Taking Responsibility

It would appear that we are coming to a dead end in Iraq. For whatever reason the insurgency drags on. The number of attacks is increasing, although the typical attack is now a suicide bomber in a vehicle, a tactic less commonly used in the past. The explosives used by insurgents are larger and better made than in the past and attacks appear to be more carefully planned and focused. These facts cannot be wished away.

As a result, signs of desperation abound.

First, the American command reports that it is speaking to persons in the insurgency, or at least in the non-al Qaeda branch of the insurgency. Remember, these are people who have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and kidnappings, just to make a point. It is true that they are more likely to discriminate, to emphasize killing Americans, than are the Islamists, who believe that disruption and death, particularly the deaths of Shiites and Kurds need no justification. Yet how exactly will we make peace with them? Will the Kurds and Shiites who have been murdered, go along? Of course, we should have been trying to talk before now, but it will be a thorny road in a country in which revenge for every death is the responsibility of every family.

Second, Rumsfeld now says that putting down the insurgency will take at least ten years. He then adds that this means the Iraqis will have to be the ones who do it. How he chose the "ten or more years" is unclear, but what is clear is that the United States now accepts the fact that it cannot end the insurgency. It follows that we will be leaving long before the insurgency is controlled. This admission cannot help but bolster the arguments of an increasing number in Congress that we should be making plans to leave now and setting dates.

Third, we are getting more and more reports from officers and men in the field that no matter how effective their repeated offensives might be, they have nowhere near the number of troops needed to control the areas they "clear". They are quite aware that when they leave, the insurgents will come back in. This, in turn, must make it hard for the Iraqis caught in the middle (and, as in most insurgencies, this means the vast mass of the people) to help the Americans. Some do help in spite of this, but their risks are great. Increasing numbers in such situations are trying to get their families out of the country.

Of course, in some parts of the country, such as Basra and the solidly Shiite or Kurdish areas, there has been progress, life is returning to something like normal. Regular plane service from Basra to many locales, including Baghdad, has been initiated. One can only expect that the contrast between areas of the country will continue to grow.

The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan continue in their bloody ways. Taken together, and they should generally be, they constitute a major drain on American resources and attention. As long as they continue to require our presence, the ability of the United States to take an active role in other violent contests in the world is limited.

So let us compare them. In both cases, one reason for insurgent success is the continuation of support from outside. In both cases, the struggle of Muslim extremists against what they regard as infidels and traitors to Islam is central to the motivation of the persons involved. In both cases, Al-Qaeda and its off-shoots play a major role. In both cases, the insurgency is confined largely to the one ethnic group, with the other groups either supportive of the government or have interests of their own that do not affect the insurgency.

But there are also important differences. The insurgency in Afghanistan is both nationalist and religious, with the emphasis on the latter. As such, it represents a continuation of the Taliban movement that once ruled most of the country. In Iraq, the religious side of the insurgency is not related to previous rule, for Saddam was a secularist. However, the former Baath members that are critical to the insurgency represent the previous ruling system.

The ranks of both insurgencies are filled from the outside to some degree. However, in Iraq, these outsiders serve primarily as suicide bombers. Native Iraqi insurgents seem to very seldom agree to play such a role. Perhaps less than a tenth of the insurgents are from outside. Those that do come in, however, can be easily identified by their accents as non-Iraqis. Because of their small numbers and specialized but critical role, stopping the route of entry for outsiders into the insurgency seems feasible. They are vulnerable to interdiction as they come in because they essentially follow the Euphrates, which gives them a narrow path, and they must make several stops before they are utilized. (The fact they enter unarmed makes them harder to spot, however, than in Afghanistan where they generally come with their arms.)When Iraqi insurgents are killed or captured in large numbers, the insurgency cannot easily replace them from outside. On the other hand, the Taliban movement was from the beginning a Pashto (Pathan, Pushtu) movement that recruited from a large alliance of tribes inhabiting both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. This has not changed. The result is that the insurgents from Pakistan speak the same dialect as the Pashtos with whom they are intermixed. An armed people, as most rural Afghans are, they are able to quickly replace any insurgents that the Americans recruit with fresh blood. This makes the defeat of the insurgency in Afghanistan essentially impossible, although under many conditions, it could "wind down".

