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	Multi-polarity as the new reality of international politics by Jonathan Steele The Guardian / UK   03 February 2006   The crises over Hamas and Iran underline the collapse of the neoconservative mission and the end of a one-superpower world.   George Bush"s presidency still has three years to run, but this week"s state of the union address had an unmistakably ebb-tide air. Its tone - "chastened, deferential, modest" in the words of the Los Angeles Times - suggested that the president felt the waves of power were flowing against him.   This is not the same as being a lame duck. The moment when second-term presidents start to face severe problems in getting legislation through Congress or convincing foreign allies to support controversial measures normally comes later in the cycle. The last midterm elections (in this case November 2006) are the usual peak before the White House incumbent"s domestic authority declines. On foreign policy the slippage comes even later. It may be delayed as far as the final weeks of office, as Bill Clinton found when he tried to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians in January 2001.   Nor does the change in Bush"s demeanour this week result mainly from fading support among Americans for what will be remembered as the central decision of his presidency, the mistaken war on Iraq. His unprecedentedly low poll ratings certainly affected his mood on Tuesday night, and one sharp-eyed New York Times reporter noted that "he smiled seldom and only winked once". But the reason for Bush"s gloom goes much deeper.   Like missionaries who find that the heathens are refusing to be converted, he and his neocon colleagues are beginning to realize that their mission of freedom is not as convincing as they expected. It is also having unpredicted effects, forcing them to confront awkward choices: carry on elaborating grand principles, or adjust the message and feel guilty of sinful backsliding.   Bush"s speech was remarkable for the number of times he called on his fellow Americans not to retreat, not to give up, not to succumb to pessimism, not to be defeatist. If his policies were not floundering, these pleas would not have been necessary. They were markedly different from the confident tone of last year"s address, when he had just been inaugurated for a second term and the administration hoped that Iraq"s first elections would bring the collapse of the insurgency. Now, after a constitutional referendum and another election, the attacks on US and British forces show no sign of abating significantly.   Bush insisted on Tuesday that democracy was still on the march around the world, particularly in the Middle East. He cited the polls in Egypt, Palestine and Saudi Arabia, though when he claimed that Iran "is held hostage by a small clerical elite" he seemed to forget that its president was also elected: he won in a well-contested race with a high voter turnout and no obvious frontrunner.   Yet, as one listens to Bush and his neocon team, their sense of frustration is palpable. They realize they have been ambushed by their own policies. Their zeal for ideological purity pushed them into positions from which it is hard to escape without looking as though they are betraying themselves.   Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has made two difficult trips to Europe in less than a month. The first was overshadowed by the scandal over secret US torture centers in Europe; the second was meant to be a triumphant assertion of progress in Afghanistan, but turned into a series of crisis meetings on Hamas and Iran.   Rice pleads with Europeans to understand that a real war is going on and there are bad people out there. She urges us not to be complacent about terrorism and argues the need to make tough changes in our civil-liberty laws. She sees it as a success that the Bush administration has abolished the distinction between freedom fighters and terrorists. This means, she argues, that the tolerance shown to the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1980s, which allowed them generous time to drop their commitment to violence, cannot be repeated with Hamas now.   She fears that Hamas"s victory will erode Europeans" commitment to the war on terror as they struggle to square the circle of continuing to help the Palestinians while calling on their new government to tear up its manifesto. The Hamas crisis is not just a foreign-policy dilemma. It is a metaphor for the brittle nature of the Bush administration"s self-awarded global mission as it faces the contradictions of the real world.   The crisis over Iran"s nuclear ambitions is equally significant. The post-cold-war era, when there was only a single superpower, is over now. The United States is being forced to enlist Russia and, to a lesser extent, China as partners in finding a compromise. With this, the economic rise of India and the resurgence of anti-yanqui nationalism in several states in Latin America, we have clearly entered a multi-polar world.   No one in Downing Street or Washington will admit it publicly, but Jacques Chirac has turned out to be right. His global Gaullism, the notion that the world has several power centers, and it is no longer just "the west versus the rest", offers a more accurate picture than the image of the lone cowboy acting in the name of us all. The analysis is not Chirac"s alone, of course. The French president is in most ways a discredited figure, little loved even at home. But he is the most prominent European to dare to embrace multi-polarity as the new reality of international politics.   Leaders of the non-aligned nations have been saying the same thing for a long time, as have Washington"s latest bugbears, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In his soft-spoken way, Kofi Annan has also been calling for a new recognition of the dispersal of international power. In a little-reported speech in London this week, he took issue with even the concept of a five-nation power centre made up of the permanent members of the UN Security Council. "Do not underestimate the slow erosion of the UN"s authority and legitimacy that stems from the perception that it has a very narrow power base, with just five countries calling the shots," he pleaded.   UN reform is a slow process, and it is doubtful whether the new claimants for permanent security-council seats, such as Brazil, India and Japan, will get their way soon. But the trend is in their direction, regardless of whether it is formalized by the UN now or in several years.   So, Bush"s frantic pleas to his American audience not to retreat are signs not just that his ideological simplicities carry less conviction at home than they once did. He has also begun to see that US power abroad is on the wane.
