a Vietnam veteran who was decorated for bravery at a time when Bush avoided combat duty in Vietnam by serving in the National Guard in Texas and Alabama makes things even more difficult.

Will dissent by the US military undermine a politician who is running for re-election as a war president? Bush's opponents may hope so. But there is little chance that the Democratic opposition can capitalise on the disillusionment of American soldiers with their commander-in-chief.

Geography is the reason. Since the draft was abolished in 1973 in the United States, the percentage of recruits to the military from the south and west of the country has risen, while the proportion of soldiers from the north and north-east has declined. Between 1985 and 2001, according to the defence department, the percentage of all recruits from the south rose from 34 per cent to 42 per cent. Meanwhile, recruitment from the north-east, as a percentage of the whole, has dropped from 22 per cent in 1977 to less than 14 per cent in 2001.

The claim that minorities are over-represented in the military is a myth. Black Americans are slightly over-represented among enlisted personnel, but they are represented in the officer corps at roughly the same level as they are represented in the comparable, college-educated civilian workforce. Latinos are under-represented in the military, compared with their numbers in the population. The groups that are truly over-represented in America's armed forces are whites from the south and west.

As the south and west have grown increasingly Republican in political orientation, they have accounted for an ever-growing share of US military personnel -- while the new Democratic heartland of the north-east has contributed fewer and fewer soldiers over time to the military. The result is that the US military has become strikingly Republican in partisanship. Soldiers are not compelled to divulge their party loyalties. But the leading students of the subject believe that Republicans outnumber Democrats in the US military by a factor of 2:1 -- and, in the officer corps, by as much as 8:1.

This explains, among other things, why Democratic supporters of Al Gore, during the contested presidential election of 2000, sought to use technicalities to disqualify absentee ballots by Florida soldiers serving overseas -- a tactic that backfired by making them look unpatriotic. It also explains why Bill Clinton turned to a Republican, William Cohen, to be his defence secretary, and worked with a series of chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who were certainly or probably Republican. It is getting harder to find Democratic politicians who served in the military or know anything about it.

What explains the north-south disparity in both American politics and the American military? The media lazily explain it in terms of divisions between "left" and "right", but many egalitarian, anti-corporate southern liberals are far more hawkish than many elitist northern conservatives. As the American historian David Hackett Fischer and others have observed, the north and south of the United States were populated during the British colonial period by groups with different views of the military. The culture of New England is shaped by the legacy of the Puritans, who associated military pomp and war with royalism and aristocracy. Southern culture, by contrast, has been shaped by two colonial-era subcultures -- the patrician "cavaliers" of the lowland south, whose ancestors fought for Charles I and who emulated the militaristic British aristocracy, and the Scots-Irish "hillbillies" of the Appalachians and Ozarks, who were less genteel but just as pugnacious as the southern lords of the manor.

The deeply ingrained militarism of southern culture means that they have a higher tolerance of battle losses than Americans in other regions. White southerners are more likely to die in America's foreign wars -- but for two centuries they have also been more likely to support America's foreign wars. Even when it was clear that they were going to lose, the southern Confederates fought on in the American civil war until they sustained losses which, as a percentage of the south's population, were comparable with those suffered by Britain, France, Germany and Russia during the two world wars. The south may sour on the Iraq adventure -- but not because 500 soldiers, or 1,000, is too high a price. Southerners believe there is no greater honour than dying for one's country -- and their high levels of religiosity afford the comfort of belief in an afterlife as well.

The power of the military ethic in the south and south-west means that the Democrats are almost certainly wrong to hope that the military record of John Kerry will neutralise Bush's advantage among military and pro-military voters. It is more likely that Kerry's words and statements as an anti-Vietnam war activist, following his service in Vietnam, will neutralise his combat record.

The idea that the Vietnam experience turned soldiers into guilt-stricken pacifists is another myth dear to the liberal left. Polls over the past few decades have shown that Vietnam veterans are somewhat more likely than those who never served to support US military action. To some extent, the hawkish attitudes of Vietnam vets may represent self-selection, because in spite of the draft, young men with moral objections to war in general had ample opportunity to avoid military service during the Vietnam years. This may impair Kerry's ability, if he is the Democratic nominee, to win the support of veterans, because since the 1970s he has opposed most US military interventions overseas, from the invasion of Grenada to the first Gulf war (opportunistically, he voted to authorise Bush's invasion of Iraq, only to criticise it after the fact). Despite his heroic service record, Kerry is no more likely to win over centrist and conservative Vietnam vets than any other Massachusetts liberal.

