Reason Magazine - Staff

The Aquarians and the Evangelicals

blindsey@cato.org (Brink Lindsey) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 12:01:00 EDT

On April 5, 1967, representatives of the San Francisco Oracle, the Diggers, the Family Dog, the Straight Theater, and other parts of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene held a press conference to announce the formation of the Council for a Summer of Love. The event scored friendly media notices: The next day's San Francisco Chronicle described the coalition as "a group of the good hippies," defined as the ones who "wear quaint and enchanting costumes, hold peaceful rock 'n' roll concerts, and draw pretty pictures (legally) on the sidewalk, their eyes aglow all the time with the poetry of love."

Three days earlier and 1,500 miles away, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a very different counterculture was holding its own coming-out party. About 18,000 people—far more than the 4,000 anticipated—gathered for the formal dedication ceremonies at Oral Roberts University. Oklahoma's governor, a U.S. senator, two members of Congress, and Tulsa's mayor were on hand. Delivering the dedication address, "Why I Believe in Christian Education," was Billy Graham, the dean of American evangelists.

The events in San Francisco and Tulsa that spring revealed an America in the throes of cultural and spiritual upheaval. The postwar liberal consensus had shattered. Vying to take its place were two sides of an enormous false dichotomy, both animated by outbursts of spiritual energy. Those two eruptions of millenarian enthusiasm, the hippies and the evangelical revival, would inspire a left/right division that persists to this day.

That split pits one set of half-truths against another. On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them. Both causes were quixotic, and consequently neither fully realized its ambitions. But out of their messy dialectic, the logic of abundance would eventually fashion, if not a reworked consensus, then at least a new modus vivendi.

The Summer of Love
By 1967 the San Francisco Bay Area hippie phenomenon had been incubating for several years. The Beat presence had been strong there from the days of Allen Ginsberg's debut reading of his famous poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery in 1955. And since October 1, 1964, when Jack Weinberg was arrested in Sproul Plaza on trespassing charges—he was soliciting contributions for the Congress of Racial Equality without permission—student unrest had roiled the University of California's Berkeley campus. Romantic rebelliousness was in the air, but now it took a new twist, following the mental corkscrew turns triggered by LSD.

This cultural revolution was a largely underground affair until January 14, 1967, when "A Gathering of the Tribes for the First Human Be-In" grabbed national attention. The event was conceived as a show of unity between hippies and Berkeley radicals, just a few weeks after a glimpse of that union had been seen on the Berkeley campus. At an anti-war mass meeting, a sing-along of "Solidarity Forever" had faltered because too few knew the words. Then someone broke in with the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," and the whole room joined in.

Held on a brilliant blue-sky Saturday at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park, the Be-In was kicked off by Ginsberg and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder. As 20,000 people gradually filled the park, the Diggers, a radical community action group, distributed turkey sandwiches and White Lightning LSD (both donated by the acid magnate Augustus Owsley). All the big San Francisco bands played, while the Hells Angels guarded the P.A. system's generator. Yippie leader Jerry Rubin gave a speech, and drug gurus Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert both made the scene. Leary eventually made his way to the microphone and tried out his new mantra: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

The Be-In served as a coming-out party for the Love Generation, a term coined by San Francisco Police Chief Thomas Cahill. The organizers of the Summer of Love were reacting to the Be-In's fallout, and in the process they transformed the publicity boomlet into a full-fledged sensation. By the end of the summer, some 50,000 to 75,000 kids had made the trek to San Francisco (with or without flowers in their hair). In the process, the Haight's anarchic innocence was destroyed, as the district was overrun by gawking tourists, crass opportunists, and criminal predators. Its special magic never returned; instead, it dispersed throughout the country, and a thousand sparks began to blaze.

Civil Rights and Psychedelics
The '60s counterculture had its roots in the '50s —specifically, in Beat bohemianism and the larger youth culture of adolescent rebellion. But the Beats never imagined they were the vanguard of a mass movement. "In the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs, and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the 'square' society in which he lives, only to elude it," wrote the Beat author John Clellon Holmes.

