White-eyes

The New York Times
January 14, 2007

For Human Eyes Only

By MICHAEL TOMASELLO

January 14, 2007

 

LeIpzig, Germany

COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT is said to have prepared his troops for a charge from the British Army at the
Battle of Bunker Hill by telling his men, “Don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”
If the opposing army had not been British men but rather a horde of charging chimpanzees, the American
troops would have been summarily overrun. Why? Because neither chimpanzees nor any of the other 220
species of nonhuman primates have whites of the eyes, at least not that can be easily seen. This means that if
their eyes are looking in a direction other than the one in which their heads are pointing, we can easily be
fooled about what they are looking at.

Why should humans be so different? And yet we are. We can’t fool anyone. The whites of our eyes are several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. Trying to explain this trait leads us into one of the deepest and most controversial topics in the modern study of human evolution: the evolution of cooperation.

The idea is simple. Knowing what another person is looking at provides valuable information about what she
is thinking and feeling, and what she might do next. Even young children know that when a person is looking
at one toy and not another, she most likely prefers that toy and may reach for it. Professional poker players
are often so worried about others reading their minds by reading their eyes that they wear sunglasses.
Evolutionarily, it is easy to see why it is to your advantage to be able to tell with maximum certainty where I
am looking. You may use this information to detect food you wouldn’t otherwise have seen, or to detect the
dominant male approaching in a fighting mood.

But evolution cannot select the color of my eyes based on advantages to you. Evolutionary theory tells us that, in general, the only individuals who are around today are those whose ancestors did things that were
beneficial to their own survival and reproduction. If I have eyes whose direction is especially easy to follow, it must be of some advantage to me.

If I am, in effect, advertising the direction of my eyes, I must be in a social environment full of others who are
not often inclined to take advantage of this to my detriment — by, say, beating me to the food or escaping
aggression before me. Indeed, I must be in a cooperative social environment in which others following the
direction of my eyes somehow benefits me. Of course, it’s possible that having large whites of the eyes serves some other purpose, like enabling me to advertise my good health to potential mates. But such an advantage would apply to other primates as well.

Cooperation, on the other hand, singles out humans, as humans coordinate activities to do such things as
construct buildings, create social institutions and even, paradoxically, organize armies for war.
In a recent experiment, our research team has shown that even infants — at around their first birthdays,
before language acquisition has begun — tend to follow the direction of another person’s eyes, not their
heads. Thus, when an adult looked to the ceiling with her eyes only, head remaining straight ahead, infants
looked to the ceiling in turn. However, when the adult closed her eyes and pointed her head to the ceiling,
infants did not very often follow.

Our nearest primate relatives, the African great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas) showed precisely
the opposite pattern of gaze following. When the human pointed her eyes only to the ceiling (head remaining
straight ahead), they followed only rarely. But when she pointed her head only (eyes closed) to the ceiling,
they followed much more often.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that all great apes, including humans, follow the gaze direction of
others. But in previous studies the head and eyes were always pointed in the same direction. Only when we
made the head and eyes point in different directions did we find a species difference: humans are sensitive to
the direction of the eyes specifically in a way that our nearest primate relatives are not. This is the first
demonstration of an actual behavioral function for humans’ uniquely visible eyes.

Why might it have been advantageous for some early humans to advertise their eye direction in a way that
enabled others to determine what they were looking at more easily? One possible answer, what we have
called the cooperative eye hypothesis, is that especially visible eyes made it easier to coordinate close-range
collaborative activities in which discerning where the other was looking and perhaps what she was planning,
benefited both participants.

If we are gathering berries to share, with one of us pulling down a branch and the other harvesting the fruit, it
would be useful — especially before language evolved — for us to coordinate our activities and communicate our plans, using our eyes and perhaps other visually based gestures.

Infant research, too, suggests that coordinating visual attention may have provided the foundation for the
evolution of human language. Babies begin to acquire language through joint activities with others, in which
both parties are focused on the same object or task. That’s the best time for an infant to learn the word for the object or activity in question.

We are still a long way from figuring out why humans evolved to do so many complicated things together —
from building houses to creating universities to fighting wars. But the simple fact that we have evolved highly
visible eyes, to which infants attune even before language, supplies at least one small piece of the puzzle of
how.

Michael Tomasello is the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Extremism in Israel

POLITICS NOW

by Abraham Berkowitz & Tom Milstein

March 14, 2007

Religious Zionism, and the broader modern Orthodox movement, must call themselves to account: the opponents of the peace process have killed twice since the Oslo accords were signed, and both murderers were shelanu, from our camp. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 innocent Arabs at the Maarat HaMachpaila — Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs — graduated from American modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institutions. And Yigal Amir, the admitted assassin of Yitzhaq Rabin, was a product of Israel’s Hesder program which combines Tora study with military service and is a current student at the Law School of Israel’s leading modern Orthodox university.