The June 3 NYT offered the most recent version of the series of remarkable updates on the situation in Iraq that have bee offered by two researchers at the Brookings Institution. In a concise format they report information from a wide variety of sources. These include military and economic statistics, as well as polling results. The data is reported in the form of a time series (in this case May 2003, June 2004, and May 2005).

There are some curious anomalies in the latest compilation. On the one hand, there has been a considerable increase in the rate at which American and Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians are being killed. The average number of insurgent attacks per day has increased. On the other hand fuel supplies available to the people have increased, while the number of telephone users and internet subscribers has increased dramatically. (Significantly, there were only 833,000 telephone users before the war, while there are 3,300,000 today.) The percentage of Iraqis supporting the government has risen to 75%. The number of well-equipped Iraqi security forces has increased rapidly to 50,000 (many other estimates exist, but this estimate is probably as good as any). The number of trained judges has also risen rapidly. The percentage of Sunni Arabs believing the country is headed in the right direction has risen, although not dramatically. At the same time, actual fuel production has fallen slightly, and electricity production has fallen more rapidly. The rising confidence of the people in the face of what objectively is a far from encouraging situation is remarkable.

One can only conclude that the situation is encouraging but quite fragile. People have evidently concluded that the political process offers the only hope for reestablishing and improving their way of life. They like the possibilities that are opening up under the new order. Yet I would suggest that if the confidence of the people is not sustained by progress in key economic areas and in security for the average person, there could be a rapid collapse in support for the system, as well as for American and Iraqi security forces.

A recent Op-Ed offered a serious analysis of the danger of a biological attack by terrorists on the nation's milk supply and offered useful suggestions for reducing this danger. It pointed out the many places in the milk delivery system in which there are obvious and easily exploited vulnerabilities. A recent discussion on television of the availability of high-powered rifles detailed how a sniper at a great distance might bring down airliners at the Los Angeles terminal. Other programs have pointed to the extreme difficulty of checking on the contents of the many containers that are brought into American ports every day. Unfortunately, warnings of this kind, however well-thought out and well-meaning, also increase the danger to the country by educating terrorists, both foreign and home-grown, in the vulnerabilities of our society and how they might be exploited. Yes, some terrorists may have already thought of these vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. But we cannot assume that they all have, or that they understand their potential opportunities as well as our many aggressive and competing antiterrorism experts can explain them.

A way to get around this dilemma would be for Congress to establish a well-publicized office to receive ideas and analyses of terrorist threats. (This office may already exist, but it is apparently not well known to the public, perhaps not even to the experts who are dreaming up and analyzing possible attacks.) Once received, the ideas would be dealt with on a "need-to-know" basis. The bipartisan staff of the suggested office should be organized in such a way that it is beholden to neither corporate nor bureaucratic (including Homeland Security) interests. Its job would be to analyze and winnow the information it receives and transmit what appears most important to those likely to make good use of it. Congress should be involved, because Congressional involvement in the background should make it less likely that the transmissions of this office would be ignored.

The American administration and its generals in Iraq seem more worried than they have been for a long time, and they have good reason to be. Instead of decreasing in number, suicide car bombings have been increasing in the last two months, exacting a terrifying toll. American military commanders have publicly begun to admit that their former optimistic assumptions about how fast the Iraqis were developing their security services and military forces have been wide of the mark. The sense of gloom is heightened by the killing of Sunni Arab clerics and the subsequent accusation that the leading Shiite political organization was behind the killings. Whether true or not, this cannot help. The Sunni Arabs appear to be further alienated by the strong welcome extended to the Iranian foreign minister, a visit that was ended by a statement by the new Iraqi, and Shi'a, Prime Minister that Iraq was responsible for the war of Iran and Iraq in the 1980s. Of course, he said Saddam was the culprit, but the Sunni Arabs interpret this as another slam at them.