What begat the transformation from apolitical fringe to passionately engaged mass movement? First, a mass movement requires mass—in this case, a critical mass of critically minded young people. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 jumped from 16.2 million to 24.4 million. Meanwhile, as capitalism's ongoing development rendered economic life ever more technologically and organizationally complex, the demand for educated managers and professionals grew. Consequently, among the swelling ranks of college-age young people, the portion who attended college ballooned from 22.3 percent to 35.2 percent during the '60s.

With their wider exposure to history, literature, philosophy, and science, recipients of higher education were more likely to see beyond the confines of their upbringing—to question the values they were raised to accept, to appreciate the virtues of other cultures, to seek out the new and exotic. By triumphing over scarcity, capitalism launched the large-scale pursuit of self-realization. Now, by demanding that more and more people be trained to think for themselves, capitalism ensured that the pursuit would lead in unconventional directions—and that any obstacles on those uncharted paths would face clever and resourceful adversaries. In the culture as in the marketplace, the "creative destruction" of competitive commerce bred subversives to challenge the established order.

So the tinder was there. But what sparks would set it ablaze? The primary catalysts were an odd couple: the civil rights struggle and the psychedelic drug scene. Both inducted their participants into what can fairly be called religious experience.

By the middle of the 20th century, belief in racial equality was de rigueur for liberals in good standing. Yet notwithstanding liberalism's towering intellectual and political dominance, progress toward full civil rights for blacks was exasperatingly modest. Despite their frustration, most liberals saw no alternative but steady, gradual gains. But patient advocacy by white liberals wasn't what gave the cause of civil rights its irresistible momentum. What made the movement move was the decision by African Americans, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott, to push past liberal nostrums and take matters into their own hands. Moral suasion was not enough; confrontation, nonviolent but deliberately provocative, was needed. And to steel themselves for the struggle, African Americans called on sources of strength more profound than Gunnar Myrdal–style social science empiricism.

Black churches were therefore indispensable to the movement's success, not just because they provided organization and fostered solidarity but because the simple, powerful faith they propounded gave ordinary people the heart to do extraordinary things. Even those who lacked the consolation of literalist faith still found some lifeline beyond reason to cling to.

The resulting defiance was sublime in its absolute audacity. Protesters took the truly radical step of acting as if segregation did not exist—ordering lunch, getting on the bus, signing up to vote as if Jim Crow were already gone. With a movement grounded in such extreme commitment, religiosity was always in the air. Marches, stately and solemn, were redolent of religious ritual; beatings, jailings, water-cannon dousings, tear-gassings, and killings sanctified the movement by providing it with martyrs.

For America's liberal-minded young, the prophetic grandeur of the civil rights movement was electrifying. Many joined the movement; many more were inspired to take up other causes and make their own stands. "Without the civil rights movement, the beat and Old Left and bohemian enclaves would not have opened into a revived politics," concluded Todd Gitlin, a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, the premier organization of the student New Left.

While the civil rights movement fired young mindswith the possibilities of prophetic dissent, the emerging drug scene was blowing those minds with visions of mystical experience. Marijuana, which grew in popularity with the spread of the bohemian subculture during the '50s, served as the chemical gateway. Heightening sensory pleasures and lubricating free-associative thinking, it fit perfectly with the Beat cult of intense experience. Under its influence, consciousness seemed to expand; aggression melted away, and shared wonder and laughter took its place.

Psychedelic drugs, meanwhile, took consciousness expansion to an entirely new level. The phantasmagoric hallucinations they induced frequently led people into the realm of religious experience, and many of the leading lights of psychedelic culture, including Leary and Alpert, interpreted and sold the psychedelic experience that way. (Alpert eventually changed his name to the Hindu-derived Baba Ram Dass.)

Both the civil rights movement and the drug culture were outgrowths of mass affluence. In a society devoted to self-expression and personal fulfillment, African Americans found their second-class status intolerable and latched onto resistance as their path to self-realization. Their efforts succeeded in large part because one product of technological abundance—television—carried their struggle into America's living rooms. Meanwhile, the newly unrestrained pursuit of happiness led ineluctably to the pursuit of broadened experience, including the experience of altered states of consciousness. What made increasing numbers of young people eager to try drugs, and receptive to their pleasures, was the cultural shift wrought by the triumph over scarcity.

The struggle for civil rights showed that rapid social progress was possible, that entrenched evil could be uprooted, that social reality was more fluid than imagined, and that collective action could change the world. Likewise, pot and psychedelics revealed wildly different visions of reality from the "straight" one everybody took for granted. If our most basic categories of experience could be called into question, so could everything else.