To be sure, by the time these men killed they were no longer true partisans of Religious Zionism or of modern Orthodoxy. Baruch Goldstein had become a follower of Meir Kahane long before he entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs on that fateful Purim day, while Yigal Amir appears to have been deeply entangled with Israel’s GSS when he pulled the trigger on Yitzhaq Rabin. But these facts, at most, only mitigate the responsibility.  They do not absolve us.  Both killers were educated at our institutions and grew up under our flag. In some perverse way, the education we gave them — or failed to give them — allowed them to be turned into deadly instruments. And so we must call ourselves to account and take stock of our movement.

But no honest accounting can be rendered until we first release ourselves from our humiliating dependence on the political ideologies our opponents. In recent times, this self-imposed political addiction has driven our movement to the Right side of the political spectrum. Since the early 1980’s, from about the time that Yitzhaq Shamir replaced Menachem Begin as the leader of the Likud Bloc, Religious Zionism practically ceased to function as an independent political movement.  Instead Religious Zionism nearly dissolved into the secular neo-conservatism and Cold War geopolitical calculations of Shamir’s Likud. During this period, Religious Zionism contributed little more than a religious or Biblical patina to the security arguments which Likud’s secular neo-conservatives advanced against world pressure to trade land for peace — pressure which they pretended was Communist (or “Leftist”) inspired. When the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that the true source of this pressure was not Communist or Leftist but rather American, our reliance on the Likud’s security-based arguments left us utterly disarmed. Most distressing of all, as part of our surrender to the secular Right, we allowed the tens of thousands of religious settlers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the flower of our movement, to be turned into human pawns, hostages to the vicissitudes of the Likud’s strategic calculations and political ambitions.

But freeing ourselves from the suffocating embrace of the Right most emphatically does not mean returning to the arms of the Left. Israel’s political Left, the former socialist Zionists of the Labor Party and their anti-religious partners who currently constitute the Meretz Bloc, represents a political culture from which we were lucky to escape in 1977 following Menachem Begin’s first electoral victory. Already at that time, when the religious settlers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were still portraying themselves as the new halutzim, long before their settlements became “strategic assets,” it was already clear that the so-called traditional alliance between socialist and Religious Zionism had run its course. This alliance, which began in the pre-State period and lasted for the first thirty years of our national independence, led us to distort our world historical mission so as to better fit the socialist paradigm of our allies. And so, instead of building institutions to facilitate the ideals of Religious Zionism and the broader modern Orthodox movement we created miniature religious replicas of socialism’s grand institutions — a religious kibbutz movement, the Mizrachi bank, a religious workers union, and so on — which we then invested with great significance and too much influence.

But in 1967 we began a new course. The new generation of Religious Zionists who had grown up under Jewish sovereignty and who had been schooled by the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, determined to settle all of the new lands which had been won in the recent war in order to complete the Zionist revolution of “returning the children to their boundaries.” Their bold creation of “facts on the ground” propelled Religious Zionism onto the center stage of Israeli politics.  Taking an independent stand on the “domestic” question of the territories brought Religious Zionism face-to-face with the single most important issue in Israeli foreign policy:  the question of Israel’s final territorial boundaries.  This issue would shape not only Israel’s role in the Middle East but also its relationship with the great powers beyond the region and especially with its superpower patron, the United States of America, and thus also with the American Jewish Establishment.

Religious Zionism now more than ever needed its own approach to international relations, to the role of Israel among the nations.  But no such approach was forthcoming.

In the years since the 1967 war, modern Orthodoxy failed to advance any systematic approach to understanding the connection between Israel’s territorial boundaries and its relations to the nations. At a time when the strongest partisans of Religious Zionism were building settlements throughout the length and breadth of the Land of Israel, up to the Biblical borderline, modern Orthodoxy ignored the implications of this enterprise for the other nations of the world. Worse yet, we treated the entire matter as an internal Jewish affair, a battle between religion and secularism, as if the world outside was quite irrelevant to the debate over Israel’s proper boundaries. It was this blithe disregard of the outside world — so completely at variance with the engaged spirit of Modern Orthodoxy — that tore a gaping hole in our movement.  Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  Into the political vacuum which we created by our refusal to face the foreign policy implications of our own “domestic policy” values — i.e., our demand for recognition of the sanctity of the boundaries of Eretz Israel — flowed the looney messianism of Meir Kahane and his sad band of hardened police provocateurs and gullible teenagers.  It was this absurd, apolitical messianism which sprouted in our midst with such tragic consequences.