The result is that the Americans have begun to talk of remaining in the country indefinitely whether they want to or not. This will give more ammunition to Moqtada al-Sadr, who believes inflaming this issue is good for his Mahdi Army. He has already begin holding new demonstrations against us (and this from within the Shi'a camp). Our open-ended stay will give more credibility to both the Sunni Arabs and the Iranians who already believe in our imperial intentions. (Even if we had such intentions, and some in our government no doubt do, we do not have the money nor the political staying power to bring it off.)

Today, I have no concluding words of wisdom.

Recent riots in Afghanistan incited by a Newsweek reference to flushing a Quran down the toilet reminds us that democracy means something quite different from our understanding in states without long democratic traditions. President Karzai was elected by a large majority of Afghanis. But what did that mean? It meant first of all that many people were asked to vote for him by their local tribal or other leaders. In transitional democracies voting is often not an individual choice. It is a group choice. Many people who voted for Karzai may in fact have no idea who he is. Secondly, many Afghanis voted for Karzai simply because it was a unique experience that they wanted to have a part in. By this act they did not betray any deep commitment to the person of Karzai or the governmental system that he represents. The next week an issue might come up much closer to their hearts, and one which would inspire quite different means to express public power.

Historically, there have been many "democracies" that utilize the processes we are all familiar with, but have populations and occasionally political leaders who are by no means constrained by these processes. This pattern has been especially prominent in Latin America where leadership by "caudillos" has been the historical pattern. Such strong men may or may not come to power by the ballot. Once in power they are unlikely to leave office because of the ballot. The tendency of populations to grant their right to flaunt the law reinforces the pattern, as we saw in the case of Juan Peron. Another example is found in Ecuador and Bolivia where power is expressed by the street as often as by the ballot. Frequent changes of head of state, irregular means to office, and of exit from office are the pattern. In Ecuador we have recently had the example of a government dismissing the Supreme Court and vice-versa. Perhaps Mexico and Venezuela are teetering on the edge of return to such regional patterns.

One can only hope that the majority of the new democracies of the last thirty years will not relapse into such quasi-democratic processes. That we will escape such a reversal in Iraq in the next few years is almost too much to hope.

Once again Robert Pape, a leading authority on "suicide terrorism" contributes an Op-Ed to the NY Times. His presentation of data is the same as in his previous contribution (discussed some months back in this blog). The essential point is that religion has not been the major reason for suicidal terrorism. Whether it be the Muslims in Palestine or the Hindus in Sri Lanka, there seems little connection between religiosity and suicide. (Apparently, you do not need a vision of all those virgins in heaven.) The key issue for most suicide bombers is the fact that their group is not as self-governing within the system they find themselves in as they would like. One can expand on his point by pointing out that when commentators use the word "religion" in such discussions what is referred to is not some set of sacrosanct beliefs but rather a difference in group affiliations. The Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have not fought one another because they hold different views of the sacredness of the Virgin Mary or of the way to take communion. They are fighting for control because they belong to different social groups. One group says to the other "We are catholics and you are protestants", and vice-versa.

Pape's evidence suggests that democracies or near democracies seem especially prone to developing groups with such suicidal tendencies. This is apparently because the promise of democracy is that all people will have an equal say in how their lives are run. When this promise remains permanently unfilled or is seen to be impossible with the balance of power (or votes) that a people faces, they turn to terrorism and eventually suicidal terrorism.

Pape goes astray, however, when he interprets the situation in Iraq to be primarily an expression of a desire to rid the country of foreigners, especially Americans. Give this interpretation, his solution for terrorism in Iraq then becomes taking the American forces out. This might have worked at some point, but the insurgency and the suicide bombing is now directed mainly against the Shi'a, and one can assume that it will be turned against the Iranians if they continue to increase their influence. I would judge that a better analogy for Iraq is the struggle of radical Tamils against the government of Sri Lanka. They find themselves a "permanent minority". As such, democracy does nothing for them unless the borders of the country are drawn so that they can live in a country of their own. It is true that the Tamils fought effectively against the Indians when they came to the aid of the Sri Lanka government. They did blow up the prime minister of India in a famous suicide event. But this was essentially a side show. Their real enemy was and remains the Sinhalese majority on their island.