Guided into those transcendent realms, many young and impressionable minds were set aflame with visions of radical change. One assault after another on conventional wisdom and authority gained momentum. Anti-war protesters, feminists, student rebels, environmentalists, and gays all took their turns marching to the solemn strains of "We Shall Overcome"; all portrayed themselves as inheritors of the legacy of Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma. And the scent of marijuana wafted around all their efforts.

The Counter-Counterculture
The quest for wider horizons and the fulfillment of higher needs, so exuberantly pursued during the '60s, relied on mass affluence, which was achieved and sustained only by a vast mobilization of social energies through an intricate division of labor. There could be no counterculture without capitalism. And capitalism requires discipline, deferred gratification, abstract loyalties, impersonal authority, and the stress of competition. With its hostility to the system that brought it into being, the counterculture created an opening for hostile worldviews that allied themselves with capitalism's titanic power. Conservative Protestantism took advantage of the opportunity and reclaimed a place on society's center stage.

The evangelical revival was the unlikeliest of comeback stories. In the middle years of the 19th century, the bourgeois Protestant worldview had enjoyed unquestioned cultural primacy and matchless self-confidence. The ensuing decades, however, hammered America's old-time religion with setback after setback. Darwin and German higher criticism shook belief in biblical inerrancy; mass immigration filled the country with rival faiths; urbanization bred cesspools of sin and temptation.

Yet the old-time religion did not die. In the South, in small towns and rural areas, among the less educated, the flame still burned. Shaking off their well-earned pessimism, a new generation of conservative religious leaders worked to rebuild dogmatic Protestantism as an active force in American life. Dissociating themselves from the now pejorative term fundamentalist, they called themselves evangelicals. On doctrine, the evangelicals toed the fundamentalist line. In their posture toward the outside world, however, they differed dramatically. Fundamentalists
hunkered down in a defensive crouch, refusing any association with mainline denominations. The new evangelicals were intent on expansion and outreach. Thus, when the National Association of Evangelicals was founded in 1942, it adopted as its motto "cooperation without compromise."

Evangelicals built up an entire parallel cultural infrastructure—a counterculture by any other name. One landmark was Billy Graham's 1957 crusade in New York City's Madison Square Garden. Kicking off on May 15 and running through September 2, the campaign attracted more than 2 million attendees, with 55,000 recorded "decisions for Christ." In June, ABC began televising Graham's Saturday night services live. Millions tuned in.

Evangelicals retooled their message to appeal to the unconverted, and they constructed a robust network of churches and parachurch institutions where believers could coalesce into a thriving community. Yes, they remained outsiders, looked down upon when not ignored by the nation's metropolitan elites. Only Graham, with his immense charisma and political skills, was a fully mainstream figure. Nevertheless, evangelicals were now a mass movement on the move. Though scorned by the cultural elite, they had consolidated their position in the nation's most economically dynamic region, and therefore the fulcrum of political change in the ensuing decades: the Sunbelt.

Conservative proselytizing found a receptive audience as countercultural chaos erupted around the country. Among what became known as the "great silent majority," including many Americans who considered themselves good liberals during the '50s, Aquarius and its tumults seemed like an outbreak of mass insanity. How could the most privileged children in history reject everything their parents held dear? The mainline Protestant denominations had thrived as bulwarks of the postwar liberal ascendancy, but they faltered in the face of the Aquarian challenge. The 1964 slogan for the evangelicals' bête noire, the ecumenical and progressive World Council of Churches, summed up the situation: "The world must set the agenda for the church." People who believed the world was going to hell thought that slogan had things precisely backward.

For Americans anxious to defend their way of life against cultural upheaval, evangelicalism provided the resources with which to make a stand. It imbued believers with a fighting faith, granting them access to the same kind of energies that animated the romantic rebellion —energies found only in the realms beyond reason. Exuberant worship, regular prayer, and belief in prophecy and present-day miracles were the spiritual fortifications that could stymie the radical onslaught.

Evangelicals vs. Aquarians
The audacious idea of founding a university had come to Oral Roberts in the middle of dinner with a young Pat Robertson. Roberts began scribbling on a napkin—not his own words, he believed, but words straight from God. "Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim," his inner voice instructed, "where My voice is small and My healing power is not known. To go even to the uttermost bounds of the earth."