And so, when we call ourselves to account, we must recognize that what we need is politics now.  As a first step in this direction, we must provide our partisans with a sound and serious political alternative to the capitulation counseled by the Left and the hollow security arguments espoused by the Right.  This alternative must address the worldly significance of the Zionist revolution and especially of the “return of the children to their borders” without raising unrealistic, other-worldly expectations about the imminence of the Redemption.  The Redemption will no doubt come in its time, with or without a clap of thunder or a hail of bullets.  Meanwhile, we must go about our business of building the land while developing an answer to the very difficult question which we have avoided asking for the past thirty years: what will the “goyim”—the nations—say, and more importantly do, when we succeed in holding on to our entire patrimony, up to the Biblical boundary lines?

Mighty Hunters, but Lousy Mothers

The New York Times

Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt
By NICHOLAS WADE

December 5, 2006

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that
occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by
two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and
women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main
occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in
an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large
game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown
those of the Neanderthals.

The Neanderthals endured for about 100,000 years, despite a punishing way of life. They
preyed on the large animals that flourished in Europe in the ice age like bison, deer, gazelles
and wild horses. But there is no evidence that they knew of bows and arrows. Instead, they
used stone-tipped spears.

Hunting large game at close range is perilous, and Neanderthal skeletons bear copious
fractures. Dr. Kuhn and Dr. Stiner argue that Neanderthal women and children took part in the
dangerous hunts, probably as beaters and blockers of exit routes.

Their argument, necessarily indirect, begins with the human hunter-gatherer societies, almost
all of which have a division of labor between the sexes.

At sites occupied by modern humans from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period known as the
Upper Paleolithic, there is good evidence of different occupations, from small animal and bird
remains, as well as the bone awls and needles used to make clothes. It seems reasonable to
assume that these activities were divided between men and women, as is the case with modern
foraging peoples.

But Neanderthal sites include no bone needles, no small animal remains and no grinding
stones for preparing plant foods. So what did Neanderthal women do all day?

Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking
after the children, the anthropologists write. More likely, they did the same as the men, with
the whole population engaged in bringing down large game.

The meat of large animals yields a rich payoff, but even the best hunters have unlucky days.
The modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic, with their division of labor and diversified food
sources, would have been better able to secure a continuous food supply. Nor were they putting
their reproductive core — women and children — at great risk.

David Pilbeam, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard, said the Arizona researchers’ article was
“very stimulating and thoughtful” and seemed to be the first to propose a mechanism for why
Neanderthal populations declined.

Dr. Stiner said the division of labor between the sexes was likely to have arisen in a tropical
environment. Indeed, it may have provided the demographic impetus for modern humans to
expand out of Africa, she said.

A rival hypothesis proposed by Richard Klein of Stanford University holds that some cognitive
advance like the perfection of language underlay the burst of innovative behavior shown by
Upper Paleolithic people and their predecessors in Africa.

Why did the Neanderthals fail to adapt when modern humans arrived on their doorstep?
Under Dr. Klein’s hypothesis, the reason is simply that they were cognitively less advanced.
Dr. Stiner said that in her view there was not time for them to change their culture. “Although
there may have been differences in neurological wiring,” she said, “I think another very
important key is the legacy of cultural institutions about social roles.” Is there a genetic basis to
the division of labor that emerged in the modern human lineage? “It’s equally compelling to
argue that most or all of this has a cultural basis,” Dr. Stiner said. “That’s where it’s very
difficult for people like us and Richard Klein to resolve the basis of our disagreement.”

Land for Peace?

Land for War

by

Abraham Berkowitz, John Bradford, and Tom Milstein

7/19/2006

“Land for Peace” is now acknowledged by everyone to have failed. This failure should
have been recognized long ago, but hope triumphed again and again over reality and
“the dream” persisted in clouding the consciousness of the Israeli people.
Israel has her definitive Arab-Islamic answer to “Land for Peace”: war, war to the
uttermost, not just against the Hovels of the Settlers on the West Bank (demonized as
the source of all Israel’s problems), but even against the Palace of Israel itself, “Green
Line” Israel, Israel inside its “proper borders.”

“Land for Peace” used to be Israel’s grand strategy. It has failed. It is time to try “Land
for War.” The “Land for War” strategy is predicated on the failure of its predecessor. If
the Arabs will not make peace with Israel in return for the ceding of land conquered in
1967 and the founding of a Palestinian state on that land, it is time for Israel to turn the
tables and adopt the opposite approach: instead of giving up land in return for (the hope
of) peace, Israel should announce a schedule of annexations of the land formerly slated
for withdrawal. This schedule should be shaped by the continuation of the terrorist War
on Israel. Step one – in response to the attacks already carried out– should be the
immediate annexation by the State of Israel of the territory lying between Jerusalem and
Ma'aleh Adumim. This annexation should be declared irrevocable. The schedule should
then lay out further steps and stages of irreversible annexation of territories conquered
in the Six-Day War, each in response to terrorist attacks against Israel, in whatever form
they take and wherever they occur. If the terrorism does not stop, Israel should commit
to continued implementation of the schedule until nothing is left to annex.