This is not to say that Bush faces no difficulties with American soldiers and their families. There is a genuine rift between the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon and the office of the vice-president, and the conservatives in uniform who tend to represent the views of the southern and western Republican voters. Walter Russell Mead has described southern and western culture as "Jacksonian" (after the bellicose American general and president Andrew Jackson). Like the neo-cons, Jacksonians are unilateralists who dislike and distrust the UN and other international institutions which might constrain American power. Unlike the neo-cons, though, Jacksonians do not dream of an American empire spreading democracy abroad. In their view, the US should strike down enemies and then come home. Nation-building is seen by southern and western conservatives as a trap.

If Bush had been challenged this year for the Republican nomination, his challenger might well have taken advantage of the divide between the neo-cons and the Jacksonians. But Bush is running unopposed, and the Democrats, committed for the most part to the idea of nation-building as part of liberal internationalism, cannot play this card against Bush. Jacksonian voters disillusioned with Bush's neoconservative Iraq war may sit on their hands, but they are unlikely to vote for a Democrat.

Beginning in the 1970s, the Republican Party obtained an enduring presidential majority, interrupted only by Jimmy Carter, because voters trusted them with defence at a time when the Soviet Union was a superpower with troops in half of Europe and nuclear submarines prowling American coastlines. The era of great-power peace following 1989 made possible Clinton's two terms. By calling the war on terrorism "World War IV" and prolonging post-9/11 anxiety, the Republican right hopes to marginalise liberal Democrats once again.

In doing so, they find unwitting allies among American liberals. The deep strain of pacifism and anti-militarism on today's American left comes out of Puritanism and Quaker religious culture, rather than out of the Marxist left. For a generation, American progressives have made the strategic mistake of opposing not merely particular wars but the military itself. In the 1970s, anti-Vietnam fervour led liberal Ivy League schools to ban the Reserve Officer Training Corps from campuses; and in the 1990s, the exclusion of openly gay citizens from the military led them to renew the ban. We have seen the result: there are twice as many conservative Republican soldiers as liberal Democrat ones. In the north-east and Pacific coast, environmentalists and anti-military activists on the left have successfully discouraged armaments production and military bases. Result: those institutions are located mostly in the southern and western "gun belt", where the hawkish predilections of voters are reinforced by economic self-interest. To make matters worse, in the two and a half years since al-Qaeda attacked the US, no leading Democrat has come up with a convincing, detailed military strategy as an alternative to Bush's. Democratic calls for more "multilateralism" are easily caricatured by Republicans as the claim that foreign countries should be given a veto over America's national defence.

If the American public re-elects Bush and entrusts the White House to Republican commanders-in-chief, part of the reason will be the unilateral disarmament of the American left.

An Unperson in Texas

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 13 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

I am about as Texan as anybody could be. A fifth-generation native of Austin, the state capital, I lived there for my first 21 years. I return frequently, own a small ranch about an hour west of town, and will inherit part of another one. Larry 'J R' Hagman, star of the 1980s TV soap opera Dallas, is a relative of mine.

Moreover, my book Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern takeover of American politics (Basic Books) was a bestseller in the US and has been translated into several foreign languages. I have written for the New Statesman and Prospect and hundreds of people paid 'cash money' (as we say in Texas) to hear me discuss it at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival last summer.

So you would have thought I was a natural this year for the annual Texas Book Festival -- particularly since the organisers sought me out when I published a narrative poem about the Texas revolution, The Alamo (1997), and a book in which I defended the goals (though not the methods) of America's tragic effort in Indo-China, Vietnam (1999). But no. Made in Texas has been excluded from the Texas Book Festival. I won't be present with the other authors at the ceremonies in Austin next month.

Why? Perhaps it's a clue that the Lone Star State's major literary festival was founded by Laura Bush in the 1990s, when her husband was governor of Texas. Laura's mother-in-law, the mother of the incumbent president, is featured at her book festival, while I, the author of the critique of George W Bush that has gained the most attention worldwide, have not been invited. Is there a pattern here?