In 1947 Roberts, who believed he had been healed of youthful tuberculosis directly by God via a faith healer, was a minister with his own little Pentecostal Holiness church in Enid, Oklahoma. He felt frustrated and trapped as a dirt-poor, small-town preacher with a pleasant but complacent congregation. One harried morning he picked up his copy of the Good Book, and his eyes fell on III John 1:2: "I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." It changed in an instant his whole understanding of God. God is good, Roberts now saw: God wants us to be healthy; God wants us to succeed; God wants us to be rich!

Roberts achieved great success as a revivalist and faith healer—which is to say, he became a central figure in a marginal movement. But his ministry transcended Pentecostalism's lowly origins. Not content with success as a traveling tent preacher, he built a far-flung empire of evangelical outreach, complete with television and radio programs, magazines, newspaper columns, even comic books. In 1967, as he was being sworn in as president of the university he built from scratch, Roberts knew he had brought his upstart faith into the American mainstream. There to pay their respects were not just government officials but representatives of 120 of the nation's colleges and universities.

Roberts' rapid ascent was only one spectacular example of the larger evangelical uprising. Between 1965 and 1975, while mainline denominations were shriveling, membership in the Church of the Nazarene increased by 8 percent. The Southern Baptists grew by 18 percent, and membership in the Seventh-Day Adventists and Assemblies of God leapt by 36 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Newsweek declared 1976 "the year of the evangelical" as Jimmy Carter, who identified himself as one, took the presidency. A Gallup poll that same year asked Americans, "Would you describe yourself as a 'born-again' or evangelical Christian?" More than a third said yes.

There is no point in mincing words: The stunning advance of evangelicalism marked a dismal intellectual regress in American religion. A lapse into crude superstition and magical thinking, credulous vulnerability to charlatans, a dangerous weakness for apocalyptic prophecy (see the massive popularity of the best-selling nonfiction book of the '70s, evangelical Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth), and blatant denial of scientific reality, resurgent conservative Protestantism entailed a widespread surrender of believers' critical faculties. The celebration of unreason on the left had met its match on the right.

But having beat their intellectual retreat, evangelicals summoned up the fortitude to defend a cultural position that was, to a considerable extent, worth defending. In particular, they upheld values that, after the Sturm und Drang of the '60s and '70s subsided, would garner renewed appreciation across the ideological divide: committed family life, personal probity and self-restraint, the work ethic, and unembarrassed American patriotism.

By no means were the evangelicals purely reactionary. Take race relations. Although many of them hailed from the South, the leaders of the evangelical revival dissented from the reigning regional orthodoxies of white supremacy and segregation. For years Billy Graham had waffled on race, but after the Supreme Court rejected school segregation in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, he refused to tolerate segregated seating at his crusades. In his breakthrough 1957 crusade at Madison Square Garden, Graham invited Martin Luther King to join him on the podium, introducing him as one of the leaders of "a great social revolution" afoot. Graham was not alone. The Southern Baptist Convention strongly endorsed Brown and called for peaceful compliance. Pentecostalism, meanwhile, had begun as an integrated movement, led by the son of slaves.

Most important, evangelicalism aligned Christian faith with the Holy Grail of the affluent society: self-realization. Unlike the classic bourgeois Protestantism of the 19th century, whose moral teachings emphasized avoidance of worldly temptation, the revitalized version promised empowerment, joy, and personal fulfillment. A godly life was once understood as grim defiance of sinful urges; now it was the key to untold blessings. "Something good is going to happen to you!" was one of Oral Roberts' favorite catchphrases.

The New Synthesis
The evangelicals' therapeutic turn, like that of the counterculture, moved with currents of psychic need sprung loose by mass affluence. Indeed, the two opposing religious revivals overlapped. The Jesus Freaks, or Jesus People, emerged out of the hippie scene in the late '60s, mixing countercultural style and communalism with evangelical orthodoxy. As the hippie phenomenon faded in the '70s, many veterans of the Jesus Movement made their way into the larger, socially conservative evangelical revival.