What the “Land for War” strategy does is to effectively put the terrorists in charge of the
Israel’s annexation program. It says to them, “Every time you attack Israel, you enlarge
the Jewish State, and you correspondingly diminish the Arab patrimony. It’s your
decision.”

This strategy will throw the Arab world into crisis, because while the Islamic extremists
of Hamas and Hizbollah don’t give a fig for the cause of Arab nationalism, the Middle
Eastern states which nurture and appease them do. Therefore “Land for War” will drive
a wedge between Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism. It will put the Islamists in
the role of gravediggers of the Palestinian state. It forces them to argue openly for the
supremacy of Islam over nationality. This is the great socio-political chasm of the Middle
East. A strategy which exploits this chasm is a strategy for victory rather than stalemate
and confusion.

Israel is bravely responding, as any self-respecting nation would, to the acts of
aggression perpetrated against her. But mere war, past a certain point, will only
perpetuate Israel’s no-win strategy. The time for a resolution of the Israel-Arab conflict
is at hand. Given the total failure of “Land for Peace” as a strategy, the necessary
political dimension of this war can only be supplied by “Land for War.” Neither the
Middle Eastern states nor the terrorist organizations which they harbor care about the
pain and suffering which Israel’ s military measures will inflict. In fact, these measures
by themselves have the effect of uniting nationalists and Islamic terrorists in a common
cause against the Jews. But the unfolding spectacle of Israeli annexation of Judea and
Samaria, step by inexorable and irreversible step, at a pace and to an extent dictated by
the terrorists themselves – that will have the opposite effect. It will devastate the anti-
Israel consensus in the Middle East and place the blame for Israel’s territorial
aggrandizement squarely on her supposed arch-enemies.

“Land for War” speaks to the Arabs in a language they understand: the language of lost
territory, the real and just price for starting and losing a war.

Abraham Berkowitz holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in Political Science. He will be making
aliyah in August of this year.
John Bradford is an artist and teacher.
Tom Milstein is an Executive Director of a property management firm.
All currently reside in New York City.

Gedankenexperiment

Thought Experiment

By Tom A. Milstein

June 8, 2006

Einstein made fruitful use of a creative technique called the “thought experiment” (Gedankenexperiment),
by which he meant a purely intellectual experiment in physical science, impractical
to carry out empirically, but bound by logic and constrained by the rule that it not violate any
fundamental physical laws.

Let us carry out the following “thought experiment”:

Something happens to flood the world with large quantities of new oil. That “something” might
be, for example, the discovery of large oil fields in politically benign areas, or a new technology
permitting oil to be brought up from areas previously thought inaccessible. Neither of these two
possibilities is excluded by the laws of geology or engineering. Since we are conducting a
thought experiment, a “what-if” chain of reasoning, we are entitled to consider either as our
starting assumption, however unlikely in practice.

What scenario logically unfolds from such a development?

Today oil sells at about $70 per barrel. Whatever factors have determined this price, the injection
of large quantities of new supply into the world market would obviously imperil the existing
price structure. If the supply bulge were large enough, the price would plummet. How low it
might fall is a matter of conjecture. But if the example of other economic raw materials offers
any guide, oil would probably sell at its true cost of production, plus a reasonable profit – perhaps
about a dollar a barrel.

So the first consequence of our thought experiment is that the economic interest represented by
the difference between oil selling at $70 per barrel, and oil selling at around $1 per barrel, would
be adversely affected. How big an interest are we talking about? The word “cosmic” comes to
mind. After all, oil is the key commodity in the modern world. Virtually nothing can be produced
without it. It is truly the prerequisite, the sine qua non, of all the world’s business. Ipso
facto, bathing the world economy in virtually limitless cheap oil would thus have a revolutionary
impact on the structure of that economy. Not only would the interest represented by oil at $70
per barrel be disrupted, but new interests founded on the much lower cost of producing goods
would move to the foreground. Like all newly-empowered economic interests, they would carry
with them new political, cultural and technological values, more rooted in entrepreneurialism,
technological innovation, and the deployment rather than the amassing of capital. The historic
balance between banking capital and production capital would tilt in the latter’s favor.

But wait! We have left an important and inevitable element out of our thought experiment scenario.
It is not reasonable to suppose that an interest whose power and influence we have not
shrunk from calling “cosmic” would gracefully bow out of the political struggle and exit stage
right from the theater of economic history. On the contrary, we ought to expect a serious effort
to appeal the verdict of the market and reverse the laws of supply and demand. Such an effort
would be consistent with Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
This reaction would constitute the second consequence of our thought experiment: the
effort by the enormous economic, political and cultural Establishment represented by oil at $70
a barrel to preserve its power and influence notwithstanding the collapse of its key asset’s price
(upon which our thought experiment is predicated).