In the May 15 New York Times "Week in Review" James Bennet Expounds at some length on the difficulty of understanding why the insurgency continues and even escalates in Iraq. It is hard to understand if one believes that the critical issues for Iraqis are the overthrow of Saddam, the occupation of the country by foreigners and non-Muslims, or the emerging democratic process. Sadly, I conclude that these issues are no longer foremost in the minds of the insurgents if they ever were. Apparently what has happened is that a critical number of Sunni Arabs have concluded that democracy in Iraq does not and cannot work for them. They understand (in spite of Sunni Arab claims that the Sunnis are actually the majority) that the Shi'a have an overwhelming and possibly expanding majority. They understand that most Shi'a believe that they should at last rule the country and that the past behavior of the Sunni Arabs gives them little right to complain. The Sunni Arab understanding is confirmed by the fact that the security forces of the elected government are made up almost exclusively of Shiites and Kurds (who, of course, make calculations of their own).

The fact that this situation leads the Sunni Arabs to fight bitterly and relentlessly against the democratic system that is coming into being in Iraq should not surprise Americans. After all, it was the shrinking minority of white Southerners in mid-nineteenth century America that decided to fight against what they thought would otherwise be an irresistible northern tide. As they saw it, the democratic system of a united country was simply incapable of saving them or what they saw as their essential interests. The result was our bloodiest war.

Today's paper has an Op-Ed whose purpose is to record for the month of April the many good things that were going on in Iraq during a period in which all we heard were reports of killing and mayhem. Some of these good news reports were important and I certainly had not heard them before, others were less so. I did not know that Iraq's educational television service began again on April 19 after a twelve year hiatus, that the inflation rate fell in March, or that nine residential districts in Diyala received new electricity supply through an energy-cooperation project with Iran.

Yet in spite of the good news items that we do not hear about, the killing remains out of control. Everyone now realizes that the attacks are by the Sunni Arabs (although al-Sadr's people still wave their fists at the Americans). The Shi'a remain restrained, but we are coming to realize that this restraint is explained by the fact that the government forces are nearly all Shi'a. Gradually, the fighting between the insurgents and the government has willy-nilly become a fight of Shi'a and Sunni Arab. In this, the worst fears of everyone are being confirmed. The situation is much worse than I thought if what I read today about the makeup of the commission parliament has set up to write the constitution is true. According to the story, of the fifty persons selected only two are Sunni Arabs (the same number as there are for the Christian community). This can only suggest to the Sunni Arabs that in a few months they will be living in a country in which they will have little or no say in what happens. In addition, many Shi'a on the popular level may want to use this opportunity for massive revenge. The Sunni Arabs are well aware of the danger. The United States is reported to be so concerned by the increasing Sunni alienation that they are increasing their pressure on the government to give the Sunni Arabs more of a say. But what we can accomplish in this manner is limited and all sides know it. We have been applying this pressure for months with little result. And if we apply too much pressure, everyone turns against us.

So it appears that we have a sectarian war on our hands. We call it an insurgency against a democratically elected government. This may make us feel good, but this is not the way the Iraqis and particularly the Sunni Arabs see it. I do not have a ready solution. Maybe it was simply inevitable, something that should have been foreseen more clearly than it was. Again, I would think there could eventually be a division of the country that could be a basis for an end of the insurgency. But I do not see this in the cards now, particularly when the watching world would condemn any result that destroyed the "territorial integrity" of the country (a sacred concern for the international community).

The continued toll in the Iraq war has occasioned some rethinking of what we are up against. The number of attacks and their sophistication continues to increase, and any number of optimistic statements that this must be their last hurrah ring increasingly hollow (even though they may be true --remember the Tet offensive). While much is still unclear, the consensus is that the old Baath-Sunni leadership generally calls the shots and arranges the finances. The preferred tactic these days is the use of suicide bombers driving vehicles. The insurgency is said to have a stockpile of such vehicles, some already loaded. In addition, they have large stockpiles of munitions from which more can be made. The people carrying the weapons appear mostly to be foreigners recruited for the war against the crusaders. Some, however, may be Iraqis who are compelled to play this role (by, for example, threats to family members that are in the hands of the insurgency).