The peculiar career of Arthur Blessitt illustrates evangelicalism's debt to the cultural left. In the late '60s, Blessitt hosted a psychedelic nightclub called His Place on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, an establishment whose logo combined a cross and a peace sign. "Like, if you want to get high, you don't have to drop Acid. Just pray and you go all the way to Heaven," Blessitt advised in his tract Life's Greatest Trip. "You don't have to pop pills to get loaded. Just drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John." In 1969 Blessitt began his distinctive ministry of carrying a 12-foot-tall cross around the country—and, later, around the world. On one of his countless stops along the way, at an April 1984 meeting in Midland, Texas, he received word that a local oilman, the son of a prominent politician, wanted to see him privately. The businessman told Blessitt that he was not comfortable attending a public meeting but wanted to know Jesus better and learn how to follow him. Blessitt gave his witness and prayed with him. The man, George W. Bush, subsequently converted to evangelical Christianity.

Evangelicals and Aquarians were more alike than they knew. Both sought firsthand spiritual experience; both believed that such experience could set them free and change their lives; both favored emotional intensity over intellectual rigor; both saw their spiritual lives as a refuge from a corrupt and corrupting world. That last point, of course, was subject to radically different interpretations. Aquarians rejected the establishment because of its supposedly suffocating restrictions, while the evangelicals condemned its licentious, decadent anarchy. Between them, they left the social peace of the '50s in ruins.

That peace deserved to be disturbed. Its cautious, complacent liberalism was ill-suited to coping with the emerging conflicts of mass prosperity. It frustrated the aspirations of blacks, of women, and of the affluent young. It suppressed and distorted economic energies by throttling competition. Its spiritual life tended to the bland and shallow.

But no new, improved social consensus emerged to replace the one that collapsed. Instead, with the culture wars and division between "red" and "blue" America, our ideological categories and allegiances continue to perpetuate the warring half-truths of the great spiritual upheavals of the '60s. Yet despite this confusion, a new modus vivendi has managed to emerge that contains within tolerable bounds the ideological dissatisfactions of both the countercultural left and the religious right.

As liberal dominance was shaken by successive blows of social and economic turmoil in the 1960s and '70s, a New Right energized by the evangelical counter-counterculture seized the opening and established conservatism as the country's most popular political creed by the '80s. Yet the conservative triumph was steeped in irony. Capitalism's vigor was restored, and the radical assault on middle-class values was repulsed. But contrary to the hopes of the New Right's traditionalist partisans, shoring up the institutions of mass affluence did not, and could not, bring back the old cultural certainties.

Instead, a reinvigorated capitalism brought with it a blooming, buzzing economic and cultural ferment that bore scant resemblance to any nostalgic vision of the good old days. This was conservatism's curious accomplishment: Marching under the banner of old-time religion, it made the world safe for the secular, hedonistic values of Aquarius.

The resulting cultural synthesis that prevails today, this accidental by-product of ideological stalemate, remains nameless. It could be called liberal, in the larger sense of the tradition of individualism and moral egalitarianism that America has always embodied. It could also be called conservative, if that same liberal tradition is understood to be the object of conservation. But the ideologies that pass for liberalism and conservatism today are too weighed down with authoritarian elements for either to lay claim to the real American center. Since American society today is committed to a much wider scope for both economic and cultural competition than was allowed before the '60s erupted, it makes most sense to call that center libertarian.

Brink Lindsey is vice president for research at the Cato Institute. This article was adapted from The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture (Collins, 2007), by Brink Lindsey. Copyright© 2007 by Brink Lindsey. Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers.

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10 Truths About Trade

blindsey@cato.org (Brink Lindsey) — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Is globalization sending the best American jobs overseas? If you get your news from CNN's Lou Dobbs, the answer is "of course" and the only real issue is how many trade restrictions should be applied to stem the bleeding.

But the recent scare about "offshoring" is just the latest twist on an inaccurate, decades-old complaint that global trade is stealing jobs and causing a "race to the bottom" in which corporations relentlessly scour the world for the lowest wages and most squalid working conditions. China and India have replaced 1980s Japan and 1990s Mexico as the most feared foreign threats to U.S. employment, and the old fallacy of job scarcity has once again reared its distracting head.

The truth is cheerier. Trade is only one element in a much bigger picture of incessant turnover in the American labor market. Furthermore, the overall trend is toward more and better jobs for American workers. While job losses are real and sometimes very painful, it is important -- indeed, for the formulation of sound public policy, it is vital -- to distinguish between the painful aspects of progress and outright decline.