Since we have excluded a priori by the terms of our thought experiment the possibility of maintaining
or restoring an elevated price of oil, what we need to consider – from the standpoint of
its former beneficiaries – are ways and means of preserving its effects even after its cause has
been (hypothetically) removed. For it is upon these effects – not the price of oil itself – that the
above-mentioned Establishment bases itself.

A vast increase in the supply of oil would exert a massively depressing effect on its price. This
price has obviously been a hugely limiting factor on the consumption of oil, and therefore a
hugely escalating factor on the cost of things produced with oil. The price of oil has created a
regime of scarcity around the world’s most important single commodity. But abundant oil
would destroy this regime of scarcity and overturn high-priced oil’s applecart. Could a regime of
scarcity be reimposed based on some other criteria than price? In other words, could scarcity,
having been overthrown at the supply end of the economic curve, be reinstituted at the demand
end, where oil is consumed? If so, a lot of applecart passengers would be mighty grateful.
Global Warming! Al Gore is only the most prominent of the many Cassandras who have recently
arisen to warn us that all respectable scientific opinion now agrees that we are destroying
our planet with our uncontrolled emissions of petroleum combustion byproducts. For these
folks abundant cheap oil would not be a blessing, but the apocalypse, leading to new ice ages,
oceanic inundations, famine, pestilence, giant hurricanes, together with, no doubt, epidemics of
baldness, impotence, and date rape.

Global Warming, about which all scientists now unanimously agree (except for some miscreants
who don’t), provides the perfect rationale for instituting an artificial regime of scarcity to replace
the economic regime imposed by high prices and short supplies. Not the economy, but Mother
Nature herself, so help us Wicca, demands that limits be imposed on oil consumption, in order
to save Gaia, our violated planet. How very convenient for Nature to come to the rescue of the
$70 a barrel crowd also! Once before She performed this service, through the pious auspices of
the good Rev. Thomas Malthus: 

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce
subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the
human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They
are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work
themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics,
pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and
tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks
in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
-- An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1789.

For Malthus, scarcity was dictated by the his iron law of population, which he insisted would
always increase geometrically, outstripping food supplies, which could only increase arithmetically.
Malthus proposed his ideas just as the English landed aristocracy was becoming aware of
the threat which the new industrial system of manufactures posed to its ascendancy. His pessimistic
and anti-human doctrine of food scarcity helped create the political atmosphere which
resulted in the passage of Britain’s Corn Laws, high tariffs on imported wheat and other foodstuffs
whose purpose was to subsidize the country’s inefficient feudal estates and thus artificially
perpetuate the Tory aristocracy’s corrupt dominion over England against the modernizing challenge
posed by the Manchester industrialists.

Today it is not food but energy which is alleged to be scarce. Whether it actually is or not is beyond
the scope of our thought experiment. But it is certainly heartening to know that the same
doctrine of scarcity which preserved the English aristocracy can be trotted out in the 21st century,
suitably regarbed in the trendy couture of ecology, to perform an equivalent function for
our own $70 a barrel aristocracy in the disastrous wake of an (hypothetical) oil price collapse.
The dogma of Global Warming is thus the third consequence of our thought experiment. It
stands ready to rationalize the imposition of Energy Consumption Controls, no matter what the
price of energy production, in the name of saving the planet from mankind’s swinish overconsumption.
Such controls would no doubt take the form of huge new taxes on energy consumption,
thereby creating a massive cash flow into the world’s various environmental protection
agencies, governmental and private. So aggrandized, these high-minded bureaucracies will acquire
the clout to perpetuate an artificial regime of scarcity forever – or at least for a long time –
even if technology and capitalism combine to discredit the doctrine of scarce energy supplies.
This brave new form of socialism, based on the expropriation and redistribution of scarcity,
should inscribe on its banner, “Arise, ye prisoners of abundance. You have been all, you shall be
naught!”

But our little thought experiment has produced a very peculiar result: whereas a crash in oil
prices is purely hypothetical, Global Warming is with us now. Nothing hypothetical about it.
Thanks to Al Gore, we even have that ultimate 21st century validation of its really real reality, a
movie – named, with 66% mendacity, An Inconvenient (sic) Truth (sic). What are we to make of
this strange emergence of a causeless consequence?

Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia

Nuclear Parity in the Middle East

By Tom A. Milstein

December 13, 2005

On Thursday, Dec. 15, the Iraqi people will once again vote in a free election, this time to choose their next government. This momentous event will empower the formerly disenfranchised and oppressed 60% of the Iraqi people who are Shi’a for the first time in their country’s modern history.

Elections are no less struggles for power than revolutions, coups, and wars. In all such struggles there are winners and losers. This time the losers will be the Sunni Moslems of Iraq, who traditionally have ruled the Shi’a with an iron fist. They will lose no matter whether they participate in the election or not, because either way, their dispossession as the ruling elite of Iraq will be confirmed. Needless to say, the Sunni are unhappy at this turn of events.