One result of this latest understanding is a major offensive against insurgent areas near to the Syrian border. This area near Qaim has been the known source of infiltration for a long time. I was surprised to see that the Coalition had not secured the area long ago. This is another one of the costs of simply not having enough troops. We and our Iraqi allies need to be able to go into such critical areas in force and stay there. Campaigns, such as that in Falluja, are often not the answer. (However, the situation in Falluja in spite of everything is actually much improved over the situation when we went in.)

It is a war of Sunnis against everyone else. Yet it is more complex than that. Many in the Sunni leadership are actually secular, as are Baath leaders in general. Interviews suggest that the fears of the Sunnis includes some mixture of having to live in a theocracy and losing their leading role in Iraq to the Shiites. One interview suggests that the Baath-Sunnis also see the struggle as developing into one between Iraq and Iran. They even suggest that many of the bombers are set up by the Iranians as a way to cause trouble. And they thoroughly believe that the new Prime Minister is simply a tool of Iran. One does not have to believe any of this to understand the rather dark implications of such beliefs. My own experience in the area suggests that even more than most peoples, the Muslims believe what they want to believe: talking them out of it is often impossible.

In many ways, President Bush represents a dream of democracy advocates come true. He is willing to crisscross the world bringing the message that the job of this century is to democratize the world and the United States has taken it upon itself to be the leader in this enterprise. Unfortunately, his inconsistencies and reliance on others in the administration with other agendas makes the message less credible than it should be.

He lectures Putin on the need for more democracy and the correctness of the American policy directed toward supporting emerging democracies on the periphery of Russia. He seems to say that successful states in the modern world must be democracies, states that have "freedom of worship, freedom of the press, economic liberty, the rule of law and the limitation of power through checks and balances". However, at the same time, he continues to support the authoritarian regimes in Pakistan and Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia for economic reasons or because of the help they afford us in the war on terrorism. Most glaringly, he does not lecture China or Singapore on the necessity for democracy.

The latter failure is traceable to the desire of many in the Bush Administration to continue the cold war against Russia. From their perspective, old friends in that war, such as China and Pakistan, are not to be lectured to or interfered with, while antagonists in that war, such as Russia, are to be surrounded and pressed on all sides until they follow our direction. Even from a democracy perspective this is a dangerous strategy, one that risks a backlash. Right now, Putin seems willing to go along grudgingly. The latest exercise in Moscow seems to have gone well on the atmospherics level. But if Putin does not, there are many others in Russia who will raise the nationalist banner to everyone's detriment. We see from recent events in Latin America how alliances and good feelings can wax and wane.

Except for a few trivial examples, war is always hell. War is sometimes essentially unavoidable. It is sometimes desirable. It does accomplish positive goals for the generations involved and even for later generations. Readers will disagree on which wars these generalizations apply to, but most people will find occasions in history when a war has done more good than evil.

One of the ways to balance the good against the evil is to look at the way wars are fought. The most evil wars have been fought with the purpose of destruction. This was surely true of the some of the Mongol conquests. We can also see how the use of certain weapons, such as nuclear weapons, might make any possible gains from a war most doubtful. But we also need to look at the particulars, at how wars damage the relationships and understandings that people have of themselves and of how human beings should act in the world. The latter is the reason for the "rules of land warfare" that American forces have long carried with them, or for the Geneva agreements on the treatment of prisoners. A "good war" in this regard is one in which captured persons are not executed after capture or tortured and humiliated, particularly when such actions are carried out carelessly and without evident need.