Toward that end, and to counter protectionist "analysis" masquerading as fact, here are 10 core truths about global trade and American jobs.

1. The Number of Jobs Grows With the Population

As Figure 1 shows vividly, the total number of jobs in the American economy is first and foremost a function of the size of the labor force. As the population grows, the number of people in the work force grows; then market forces absorb that supply and deploy labor to different sectors of the economy.

Consider all the major events that have increased the supply of labor during the last half-century: the baby boom, the surge in work force participation by women, and rising rates of immigration after decades of restrictionist policies. Consider as well the key developments that have slashed demand for certain kinds of labor: the growing competitiveness of foreign producers and falling U.S. barriers to imports; the shift by American companies toward globally integrated production and the consequent relocation of many operations overseas; the deregulation of the transportation, energy, and telecommunications industries and the wrenching restructuring that followed; and, most important, the many waves of labor-saving technological innovations, from the containerization that replaced longshoremen to the dial phones that replaced switchboard operators to the factory-floor robots that replaced assembly-line workers to the automatic teller machines that replaced bank tellers.

Yet in the face of all this flux, no chronic shortage of jobs has ever materialized. Over those tumultuous five decades, a growing economy and functioning labor markets were all that was needed to accommodate huge shifts in labor supply and demand. Now and in the future, sound macroeconomic policies and continued flexibility in labor markets will suffice to generate increasing employment, notwithstanding the rise of China and India and the march of digitization.

2. Jobs Churn Constantly

The steady increase in total employment masks the frenetic dynamism of the U.S. labor market. Gross changes -- total new positions added, total existing positions eliminated -- are much greater in magnitude. Large numbers of jobs are being shed constantly, even in good times. Total employment continues to increase only because even larger numbers of jobs are being created.

According to economist Brad DeLong, a weekly figure of 360,000 new unemployment insurance claims is actually consistent with a stable unemployment rate. In other words, when the unemployment rate holds steady -- that is, total employment grows fast enough to absorb the ongoing increase in the labor force -- some 18.7 million people will lose their jobs and file unemployment insurance claims during the course of a single year. Meanwhile, even more people will get new jobs.

More detailed and dramatic evidence of job turnover can be found in Table 1. According to data compiled by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, total private-sector employment rose by 17.8 million between 1993 and 2002. To produce that healthy net increase, a breathtaking total of 327.7 million jobs were added, while 309.9 million jobs were lost. In other words, for every one net new private-sector job created during that period, 18.4 gross job additions had to offset 17.4 gross job losses.

In light of those facts, it is impossible to give credence to claims that job losses in this or that sector constitute a looming catastrophe for the enormous and dynamic U.S. economy as a whole. It is as inevitable that some companies and industries will shrink as it is that others will expand. Localized challenges and problems should not be confused with national crises.

3. Challenging, High-Paying Jobs Are Becoming More Plentiful, Not Less

The ongoing growth in total employment is frequently dismissed on the ground that most of the new positions being created are low-paying, dead-end "McJobs." The facts show otherwise.

Managerial and specialized professional jobs have grown rapidly, nearly doubling between 1983 and 2002, from 23.6 million to 42.5 million. These challenging, high-paying positions have jumped from 23.4 percent of total employment to 31.1 percent.

And these high-quality jobs will continue growing in the years to come. According to projections for 2002-12 prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, management, business, financial, and professional positions will grow from 43.2 million to 52 million, increasing from 30 percent of total employment to 31.5 percent.

4. "Deindustrialization" Is a Myth

Opponents of open markets frequently claim that unshielded exposure to foreign competition is destroying the U.S. manufacturing base. That charge is flatly untrue. Figure 2 sets the record straight: Between 1980 and 2003, American manufacturing output climbed a dizzying 93 percent. Yes, production fell during the recent recession, but it is now recovering: the industrial production index for manufacturing rose 2.2 percent in 2003.