To appease them, various concessions and compromises have been made in both the Iraqi constitution and other areas of society, the new army, and the government. The sum total of this appeasement has come close to completely vitiating the representative and democratic character of the new republic, by granting this former ruling class minority privileges and powers normally considered incompatible with democratic principles.

Why have these concessions and compromises been made? The official explanation is to prevent a civil war from tearing Iraqi society apart. We shall see whether this tactic works, in the statistics of insurgent terrorist acts to be compiled in the post-election future. Certainly we can see that it has failed up to now, as 30,000 dead Iraqis mutely testify to, but perhaps the success of the election will usher in a new spirit of peaceful participation. One hopes so.

So far, the Iraqi Insurgency has largely been a Sunni affair, aimed at inflicting as much carnage as possible on the Shi’a population. In truth, the Shi’a have largely replaced the American military as the target of choice for terrorist attacks. Sunni violence against Shi’a, whether carried out by former Ba’athist secular cadres or Al Qaeda Islamofascists, has in fact become “the war within the war” in Iraq. The media likes to publicize the comparatively sparse instances of Shi’a violence against Sunni, whether carried out by militias or by Iraqi government agencies, in order to establish some sort of false equivalency. The fact is that the volume and sheer horror of the Sunni attacks on innocent Shi’a civilians, mosque worshippers, police and army trainees, and shoppers, far outweighs counterpart Shi’a atrocities.

The insurgent focus on blowing up Shi’a appears on the face of it a rather odd tactic, if the objective of the insurgency is to drive American forces out of Iraq. A true “national liberation front” strategy would seek to unite Sunni and Shi’a against the American occupation. Instead, the effect has been to place Iraq’s Shi’a under the somewhat half-hearted protection of the U.S. Army. Most Americans, and that includes American soldiers, sense no vital stake in the Sunni-Shi’a struggle. “Let ‘em go on killing each other off” would be a fair characterization of this attitude, particularly if it means less ordnance being expended against our troops. Nevertheless, given the President’s commitment to establishing a democratic government in Iraq, our Army has been tasked to prevent terror attacks and this means, in the current Iraq reality, protecting Shi’a against Sunni. Indeed, in the larger sense this mission ties in directly with the President’s aim of creating a legitimate, representative government in Baghdad, for the previous Sadaam government was simply the institutionalization of minority Sunni terror against the Shi’a majority.

Shi’a’s humiliating dependence on American protection against the Sunni minority is supposed to end with the creation of a representative government through free elections. The theory – or the hope – is that such a government will make it impossible for a Sadaam-style regime to ever return to Baghdad. But this theory begs the question of how such a government could have arisen in the first place, given the radical disproportion between Sunni and Shi’a numbers in the demography of Iraq. And this question needs to be asked, and answered, not drowned out in “Strategy for Victory” cheerleading rallies, or the President may well find himself returned to the same predicament in which he found himself after he prematurely declared “Mission accomplished” to the sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.

The Sunni have a ready answer to this question. They regard, and treat, the Shi’a as an effeminate nation of slaves, lacking in the manly Islamic virtues, and therefore easy to oppress because they can’t or won’t defend themselves. This characterization is of course propaganda, designed like most such propaganda to hide the real dynamics of Sunni dominion over Iraq. Sunni Moslems were able to dominate the Shi’a of Iraq notwithstanding the latter’s numerical preponderance not because Shi’a are girly-boys, but because exterior factors came into play: Sadaam’s Sunni thugs were clients of Saudi Arabia, which provided the indispensable financial and political clout he needed to compensate for Sunni inferior numbers in Iraq. This relationship became quite clear during the Iraq-Iran War, when with America’s help, Iraq was essentially converted into a buffer state for Saudi Arabia to gas the Shi’a Revolution launched by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

Things change. Sadaam decided that if he was destined to play Praetorian Guard for the Saudi Oil Patch, he might as well assume the landlord role as well, and, following his idol Hitler’s time-tested strategy, tried to bite off Kuwait as a dress rehearsal for later adventures against the Saudi degenerates whose bossy dominion he resented. George Bush Senior was not about to exchange the House of Saud, with whom he and his friends had maintained cozy and lucrative relations for generations, for the unknown of a hypothetical House of Sadaam. “Soddum” was duly expelled from Kuwait – but left in place in Baghdad to continue his buffer role against the Shi’a of Iraq and Iran. Better he than us, reasoned Bush 41.