In this latter regard, the United States bears a particularly heavy burden. As a superpower, it will often be the country called upon to make the decision for and against war, and to be the lead party in any resulting war. Recent events suggest that as a people, we are woefully ill-prepared to carry this burden. In particular, news reports repeatedly indicate that American soldiers, members of American services such as the CIA, and the chain of command up to and including the President have been unable to face up to the responsibility to avoid the torture and humiliation of those who are brought under American control on the battlefield or through police actions. One of the latest examples, is the apparently repeated use of Uzbekistan for the rendition of persons who it is felt must be tortured to reveal necessary information. Clearly our government knows what is going on. Our own State Department continues to list Uzbekistan as a country regularly employing torture. On the other side of the world, the trial of Lynndie England for her offenses at Abu Ghraib reveals a person of low intelligence and minimal culture was thrown into a situation for which she was not prepared. As a result she relapsed into subhuman behavior. A recent book by a person who resigned from the military because of actions in Iraq reports that the soldiers he served with regularly treated the Iraqis around them with brutality and contempt, actions that seem to have occasioned little censure from those above. Another nugget of information is the revelation that military recruiters in the United States over the last year or more have had to repeatedly ignore the standards for new recruits in order to fill their quotas. Their superiors reward them for filling the quotas and prefer to ignore how they are filled. The result is an increasing number of new recruits with known psychological problems, with below standard intelligence and/or education, and sometimes even with criminal records.

We are trying, in other words, to police the world on the cheap, and with unworthy tools. We must also recognize that too many Americans, even Americans that do meet military standards, are brutal, ignorant, and uncaring. They are raised in a cultural milieu that is too often brutal, ignorant, and uncaring, the culture of "Smackdown". America has one of the largest prison populations in the world, and many states have some of its worst prisons. What goes on in these prisons is a foretaste of what goes on in Iraq: England's superior and boyfriend was trained in such institutions.

Making the country one that will be worthy of leadership, that has a "right" to lead the world, is no small task. It must begin with leaders recognizing the cultural and educational and moral problems that have developed in this country over many years. They must take strong stands against torture and cruelty, and must be sure that people at every military and service level believe that those above them recognize the need for change and will take the necessary steps to bring about such change. At present, our top leaders appear deaf and dumb, they appear to dismiss the reports as either lies or unimportant "given the fact we are at war". Any leader who believes this should be dismissed from command, and any underling who acts against the ostensible rules should, at a minimum, leave the service. But long before this point, in the secondary schools and academies, teachers should be prepared to lead frank discussions that take clear positions on torture and cruelty, not allowing the "boys will be boys" attitudes of the past to persist. Only then can we build a country that is worthy of international respect, of leadership. It will not happen overnight.

The exceptionally effective suicide bombings continue day after day, week after week. The targets are varied, but the emphasis seems to be on killings Shiites or Kurds, probably because the Americans are harder to get at. The insurgents have little concern that civilians are killed as well as their ostensible targets. Juan Cole feels that, in spite of all the claims by the Jihadists that they are responsible for the mayhem, the main source of the insurgency remains the Baathists and the Sunnis who lived well under Saddam. This seems right. They seem to have inexhaustible money and munitions. In fact, the operations are getting more sophisticated and deadly.

One can get a feel for what is happening by looking at a piece in the New York Times Magazine this last week. It is ostensibly a discussion of the development of small commando units to fight the insurgents. These are primarily made up of former Baathists and led by former officers in Saddam's forces. They are not ideological: they fight for the money and because warfare is all they know. They are being advised and to some degree organized by Americans, particularly by Americans who organized similar units to fight against the communists in Central America in the 1980s. The Americans are not too squeamish about how these forces fight, then or now.

My conclusion is that a distinct subculture of institutionalized violence developed in Iraq before we arrived on the scene. The people carrying this culture today are relatively few but extremely skilled and dedicated to their way of life. Most of them decided after the Americans dismissed them from the army and revoked their pensions to fight the Americans. They are still at it, although the preferred enemy is now the system the Americans established. A few representatives of this culture have decided that life is better on the other side, so are now organizing into units to fight the insurgency. My guess is that it will be a long time before another and competing culture of violence can successfully compete with this Baathist culture. The Shiites simply do not have the staying power; it is doubtful that the Kurds, even their Pesh-Murga, have it either. An outside power cannot create the starch and ruthlessness required for success overnight.

