The Rag Blog

The official version of the political battles over the environment in the late 1990s goes something like this:

As the Republican Visigoths swept into control of the 104th Congress, in January of 1995, trembling greens predicted that not an old-growth tree, not an endangered species would be spared. The Republicans’ threats were terrible to behold. They proposed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. They vowed to establish a commission to shut down several national parks; to relax standards on the production and disposal of toxic waste; to turn over enforcement of clean water and air standards to the states. They uttered fearsome threats against the Endangered Species Act. They boasted of plans to double the amount of logging in the National Forests.

Then, the official myth goes on, the president, Gore and the national greens fought off the Visigoths.

American politics thrives on simple legends of virtue combating vice. As regards the environment, the Republican ultras did not carry all before them. They didn’t need to. Clinton and Gore had already done most of the dirty work themselves. The real story begins back in the early days of the administration, when Clinton and Gore had what might be called an environmental mandate and a Democratic Congress to help them move through major initiatives. But the initiatives never happened. Instead, those early years were marked by a series of retreats, reversals and betrayals that prompted David Brower, the grand old man of American environmentalism, the arch druid himself, to conclude that “Gore and Clinton had done more harm to the environment than Reagan and Bush combined.”

The first environmental promise Al Gore made in the 1992 campaign, he soon broke. It involved the WTI hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, built on a floodplain near the Ohio River. The plant, one of the largest of its kind in the world, was scheduled to burn 70,000 tons of hazardous waste a year in a spot only 350 feet from the nearest house. A few hundred yards away is East Elementary School, which sits on a ridge nearly eye-level with the top of the smokestack.

On July 19, 1992, Gore gave one of his first campaign speeches on the environment, across the river from the incinerator site, in Weirton, West Virginia, hammering the Bush Administration for its plans to give the toxic waste burner a federal air permit. “The very idea is just unbelievable to me”, Gore said. “I’ll tell you this, a Clinton-Gore Administration is going to give you an environmental presidency to deal with these problems. We’ll be on your side for a change.” Clinton made similar pronouncements on his swing through the Buckeye State.

Shortly after the election, Gore assured neighbors of the incinerator that he hadn’t forgotten about them. “Serious questions concerning the safety of the East Liverpool, Ohio, hazardous waste incinerator must be answered before the plant may begin operation”, Gore wrote. “The new Clinton/Gore administration will not issue the plant a test burn permit until all questions concerning compliance with the plant have been answered.”

But that never happened. Instead, the EPA quietly granted the WTI facility its test burn permit. The tests failed, twice. In one, the incinerator eradicated only 7 percent of the mercury found in the waste, when it was supposed to burn away 99.9 percent. A few weeks later the EPA granted WTI a commercial permit anyway. They didn’t tell the public about the failed tests until afterward.

Gore claimed his hands were tied by the Bush Administration, which had promised WTI the permit only a few weeks before the Clinton team took office. But by one account, William Reilly, Bush’s EPA director, met with Gore’s top environmental aide Katie McGinty in January 1993 and asked her if he should begin the process of approving the permit. He says McGinty told him to proceed. McGinty said later that she had no recollection of the meeting.

Gore persisted in maintaining that there was nothing he could do about it once the permit was granted. A 1994 report on the matter from the General Accounting Office flatly contradicted him, saying the plant could be shut down on numerous grounds, including repeated violations of its permit.

[Headline from Le Monde, France: Over 50,000 people demonstrate against the war in Iraq]

NEW YORK (AFP) – Thousands of protesters are expected to take to the streets here and in major US West Coast cities Sunday to demand an immediate end to the war in Iraq as New York takes the relay from other US cities that have held massive anti-war marches.

United for Peace and Justice, which describes itself as the largest anti-war coalition in the United States, said it expected the protesters to turn up here en masse to mark the fourth anniversary of the US-led Iraq invasion.

“The national anti-war movement is planning a unified surge of protest actions calling on Congress to end the occupation and for the immediate withdrawal of US troops,” the group said in a statement.