	The Gap between U.S. rhetoric and Reality by Deepak Chopra, Anatol Lieven International Herald Tribune   February 6, 2006   Democracy and the Untouchables, by Deepak Chopra. (Huffington Post)   A coca farmer has been elected president in Bolivia and a socialist doctor in Chile. Hamas has won majority power in Palestine and a hard-line anti-Zionist leads Iran. These are all democratic outcomes, and in the foreseeable future we can expect more of the same.   From the American perspective, it looks like the worst example of getting what you wish for. We stand for democracy, and now we have to hold our ground when democracy doesn''t turn out remotely as we would want it to. Observers point out that the last five elections in the Middle East have brought in Islamic fundamentalists or close to it, while almost every election in South America has brought in socialists with an animus against the U.S., or close to it.   As the world''s leading democracy, it''s ironic that we have been so afraid of it elsewhere, supporting reactionary royal families and dictatorships in country after country, although capriciously our support of a Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Duvalier, Aristide, Assad, Musharaf, etc. can suddenly sour. We should welcome democracy for the same reason that India learned to accept the rise of the untouchables to power.   Historically, it was unthinkable that the most despised and dispossessed people in the country should share in its rule. But no horrors have come to pass, and India''s democracy has been strengthened. The factions rising to power in South America and the Middle East are similarly dispossessed and despised. Much as we dislike the religious Shiites who are about to rule Iraq, weren''t they the same rebels who tried to rise against Saddam in 1991 and were massacred by the thousands when the U.S failed to help them?   Poor, oppressed, ignorant, and rejected people don''t behave well; they are often angry and irrational. Whatever anyone may think of them, the dispossessed will only change if they are given a share of power. In Palestine the ruling Fatah party squandered and outright stole billions of dollars in foreign aid, and the leading politicians there have amassed fortunes in Swiss bank accounts while their people starve. The same is true of our favored pols in Iraq. They are prepared to steal billions more as the oil wealth of the country gets divided among the ultra-privileged. In South America a peon class, often made up of indigenous Indians, exists in hopeless degradation while the richest live like colonialists from two centuries ago.   These intolerable injustices aren''t ours to fix. Each country deserves self-determination. Billions spent to prop up the Shah of Iran did nothing to prevent the rise of democracy there, and it won''t anywhere else, not in the long run. America''s choice is either to guide this great historical upheaval or be charged with trying to suppress the very people who might have sailed to the New World when we were struggling to be free.   Jan. 30, 2006   The Gap between U.S. rhetoric and Reality, by Anatol Lieven. (IHT)   The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections ought to lead to a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy in the Middle East, especially since it follows electoral successes for Islamist parties in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.   The most important lesson of the elections is that the United States cannot afford to use the rhetoric of spreading democracy as an excuse for avoiding dealing with pressing national grievances and wishes. If the United States pursues or supports policies that are detested by a majority of ordinary people, then these people will react accordingly if they are given a chance to vote.   Above all, U.S. policy makers must understand that other peoples have their own national pride and national interests, which they expect their governments and representatives to defend. In Russia in the 1990s, the liberals helped to destroy their electoral chances by giving Russian voters the impression that they put deference to American wishes above the interests of Russia.   Today, Americans who want to support liberal revolution in Iran as a way of making Iran more responsive to U.S. and Israeli demands are making the same mistake. And in order to understand this, it is hardly necessary to study Russia or Iran. In the United States, if a political party were supported by a foreign country, and gave the impression of serving that country"s interests, would it stand any chance of being elected to anything?   But in truth, the present centrality of the "democratization" idea to administration rhetoric does not come from any study of the Middle East, or of reality in general. Rather, the Bush administration has fallen back on this rhetoric in part because all other paths and justifications have failed or been rejected. The administration desperately needed some big vision that would give the American people the impression of a plan for the war on terror, promising something beyond tighter domestic security and endless military operations.   Thus spreading democracy was always one of the arguments used for the Iraq war, but it only became the central one after the failure to find the promised weapons of mass destruction. As a result of the Iraqi quagmire, the language of preventive war and military intervention, so prevalent in the administration"s National Security Strategy of 2002, has also become obviously empty, requiring a new central theme for the forthcoming security strategy of 2006.   The road map toward a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been shelved, and Bush has admitted that his promise to create an independent Palestinian state by the end of his second term has been abandoned. Building Palestinian democracy therefore became in effect a diversion from a failure or refusal to make progress on addressing real Palestinian grievances.   Finally, demands for democratic regime change in Iran have been used as a way of avoiding making the very painful U.S. concessions that will be necessary if Iran"s nuclear program is to be stopped by diplomatic means. These will have to involve U.S. security guarantees to Iran, a leading place for Iran in any Middle Eastern security order, a role for Iran in shaping the future of both Afghanistan and Iraq, diplomatic recognition and open trade and investment. Any Iranian government would have to demand all this in return for giving up the future possibility of a nuclear deterrent.   Given the mixture of extremism and chaos in the new Iranian government, such a deal may now be impossible as long as the popularly elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in office. But as Flynt Leverett, a former director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, has revealed, in 2003 the administration received a credible Iranian offer of comprehensive negotiations, which it brusquely rejected.   Democratic Party leaders, too, have failed utterly to support a diplomatic alternative to the failed strategy of the Bush administration, partly because they are too scared to confront the bitter anger among powerful groups in the United States that would attend any radical change of U.S. policy toward Iran.   The administration has also been able to neutralize domestic opposition to its "strategy" because its rhetoric appeals to a deep American belief in the U.S. duty to spread democracy and freedom. This is indeed in itself a noble aspiration, and has been until recently the source of much of U.S. moral authority in the world.   But the Bush administration"s combination of preaching human rights with torture, of preaching democracy to Muslims with contempt for the views of those same Muslims, has not helped either the spread of democracy or U.S. interests but badly damaged both.   In fact, the distance between Bush administration rhetoric and observable reality in some areas is beginning to look almost reminiscent of Soviet Communism. And as in the Soviet Union, this gap is also becoming more and more apparent to the rest of the world.   (Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, Washington, is the author of "America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.")
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