Bush Sr.’s pusillanimity was duly noted by the Saudis, so things changed again – on 9/11/01. After all, if Sadaam could survive defeat in Kuwait, could not the cowardly Americans be relied upon to forgive and forget a direct strike on their homeland by the Saudis themselves? Would not the second-rate son show even more of the family appeasing spirit than the supposedly granite-like father (“This shall not stand!”), particularly if the attack were audacious, giving Americans a taste of their own “Shock and Awe” medicine? It was time for the Saudis to accomplish what Sadaam had tried and failed to achieve – a great turning of the tables. Saudi Arabia had hitherto managed the Oil Cartel as a client of America. Now America would have to learn how to become a junior partner of the Oil Cartel and its Islamic masters.

This is the inner meaning of 9/11. It was a daring adventure, but not a terribly risky one. Even if it failed – and it did, for George W. Bush turned out to be made of different stuff than his father – the example of Sadaam demonstrated that America would never bite the hand that fed it. The Saudis and their Cartel might have to undergo some difficult moments, but when the dust of 9/11 settled, America would try to restore the status quo ante World Trade Center. America’s economic stake in the Cartel could be trusted to outweigh all other considerations, and the House of Saud would emerge unscathed.

And this gets us back to Iraq. The “status quo ante World Trade Center” will never be restored, because it cannot be. If America leaves the Saudi Oil Cartel intact, there will be future 9/11’s. This is the diplomatic circle that cannot be squared. The enemy is not terror. The enemy is not Islam. The enemy is the financial and economic foundation of Islamic terror, the Saudi Oil Cartel. No one point of this triad can be defeated unless all three are attacked. This is the lesson Lincoln had to learn during our own Civil War, as he fought his way forward toward an understanding that it was the institution of Slavery, not the abstraction of “disunion,” or the geographic region of “the South,” that he had to defeat. It is the same type of understanding that awaits our President too, in Iraq. Merely establishing a representative government in Baghdad will not insure against its subversion by a return of Sunni domination, a new Sadaam, and a resulting rebirth of Arab-Islamic triumphalism absolutely guaranteed to produce more 9/11’s, unless something is done to permanently neutralize the Saudi role in Iraq.

Shall America then permanently occupy Iraq to prevent Saudi influence from bringing about this counterrevolution? Awkward and untenable. Instead, America needs to find a countervailing regional force able to balance Saudi influence in Iraq and provide the Shi’a with an exterior base of support equivalent to that provided by the Saudis to the Iraqi Sunnis. Such a force can only be supplied by Iran. And Iran would be more than willing to play this role, were it not for one inconvenient power reality in the Middle East: the Shi’a have no nuclear deterrent, while the Sunni do. Pakistan now possesses scores of nuclear bombs, and delivery systems capable of placing them in Teheran and all other Iran cities. And not just Pakistan. According to a little-noticed but highly credible report from Arnaud de Borchgrave, writing in the Oct. 22, 2003 Washington Times, “Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on ‘nuclear cooperation’ that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.” (http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031021-112804-8451r.htm )

It is this nuclear imbalance that explains Iran’s drive for nuclear parity, not any disinformational ambition to erase Israel from the map. And the worldwide uproar over Iran’s ambition seems designed more to preserve the Sunni nuclear monopoly rather than to deter Iranian extremism. How else to explain the awkward silence that envelopes the issue of Pakistan-Saudi nuclear weaponry? The Sunni Bomb effectively inhibits Iran from playing a balancing role in the Middle East, and particularly in Iraq, against Saudi Arabia. And in the absence of such a role, America willy-nilly ends up having to perform it instead.

No demand that Iran drop its quest for nuclear weapons is credible unless it is accompanied by the regional quid pro quo of disarming Pakistan and Saudi Arabia of similar weapons. In the absence of such an arrangement, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is a prerequisite to the success of George W. Bush’s Strategy for Victory in Iraq. For unless Iran is freed from the Pakistani-Saudi nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs over Teheran, it cannot rescue the Neoconservative program of a democratic self-government from the same humiliating debacle that overtook their identical program in South Vietnam over 30 years ago.

For these and other reasons, Israel will not attack Iran, American will not attack Iran, and Iran will someday announce to the world that it possesses a nuclear deterrent. The Bush Administration will outwardly denounce and inwardly exult. So will Israel. So should we all.

Iraq Exit Strategy

Goodbye, Vietnam Iraq

By Tom Milstein

11/20/05

To get out of Iraq, first we must first know why we are in Iraq.

We did not invade Iraq to find Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

We did not invade Iraq to establish democracy in the Middle East.

We invaded Iraq to deter Saudi Arabia and its client, Islamic Fascism, from staging more 9/11
attacks on the United States.

We invaded Iraq because Iraq shares a border with Saudi Arabia, and has a history of military
antagonism to the United States. We are in Iraq for much the same reason we remained in West
Germany during the Cold War: to establish a base of operations for the maintenance of
deterrence against a perceived threat to the security of the United States. The scope and scale of
the Saudi threat are of a different order than that of the Soviet. But the strategic principle is the
same.