Massive anti-war rallies were also being organized in San Francisco, California; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched to the Pentagon’s doorstep Saturday demanding “US out of Iraq Now,” ahead of the fourth anniversary of the US invasion.

People from across the United States gathered on a cold winter day to descend on the US Defense Department offices and decry the conflict that has killed more than 3,200 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Former US attorney general Ramsey Clark called for President George W. Bush’s impeachment, while Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, demanded a US withdrawal.

“I marched in 1967 here,” Maureen Dooley, 59, said outside the Pentagon, site of Vietnam war protests, but results were not immediate: “It took seven years to end the war.”

The US is not happy about Germany going international with its hunt for the CIA agents responsible for kidnapping Khaled el-Masri. American diplomats vented their anger in meetings with German government officials.

The German investigation into what exactly happened to the German citizen Khaled el-Masri, and who was responsible, is becoming an increasingly prickly thorn in the side of Germany-US relations. Indeed, after a Munich court issued arrest warrants against 13 CIA agents at the end of January for complicity in his kidnapping and subsequent torture, high-ranking US diplomats sought to convince the German government not to expand the search for the perpetrators internationally, German government sources have told DER SPIEGEL.

Following the Jan. 31, 2007 issuing of the arrest warrants, US diplomats spoke with foreign policy advisors of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to express Washington’s displeasure that the case was being forwarded to Interpol, the international police organization that facilitates policing cooperation among 186 member countries — including the US and Germany. In addition, a representative of the US Embassy in Berlin likewise visited the Germany justice ministry to speak with the official in charge of international legal issues.

Despite the diplomatic offensive — and despite misgivings in Berlin — the government agreed to forward the case to Interpol on Feb. 21. Were they to have honored the US request not to get Interpol involved, it would have been a first in German history. Now, Interpol is searching for 10 of the 13 agents involved with the aim of arresting them and extraditing them to Germany for trial.

El-Masri was abducted in Macedonia in late 2003 before being handed over to the CIA and flown to Afghanistan in early 2004 as part of the “extraordinary renditions” program, which saw terror suspects abducted and flown to third countries for interrogation and, in many cases, torture. El-Masri says he was beaten and sodomized while in prison in Afghanistan. Five months later, after the US apparently realized it had arrested him in error, he was flown back to Europe and released on the side of a road in Albania. No charges were ever filed against him.

El-Masri has since taken the US to court seeking damages of at least $75,000 (€57,000). On Friday, though, a federal appeals court affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the case. The judge agreed with US government lawyers that to pursue the case would expose sensitive information on intelligence operations.

The case of el-Masri, who has German citizenship but is of Lebanese descent, is not the only case in Europe focusing on possible misconduct of CIA agents. Prosecutors in Milan want the Italian government to get Interpol involved in their hunt for 26 Americans, many of them CIA agents, accused of having assisted in the kidnapping and imprisonment of the Egyptian Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. He had been granted refugee status in Italy and was abducted in Milan in December 2003 before being flown to Cairo where he was tortured so badly that he suffered major kidney damage.

Similar criminal investigations are also being carried out in Portugal and Switzerland.

Washington has done little to conceal its displeasure at these investigations. Just last week, John Bellinger, a legal advisor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, criticized a recent European Parliament report on renditions. Calling it “unbalanced and unfair,” Bellinger also suggested that the US would not comply with extradition requests from Italy should they be made. “I do think these continuing investigations can harm intelligence cooperation,” he said. “That’s simply a fact of life.”

In response to the EU’s demand that the US terror-suspect prison at Guantanamo be closed, Bellinger chided Europe for not doing its part. “We have not seen Europe has been willing to help,” he told reporters in mid-February. “We have seen many statements from European governments that Guantanamo must be closed immediately. It’s not clear how Guantanamo would be immediately closed. Europe has been prepared to criticize … but has not been prepared to offer a constructive suggestion.”