Democracy and "what the people want" are important, but they may not be the key considerations for Iraqis who have to live alongside and among the organized killers that dominate the insurgency. We hear of the people on "our side" that they kill. I have no doubt that they also kill many on "their side", for treason, informing, or just to terrorize them. If we can entice enough of these hard-boiled men to switch to our side, then our side will eventually win. But meanwhile we may well have created an organized and committed force that will end up, after we leave, setting aside the democratic institutions that we have so laboriously established. It is a dilemma for which I do not have a solution.

The last few weeks have seen a shameful and disturbing display of the power of irrational and antidemocratic religion. The death of the Pope and the display of thoughtless admiration and devotion that surrounded the occasion, as well as the subsequent politburo-like election of a new Pope augurs poorly for the future of us all. The hierarchy he represents, and that the new Pope Benedict most explicitly represents, has through opposition to birth control and abortion been responsible for millions of unwanted and uncared for children around the world. It has been responsible through opposition to the use of the condom for millions of deaths from HIV, particularly in Africa.

But the Catholic Church is merely one of the most egregious examples of the pernicious hand of religion in the world's affairs. The fundamentalist Protestants in the United States have been in the forefront of opposition to medical advances, as well as to the acceptance into the human family of homosexuals. Their partisans have also been major backers of Jewish conquests in Palestine, primarily on the basis of their interpretation of an ancient book that tells them that the Jewish conquest will precede the return of Christ to the earth. Many traditional Jews, on the other hand, have supported the taking of Palestine from the Arabs on the basis of the simple proposition that this land was given to them by God for all time. If it was not in Jewish hands for 2000 years, that was simply an unfortunate historical error.

In India, Hindu holy men enflame the masses to violent massacres in the name of their holy men while in Nigeria Muslim divines managed to hold up inoculation against polio long enough to rekindle its spread at just that moment when the world community had almost managed to eliminate this plague. In Angola we are told that traditional religious healers in Uige have been responsible for the difficulty world and local health officials have had in controlling a vicious outbreak of the Marburg disease.

These are a few examples of the dangerous drag of superstition, especially organized superstition, on the growth and positive use of scientific knowledge and practice. This would not be a danger if this positive scientific growth were not needed to counteract the consequences of a parallel and largely unavoidable negative growth that also depends on science and the results of science. For example, there is more science to control disease, but there is also more disease to control. Development in the means of travel and communication has increased the spread of disease. For example, we are better able to find and control terrorists because of the many means of surveillance and communication available to counterterrorist agencies. But the terrorists have better and more available weapons to use against humanity because science has put these in their hands, just as it has facilitated their communication and movement. Many futurists cannot escape a growing fear that knowledge will in the end lead humanity to a point at which it self destructs. The invention of nuclear weapons and ever more effective means for their delivery seemed in the middle of the last century to herald a fiery end for all. That bullet was dodged for the time being. But science is coming up with many more bullets. Effective international organization and new methodologies and tools can help us battle the existential dangers that are bound to develop as we move forward. But they can only be successful if humanity matures enough to make full use of the science available to them, and international organization (institutionalized or functional) is able to overcome those hostilities based on inherited superstitions and boundaries that lead to the misuse of scientific advances.

Today's paper (April 18) has a valuable Op-Ed making the argument that the United States should cease its opposition to a gas pipeline that is being worked out by Iran, Pakistan, and India. The argument is made on several levels. First, America needs the cooperation of India and Pakistan, and it needs for these countries to develop and preserve good relations with one another. Second, India, and to a lesser extent, Pakistan need more energy sources and Iran is the most easily available and affordable source. The three countries are working out the agreement and the financing — they do not need us. Finally, natural gas is the most easily available energy source for India from the viewpoint of global pollution.