Of course deterrence only works when it can be sustained. We sustained deterrence against the
Soviets not just by declaring the doctrine of “massive retaliation,” but also by maintaining a
stable and supportive base of operations in Western Europe. The Germans – as well as the
French, the British, and the rest of Western Europe – might detest their subordinate status to
the American superpower, but the prospect of Soviet domination was a sobering antidote to all
such “Yankee go home” emotions.

We have no such stable base of support in Iraq. The Middle East is not about to flower into civil
society, Enlightenment, and free enterprise – not even with a NeoCon Marshall Plan. The Middle
East is not Europe, and democracy is not a charismatic idea in the Middle East. Jihad is.

The invasion of Iraq has deterred further 9/11’s, but it has not succeeded in institutionalizing
itself the way America’s presence in Europe institutionalized itself through NATO, as a
permanent and legitimate form of deterrence called “containment.” We have for the time being
deterred Islamic Fascism from launching another attack on the U.S., by threatening the Saudi
border, but we have not truly contained the Saudi menace the way we successfully contained
Soviet menace to Europe in the Cold War, and the whole world can see why – we cannot
“NATO-ize” our mission.

Our achievement in Iraq therefore lacks credibility, durability, and legitimacy. Nor is it ever
likely to attain these things. The gap between what America represents and Islamic political
culture is too great.
America has a wolf by the ears in Iraq. We cannot let go without risking future 9/11’s, and we
cannot hold on in the face of declining support both domestically and internationally.
So a different means of sustaining deterrence must be found – a model not based on the
Eurocentric Cold War against the Soviets, but rather on the Sino-American rapprochement,
which split the Communist bloc and led the way forward from deterrence, through and beyond
containment, to eventual victory over Communist totalitarianism.

The Sino-American rapprochement also grew out of a failed war – the war in Vietnam. That war
too was rooted in noble, but contradictory, objectives. On the one hand, we wished to promote a
Western-oriented, democratic South Vietnam against the totalitarian depredations of the
Communist North. On the other, we sought to extend the deterrence and containment model
from Europe to Southeast Asia, establishing a balance of power against the threat of Communist
expansion into and throughout the region. Based on our European NATO model, we thought
that each of these aims depended on the other. But we found to our dismay that we could not
establish a regime in South Vietnam with enough democratic vitality to win effective support
either from its own people or the American people.

We therefore could not sustain our Vietnam intervention (just as we cannot sustain our current
deterrence mission in Iraq). And because it could not be sustained, our Vietnam-era policymakers
were led to consider what the consequences might be, both regionally and globally, of a
North Vietnamese Communist victory in the South.

Out of this consideration came the decision to realign international politics by pursuing
rapprochement with China, a policy which had been verboten for American policy-makers since
the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. Maoist China was conventionally perceived to
be the more ideologically radical and dangerous of the two rival Communist states, the more
anti-American and internally the more totalitarian. But it was also much the weaker of the two,
and our diplomatists calculated that China’s extremism was actually rooted in its isolated and
disadvantaged position internationally relative to its Soviet rival.

The truth of this calculation yielded a diplomacy whose success shocked the world and
effectively neutralized the negative geopolitical consequences of defeat in the Vietnamese War.
Indeed, the new US-China relationship brought real peace to Southeast Asia and ushered in an
amazing burst of economic and social development. On the political front, the end of the Cold
War and the downfall of the Soviet Union can be traced directly to this courageous initiative by
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

The Middle Eastern equivalent to Nixon and Kissinger’s master stroke may already be underway.
American policy seems to be reaching out to the Shi’a branch of Islam in order to create a
majority government in Iraq that has real popular support. Such a government will by the force
of circumstance have strong ties to Iran, the world center of Shi’a Islam. So empowered, Iraq’s
new government will need correspondingly less support from the U.S. Further attempts by the Saudi-sponsored Al Qaeda-based insurgency to disrupt Iraq will become Iran’s problem, not
America’s.

America’s role in the Middle East can then recede from active military engagement to one of
managing the balance between Islam’s two great branches, just as in an earlier era it did
between the Chinese and Russian Communist states. The threat of future 9/11’s from the
Saudis can be countered by the deterrent prospect of a Shiite conquest of Mecca and Medina,
instead of requiring the U.S. Army on the Saudi border.

Wahabi-dominated Sunni Islam, instead of enjoying the luxury of being able to single-mindedly
indulge its passion against America and modernity, will find more pressing problems to occupy
its attention. Who knows? Perhaps out of this stalemate within Islam can come the Middle East
equivalent of Europe’s great compromise between the formerly warring Protestant and Catholic
princes – a second Treaty of Westphalia.

America’s exit strategy from Iraq needs to rooted in America’s exit strategy from Vietnam: pingpong
diplomacy leading to rapprochement with Mao’s China. Perhaps it already is.