The biggest transfer of cash in history took place from May 2003 to June 2004 when the U.S. Federal Reserve of New York shipped $12 billion in bills of various denominations to war-torn Iraq. Over the course of one year, a fleet of C-130s carried, from New York to Baghdad, 484 pallets weighing a total of 363 tonnes and holding 281 million banknotes. This is not an advertisement for a new board game but the summary of a memorandum prepared for a meeting of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, which is examining the “reconstruction” of Iraq under Paul Bremer.

No proper record of the funds, which were distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is available. They seem to have been disbursed like Monopoly money. Contractors were paid in cash from the back of pickup trucks; thousands of “ghost employees”, people enlisted in ministerial jobs that did not exist, were paid salaries with bundles of currency; one million dollars was stolen from the CPA vault and nobody seemed to be bothered; $500 million was disbursed under the heading “TBD”, which stands for “to be determined”. An obscure consulting firm from San Diego was in charge of certifying the distribution of the money, yet it never conducted any review of internal controls, as was contractually required.

Bremer’s financial adviser, retired admiral David Oliver, seems surprised by the House committee’s concern, as if the billions that have vanished were really play money. When challenged by a BBC journalist about the consequences of the disappearance without trace of billions of dollars, he pointed out that it was irrelevant where the money had gone because it was Iraqi funds, not U.S. taxpayers’ money. The $12 billion came from Iraqi assets seized after the first Gulf War, from the sale of Iraqi oil, and from surplus payments from the UN oil-for-food program. The $12 billion is not included in the $400 billion spent by the U.S. in Iraq since March 2003.

The procedure for unfreezing “political” money is generally very long and requires the fulfillment of several legal requirements. After a legal battle of more than a decade, waged by a group of Cuban exiles, then-president Bill Clinton finally released some of the Cuban funds frozen during Fidel Castro’s 1950s revolution. Still locked in the vaults of the Federal Reserve is Iranian money seized after the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini ousted Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, some of Gen. Manuel Noriega’s dirty money, and even some assets belonging to the recently deceased Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

Iraqi funds were miraculously freed in less than two months. The procedure was quick and involved the approval of the United Nations, which, technically, was responsible for the oil-for-food surpluses. Those monies could have been used to bring back water and electricity to millions of Iraqis; if equitably distributed, they would have made each Iraqi man, woman, and child $15,000 richer. Instead, they were wasted by incompetent officers appointed by even more incompetent politicians.

It is surreal to think that the U.S. government rushed to fly hundreds of tonnes of cash to a country where its army could not stop people looting arsenals, banks, museums, and hospitals, to a country not yet pacified. As Waxman put it: “Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?”

War is not a board game; it is deadly serious business. Even more surreal is the fact that no plan existed for what to do with so much money.

Bremer claims that the CPA urgently needed the cash because the banking system had disappeared and Iraq was a cash economy. Yet his administration was not equipped to operate in a cash economy, proven by the way it wasted those billions. War zones are always cash economies. Did Bremer really think that after President George W. Bush’s famous “mission accomplished” declaration, ATM machines in Baghdad would miraculously start working again?

Those monies were also needed to inject U.S. dollars into a country where the local currency, the Iraqi dinar, was about to collapse. This is the other explanation Bremer put forward. Most currencies collapse after major conflicts. In the aftermath of the Second World War, devaluation spread like a virus among European currencies and new money had to be introduced by the central banks.

Tony Blair faces the prospect of an International Criminal Court investigation for alleged coalition war crimes in Iraq.

The court’s chief prosecutor told The Sunday Telegraph that he would be willing to launch an inquiry and could envisage a scenario in which the Prime Minister and American President George W Bush could one day face charges at The Hague.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo urged Arab countries, particularly Iraq, to sign up to the court to enable allegations against the West to be pursued. Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations said that his country was actively considering signing up.
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America has refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction and is unlikely to hand over any of its citizens to face trial. However, Britain has signed up and the Government has indicated its willingness to tackle accusations of war crimes against a number of British soldiers.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo said it was frustrating that the court was viewed in the Arab world as biased in favour of the West. Asked whether he could envisage a situation in which Mr Blair and Mr Bush found themselves in the dock answering charges of war crimes in Iraq, he replied: “Of course, that could be a possibility\u2026 whatever country joins the court can know that whoever commits a crime in their country could be prosecuted by me.”