Instead of welcoming this initiative, however, the United States is opposing it in an automatic, unthinking attempt to oppose whatever Iran does. At the same time as we are blocking them in this regard we are also requiring the Iranians to give up part of their efforts in the nuclear area — and this is at the same time as we are proposing to help the Indians develop their nuclear power capabilities. If we carry through on the latter, we will infuriate all our traditional allies, all of whom we have tried to block from efforts to support (and profit from) nuclear power in the developing world.

The authors advise the U.S. government to change its stance in regard to this issue as others as well. Their suggestion is supported by an unrelated report of the IISS (in their "Strategic Comments" series, 11,2). They report that in recent years Iran has pulled back from its support of terror, particularly outside the Middle East. Iran has been reluctant to take an active role in Iraq and is likely to remain reluctant. The IISS paper argues that Iran is offering the United States an opportunity to improve relations. If we really want to keep Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, this is an opportunity we should take advantage of.

A recent posting gave an incorrect picture of the insurgency situation. Although many more civilians and Iraqi security personnel are being killed than members of the Coalition forces, according to the latest American figures it is still true that the majority of attacks are directed against Coalition forces. Nevertheless, it is also true, as that posting stated, that the number of attacks has been declining since the elections.

This brings us back to the question of where the insurgency is going. A few days ago, Muqtada al-Sadr took his people into the streets again after a long rest, denouncing Americans and demanding that they pull out. The event was in Baghdad. The numbers were impressive, but not as great as the organizers had hoped. Its organizers managed to keep their people nonviolent. It was probably just an attempt to show that the Mahdi Army was still a group that had to be reckoned with, and not really a turn toward supporting the insurgency.

Meanwhile, with fits and starts the politicians seem to be getting their act together. A major Sunni Arab leader went to see the Ayatollah Sistani to thank him for his attempts to avoid Shi'a attacks against Sunnis. This leader was not part of the die-hard Sunni Arab faction, but still a good step. The Iraqi security forces seem to be steadily becoming more and more active and effective. Talk of immediate American withdrawal has generally quietened

All of which leads to the question of how the insurgency will be able to preserve itself. It is still remarkably effective. But for how long? The fanatic Muslim side of the effort continues to get reenforcements from outside the country. But the old Baathist officers who have had most of the money and probably been the most effective militarily must be thinning out through killing and capture. Their sources of funds in Syria are sure to dry up eventually.

To be sustainable at a high level, insurgencies generally need outside support, or at least a fairly open highway for support to flow in. In spite of some accusations, the only side that has been shown to provide regular access is the Syrian. One doubts if it is in the long-range interest of Syria to allow this to continue at the level it has in the past. Syria's leaders belong to a relatively secular Allawi sect of Shiism, one with little love for the Ithna 'Ashariya Iraqi type. Only a general dislike of "the foreigner" motivates them to go along with the insurgency traffic. One can only assume that sooner or later other considerations are likely to change the balance against continuing support for the insurgency.

Which brings us back to the young men willing to risk their lives continuing the fight. Do they still have a theory of victory? It is hard to imagine. About the only fairly coherent one I can think of would be based on the hope that the three major ethnic groups will break apart over the writing of the constitution and the insurgency with its forces already in the field will be able to pick up the pieces. First, one can assume the Americans, disappointed with this result and unwilling to fight the ethnic groups to hold together a disintegrating Iraq, will decide to leave. Then, the insurgency will again establish its supremacy over the Sunni Arab community. Then it will go on to subdue the Shi'a in Baghdad and the south. Finally it will be the turn of the Kurds in the north

The Muslims extremists associated with Zarqawi have a more diffuse goal. They just want to kill the "enemies of Islam", whether they be Americans or Iraqis. Iraq seems to be as good a place to do this as anywhere. They may have hoped to inflict a major defeat on the American devils in Iraq. As this hope fails to be realized, they can be sustained by the more general faith in their righteousness. But if their secular allies desert them and the Iraqi community becomes more hostile to their presence, their effectiveness and long-term viability as a movement in Iraq will diminish.

One can only hope that the Americans and the new system of government in Iraq can understand the hopes and fears and strategies of the insurgency in such a way as to hasten its withering into insignificance.