I've asked the organisers of the festival to explain. They have refused to respond. They have also excluded my other 2003 publication, Bluebonnet Girl, a children's book in verse about a Texas Indian legend, illustrated by the renowned children's artist Kate Kiesler.

Last year, even though I had published no book, the organisers overcame my initial resistance and persuaded me to take part in two panels discussing the subjects of my earlier works. Laura Bush herself came to listen to me read from The Alamo in 1997. Yet now that I have published a book about how the pathologies of Texan conservatism have shaped the Bush presidency, they seem to have lost my number.

Instead, those who attend the festival, from Texas and around the world, will be treated to such literary powerhouses as the former first lady Barbara Bush, Cheryl Rogers-Barnett, author of Cowboy Princess: life with my parents, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and Terry Conlan, author of Fresh: healthy cooking and living from Lake Austin Spa Resort.

True, the liberal columnists Molly Ivins and Lou DuBose, who have published several witty and well-informed anti-Bush polemics, have been included. But this is hardly proof that I haven't been excluded for political reasons. It merely means that Laura Bush's book festival feels obliged to include a few token critics of her husband.

Although her smiling face greets visitors to the Texas Book Festival website (yes, she is presiding over it from Washington, even though Texas has a new first lady in the Governor's Mansion), I don't think Laura Bush personally made the decision to freeze me out. I assume the selection committee decided on her behalf.

That's how these people operate -- in Washington, as well as Austin. Earlier this year, Laura Bush arranged a White House poetry conference. It was cancelled at the last moment, when the White House discovered some of the poets were planning to make statements in opposition to the imminent war in Iraq. It's kind of hard to be a patron of writing when you ostracise the writers on political grounds.

Perhaps, by making the president's mother the star of the book festival this year, the Bush family has found a solution to its problem with the literati: keep it in the family.

Hell, it could have been worse. I'm merely banned from the major book festival in my home town in my native state, for the sin of having offended a dynasty of rich Connecticut carpet-baggers who gained office by opposing civil rights for blacks (the older Bush ran for Congress denouncing the Civil Rights Act 1964) and for gay men and lesbians (the younger Bush supported the Texas state sodomy law which the Republican-majority US Supreme Court recently overturned as barbaric).

A few decades ago, the Texas State Police would have kept a secret file on me as a suspected integrationist and communist, and I would have received phoned and mailed death threats from some of my patriotic, God-fearing fellow Texans.

The Southern right is as vicious and demented as it always was, but it's less dangerous than it used to be. Made in Texas is dedicated to the memory of the late Decherd Turner, the greatest librarian in Texas and a lifelong, passionate liberal. He was a friend of John Howard Griffin, who in the 1950s used chemicals to darken his skin and described how he was treated in Texas and the rest of the South in Black Like Me, a book admired by W H Auden, among others. After it was published, Griffin, fearing for his life, moved in for a time with the Turner family in Dallas.

I grew up hearing stories like this about the bad old days in Texas. But things become real only when they happen to you -- like the censorship of authors too critical of the president, in what the Bush dynasty seems intent on turning into the world's greatest banana republic.

The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0400

America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are not genuine 'Texas oil men' but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.

Equally wrong is the theory that American and European civilisation are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the over-representation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans. Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: they assume that the recent revolution in US foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies -- such as the selection rather than election of George W Bush, and 11 September -- the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the US population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.

The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.

The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con 'in-and-outers' when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.

The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: 'We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.'

The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a 'pro-Israel activist'. While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.

Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots -- odd as it seems -- in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.

Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington Times -- owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon -- which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the 'Gotcha!' style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.

The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.

How did the neo-con defence intellectuals -- a small group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic -- manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first -- a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf war and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process -- and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.

Then they had a stroke of luck -- Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.

The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a north-eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture.

The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ('Wolfie', as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorisation from Congress and the UN.

It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', something the leading neo-cons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the US to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with US attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neo-cons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the US. The neo-cons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the US, a far greater problem.

So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the US into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the US and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaeda attacks, any US president would likely have gone to war to topple Bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the US has done since then would have been different had America's 18th-century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.

For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of Reverend Ian Paisley, extreme Eurosceptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types -- all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.