Human rights lawyers remain sceptical about whether charges will ever be brought.

Tomorrow night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now …” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

By the time the ides of March arrived in March 2003, these warning signs were visible on a nearly daily basis. So were the signs that Americans were completely ill prepared for the costs ahead. Iraq was largely anticipated as a distant, mildly disruptive geopolitical video game that would be over in a flash.

Now many of the same leaders who sold the war argue that escalation should be given a chance. This time they’re peddling the new doomsday scenario that any withdrawal timetable will lead to the next 9/11. The question we must ask is: Has history taught us anything in four years?

Here is a chronology of some of the high and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week [with occasional “where are they now” updates].

March 5, 2003

“I took the Grey Poupon out of my cupboard.”

— Representative Duke Cunningham, Republican of California, on the floor of the House denouncing French opposition to the Iraq war.

[In November 2005, he resigned from Congress and pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from defense contractors. In January 2007, the United States attorney who prosecuted him — Carol Lam, a Bush appointee — was forced to step down for “performance-related” issues by Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department.]

March 6, 2003

President Bush holds his last prewar news conference. The New York Observer writes that he interchanged Iraq with the attacks of 9/11 eight times, “and eight times he was unchallenged.” The ABC News White House correspondent, Terry Moran, says the Washington press corps was left “looking like zombies.”

March 7, 2003

Appearing before the United Nations Security Council on the same day that the United States and three allies (Britain, Spain and Bulgaria) put forth their resolution demanding that Iraq disarm by March 17, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, reports there is “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”. He adds that documents “which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” None of the three broadcast networks’ evening newscasts mention his findings.

[In 2005 ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.]

March 10, 2003

Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks tells an audience in England, “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Boycotts, death threats and anti-Dixie Chicks demonstrations follow.

[In 2007, the Dixie Chicks won five Grammy Awards, including best song for “Not Ready to Make Nice.”]

March 12, 2003

A senior military planner tells The Daily News “an attack on Iraq could last as few as seven days.”

“Isn’t it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness?”

— John McCain, writing for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

“The Pentagon still has not given a name to the Iraqi war. Somehow ‘Operation Re-elect Bush’ doesn’t seem to be popular.”

— Jay Leno, “The Tonight Show.”

March 14, 2003

Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, asks the F.B.I. to investigate the forged documents cited a week earlier by ElBaradei and alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction: “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”

March 16, 2003

On “Meet the Press,” Dick Cheney says that American troops will be “greeted as liberators,” that Saddam “has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups, including the Al Qaeda organization,” and that it is an “overstatement” to suggest that several hundred thousand troops will be needed in Iraq after it is liberated. Asked by Tim Russert about ElBaradei’s statement that Iraq does not have a nuclear program, the vice president says, “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong.”

“There will be new recruits, new recruits probably because of the war that’s about to happen. So we haven’t seen the last of Al Qaeda.”

— Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism czar, on ABC’s “This Week.”

[From the recently declassified “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006: “The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”]

“Despite the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of Congress. Senior intelligence analysts say they feel caught between the demands from White House, Pentagon and other government policy makers for intelligence that would make the administration’s case ‘and what they say is a lack of hard facts,’ one official said.”

— “U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms,” by Walter Pincus (with additional reporting by Bob Woodward), The Washington Post, Page A17.

March 17, 2003

Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, who voted for the Iraq war resolution, writes the president to ask why the administration has repeatedly used W.M.D. evidence that has turned out to be “a hoax” — “correspondence that indicates that Iraq sought to obtain nuclear weapons from an African country, Niger.”

[Still waiting for “an adequate explanation” of the bogus Niger claim four years later, Waxman, now chairman of the chief oversight committee in the House, wrote Condoleezza Rice on March 12, 2007, seeking a response “to multiple letters I sent you about this matter.”]

PORT ANGELES – Saturday’s peace march was originally expected to include a visit to a symbolic graveyard, with a marker representing each one of the 3,195 U.S. fighters who have died in Iraq in the last four years.

Instead, marchers were greeted with a sign at Valley Creek Estuary Park saying the permit for the crosses and markers of the Arlington Northwest display had been revoked.

“I’m saddened to learn that the township will not allow us to erect the markers,” said Alan Johanson of Port Townsend.

The display – created by Seattle’s Chapter 92 Veterans for Peace, in conjunction with the Evergreen Peace and Justice Community – was planned to be erected Saturday on Front Street, first in Valley Creek Estuary Park, then on private land to the east of the park.

The original permit was issued the first week of March, said Rose Marschall, of the Clallam County Peace Coalition, an organizer of an anti-war protest held Saturday at Veterans Memorial Park, 217 S. Lincoln St.

That permit allowed the display in the park, she said.

On Thursday, the local chapter of the Veterans for Peace – who had invited the Seattle chapter to set up the display in Port Angeles – realized that the land intended for the display was not the city park but rather the privately-owned land just east of it.

The city rescinded the permit for the park.

Nelson Cone, of the Chapter 139 of Veterans for Peace, said Thursday he received permission from the landowner, Harry Dorssers – who lives out of the country, to use the land.

But on Friday, Dorssers rescinded permission, saying he had thought the display would be a tribute but that now he understood it to be a protest.

“Because of an impression given by the newspaper [Peninsula Daily News] that . . . it was a political statement, the principal landowner withdrew support,” Cone told those who attended the rally on Saturday.

The city issued a revised permit on Friday to Cone for use of the pavilion in the park, but it did not allow the placement of anything in the ground, said Bill Sterling, deputy recreation director.

In the second permit, the city cited the sensitivity of the estuary in disallowing the full display of markers there.

Cherie Kidd. a member of the Soroptimist International of Port Angeles-Noon Club had expressed concerns Thursday that the placement of more than 3,000 markers in the ground would harm the estuary area, saying the place was environmentally-fragile.

The club – which raised $1.26 million to build the 2.6-acre park along the western end of Front Street – never took a formal stand on the issue.

FORKS – The first terrorism checkpoint in the Northern Olympic Peninsula has spurred complaints and concerns that are reaching as far as Washington D.C.

U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks’ office received “a number of complaints and inquiries” Friday from constituents in the Forks area, said an aide to the congressman, D-Belfair.

Customs and Border Protection agents manned a roadblock on the southbound lane of U.S. Highway 101 north of Forks on Thursday morning.

They stopped some motorists to ask about their citizenship and birthplace.

The agents detained seven illegal immigrants, taking them to a detention center in Tacoma.

Dicks called Forks Mayor Nedra Reed about the situation, said George Behan, the congressman’s spokesman, on Friday.

Reed said that when Dicks visited Forks a few weeks ago, she told him she wanted him to work on immigration policy.

She told him that a policy that is “workable, viable, and structured” is important “so that people don’t have to live in fear.”

She told him Friday that her primary concern was the way the checkpoint invoked fear within Latinos living in Forks.

“We have worked hard to build relationship with Latino community,” Reed said.

“I do not want to see this action taken by the federal government impact the relationship we’re building.”

Reed said she was assured by the agency that it would provide the Latino community with the seven people’s names, which are typically not made public.

“I was encouraged that the border patrol will let us know who was picked up,” Reed said.

Best use?

Behan said the Congressman “has questioned whether this is the best use of border protection resources.”

Behan said Dicks planned to pass along to Customs and Border Protection some of the comments and concerns he has received.

“If there is a specific terrorist threat or legitimate information suggesting terrorist activity, there could be a cause for this type of search,” Behan said.

“But Customs and Border Protection staff shouldn’t function as immigration enforcement officers,” he added.

When the agency was reached after the checkpoint was taken down Thursday, Robert Kohlman, a field operations supervisor in the agency’s Blaine office, declined to say whether specific information or threats had prompted the checkpoint.

More checkpoints in Clallam County are planned in the coming months.

Just say nothing

Daniel Perez, intake and outreach coordinator, with the Tacoma-based Northwest Immigration Rights Project, said in light of Thursday’s action, he plans to visit Forks and help inform the Latino community.

“People are not obligated to answer immigration official’s question about status,” Perez said.

LONDON, 18 April 2006 — I have just read Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. It is a classic. Published in 1947, it analyses the nature of Japanese culture. Almost 60 years and many books later, it remains a seminal work. Like all great works of scholarship, the book manages to transcend the time and era in which it was written, ageing in certain obvious respects, but retaining much of its insight and relevance. If you want to make sense of Japan, Benedict’s book is as good a place to start as any. Here, though, I am interested in the origins and purpose of the book.

In June 1944, as the American offensive against Japan began to bear fruit, Benedict, a cultural anthropologist, was assigned by the US Office of War Administration to work on a project to try and understand Japan as the US began to contemplate the challenge that would be posed by its defeat, occupation and subsequent administration. Her book is written with a complete absence of judgmental attitude or sense of superiority, which one might expect; she treats Japan’s culture as of equal merit, virtue and logic to that of the US. In other words, its tone and approach could not be more different from the present US attitude toward Iraq or that country’s arrogant and condescending manner toward the rest of the world.

This prompts a deeper question: Has the world, since then, gone backward? Has the effect of globalization been to promote a less respectful and more intolerant attitude in the West, and certainly on the part of the US, toward other cultures, religions and societies? This contradicts the widely held view that globalization has made the world smaller and everyone more knowing. The answer, at least in some respects, is in the affirmative — with untold consequences lying in wait for us. But more of that later; first, why and how has globalization had this effect?

Of course, it can rightly be argued that European colonialism embodied a fundamental intolerance, a belief that the role of European nations was to bring “civilized values” to the natives, wherever they might be. It made no pretence, however, at seeking to make their countries like ours: Their enlightenment, as the colonial attitude would have it, depended on our physical presence. In no instance, for example, were they regarded as suitable for democracy, except where there was racial affinity, with white settler majorities, as in Australia and Canada. In contrast, the underlying assumption with globalization is that the whole world is moving in the same direction, toward the same destination: it is becoming, and should become, more and more like the West.

Where once democracy was not suitable for anyone else, now everyone is required to adopt it, with all its Western-style accoutrements.

In short, globalization has brought with it a new kind of Western hubris — present in Europe in a relatively benign form, manifest in the US in the belligerent manner befitting a superpower: that Western values and arrangements should be those of the world; that they are of universal application and merit. At the heart of globalization is a new kind of intolerance in the West toward other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.

The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness, born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the hue and cry that the world is now one, that the Western model — neoliberal markets, democracy and the rest — is the template for all.

The new attitude is driven by many factors. The emergence of an increasingly globalized market has engendered a belief that we are all consumers now, all of a basically similar identity, with our Big Macs, mobile phones and jeans. In this kind of reductionist thinking, the distance between buying habits and cultural political mores is close to zero: the latter simply follows from the former. Nor is this kind of thinking confined to the business world, even if it remains the heartland. This is also now an integral part of popular common sense, and more resonant and potent as an international language because consumption has become the mass ideology of Western societies. The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka acquired through tourism consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach.

Then there is the phenomenon of Davos Man, the creation of an overwhelmingly Western-weighted global elite, which thinks it knows all about these things because it describes itself as global and rubs shoulders on such occasions with a small number of handpicked outsiders. Nor should we neglect its media concomitant, the commentariat — columnists who wax lyrical on these things even if their knowledge of the world is firmly bounded by the borders of the West. A couple of days at a conference in Egypt, India or Malaysia makes instant experts of them. So is much of modern Western opinion made.

The net effect of all this is a lack of knowledge of and respect for difference. Globalization has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it. Globalization is itself an exemplar of the problem. Goods and capital may move far more freely than ever before, but the movement of labor has barely changed. Jeans may be inanimate, but migrants are the personification of difference. Everywhere, migration is a charged political issue. In the modern era of globalization, everything is allowed to move except people.

After three decades of headlong globalization, the world finds itself in dangerous and uncharted waters. Globalization has fostered the illusion of intimacy while intolerance remains as powerful and unyielding as ever — or rather, has intensified, because the Western expectation is now that everyone should be like us. And when they palpably are not, as in the case of the Islamic world, then a militant intolerance rapidly rises to the surface. The wave of Islamophobia in the West — among the people and the intelligentsia alike — is a classic example of this new intolerance. When I wrote a recent article on the Danish cartoons, arguing that Europe had to learn a new way of relating to the world, I got nearly 400 e-mails in response. Over half of these were negative and many were frightening in their intolerance, especially those from the US, which were often reminiscent in their tone to the worst days of the 1930s.

Twin specters hang over the Middle East of the American imagination — the perceived rise in the geopolitical power of the region’s Shi‘i Muslims and the dark shadow cast by the sectarian reprisals that increasingly propel the Iraqi civil war. In the United States, pundits and Democratic presidential candidates point to the first specter as the ominous unintended consequence of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, according to what is now conventional wisdom, strengthened majority-Shi‘i Iran at the expense of the US-sponsored order in the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi civil war, meanwhile, is the newest evidence for Americans that conflicts in the Middle East are intractable because they are, at root, religious. Many Americans have turned against the Iraq war not because the invasion was launched on false pretenses or lacked UN approval, but because they now see the well-intentioned US military trapped amidst what Newsweek called “violent sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the two main branches of Islam that have been at odds for centuries.” In Washington, former war supporters like Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) have taken to calling for “passing the torch to the Iraqis, who are the only ones who can handle this ancient—I’d say primitive—sectarian dispute.”

If nothing else, the notion that a primordial Middle Eastern hatred explains the Iraqi civil war is distressing for its resonance with the canard that Jews, Christians and Muslims have been fighting over the Holy Land since time immemorial. Regular consumers of American news coverage believe that because upon each flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, historical primers inevitably appear in the newspapers to show that the confrontation is infused with religious attachments anchored deep in the past. Such primers are an abuse of history, because they substitute detours through antiquity for excursus of far more relevant contemporary events. Politically, they are pernicious, for they encourage passive public reactions—shrugs at hopeless tribalism or the stunned silence one would evince at a natural disaster. “They will never make peace,” many readers understandably conclude, before flipping to the sports page.

As with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the problem with the religious-sectarian narrative of the Iraqi conflagration is not factual inaccuracy per se. Violence has indeed plagued Sunni-Shi‘i relations from time to time, and several wars have been fought in the name of establishing one sect’s power or another, or at least been so justified by the aggressor. It is sadly true that the Iraqi civil war has a distinctly sectarian cast, and many Iraqis have certainly died or fled their homes simply because they are Sunnis or Shi‘a.

The problem is lack of historical context. Timelines do not tell us what caused outbreaks of “sectarian violence,” and they are especially poor at conveying multiple causes. Nor, crucially, does the existence of doctrinal differences between Sunnism and Shi‘ism teach us anything about the relationship between sect and politics—why and how communal aspects of identity take precedence over others, why and how religious identity becomes “sectarian” or chauvinist, why and how rulers mobilize feelings of communal belonging for political ends. This last point suggests that we search, in contemporary rather than ancient history, for the political moorings of the tenet that sectarian affiliation determines political motivation, and so explains current events.