It is true that manufacturing's share of gross domestic product has been declining gradually over time -- from 27 percent in 1960 to 13.9 percent in 2002. The percentage of workers employed in manufacturing likewise has been falling, from 28.4 percent to 11.7 percent during the same period. But the primary cause of these trends is the superior productivity of American manufacturers. As shown in Figure 3, output per hour in the overall nonfarm business sector rose 50 percent between 1980 and 2002; by contrast, manufacturing output per hour shot up 103 percent. In other words, goods are getting cheaper and cheaper relative to services. Since this faster productivity growth has not been matched by a corresponding increase in demand for manufactured goods, the result is that Americans are spending relatively less on manufactures. Accordingly, manufacturing's shrinking share of the overall economy is actually a sign of American manufacturing prowess.

Exactly the same phenomenon has played out over a longer period in agriculture. In 1870, 47.6 percent of total employment was in farming. By 2002 the figure had fallen to 1.7 percent. In the future, manufacturing will in all likelihood continue down the trail blazed by agriculture. People who bemoan this prospect don't recognize economic progress when they see it.

International trade has had only a modest effect on manufacturing's declining share of the economy. It is true that imports displace some domestic production. On the other hand, exports boost sales for American manufacturers. The U.S. has been running a manufacturing trade deficit in recent years, but even if trade had been in balance between 1960 and 2002 the manufacturing share of GDP still would have fallen sharply, down to an estimated 16 percent (as opposed to the actual 13.9 percent). Innovation creates a steady, relentless drop in manufacturing's share of economic activity.

5. Imports Have Not Been a Major Cause of Recent Manufacturing Job Losses

Employment in the manufacturing sector has taken a beating in recent years. Between 1965 and 1990, the total number of manufacturing jobs fluctuated in a stable band between 16 million and 20 million; during the 1990s, the upper limit dropped to around 18 million; but between July 2000 and October 2003 jobs plummeted 16 percent, from 17.32 million to 14.56 million.

Although the losses have been severe, the charge that those jobs were eliminated by foreign competition simply doesn't square with the facts. As shown in Table 2, manufacturing imports rose only 0.6 percent between 2000 and 2003. By contrast, manufacturing exports fell by 9.6 percent. In other words, during this period the drop in exports accounted for 91 percent of the growth in the manufacturing trade deficit.

Accordingly, imports played at best a trivial role in the recent sharp decline in manufacturing employment. The main culprit was the worsening domestic market for manufactures during the recent recession -- in particular, a big drop in business investment. Between the fourth quarter of 2000 and the third quarter of 2002, total fixed nonresidential investment fell by 14 percent. Looking abroad, it was softening overseas markets, much more than stiffening import pressure, that added further downward pressure on domestic manufacturing jobs. Consequently, anti-trade activists who cite manufacturing job losses as a reason to turn away from trade liberalization couldn't be more wrong. Expanding overseas markets and commercial opportunities for American exporters would be a shot in the arm for manufacturing employment.

6. "Offshoring" Is Not a Threat to High-Tech Employment

In recent months, historical fears about vanishing manufacturing jobs have been compounded by growing anxiety about trade-related job losses in the service sector. Advances in information and communications technologies now make it possible for many jobs -- from customer service calls to software development -- to be performed anywhere.

In particular, the offshoring of information technology (I.T.) jobs to India and other low-wage countries has received a flurry of attention. According to a survey of hiring managers conducted by the Information Technology Association of America, 12 percent of I.T. companies already have outsourced some operations abroad. As for future trends, Forrester Research predicted in a widely cited study that 3.3 million white-collar jobs -- including 1.7 million back-office positions and 473,000 I.T. jobs -- will move overseas between 2000 and 2015.

Adding to the fear, I.T. employment has experienced a significant recent decline. In 2002, according to the Department of Commerce, the total number of I.T.-related jobs stood at 5.95 million, down from a 2000 peak of 6.47 million. Although some of those jobs were lost because of offshoring, the major culprits were the slowdown in demand for I.T. services after the Y2K buildup, followed by the dot-com collapse and the broader recession. Moreover, it should be remembered that the recent drop in employment took place after a dramatic buildup. In 1994, 1.19 million people were employed as mathematical and computer scientists. By 2000 that figure had jumped to 2.07 million -- a 74 percent increase. As of 2002, the figure had decreased only slightly to 2.03 million, still 71 percent higher than in 1994.

Despite the trend toward offshoring, I.T.-related employment is expected to see healthy increases in the years to come. According to Department of Labor projections, the total number of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations will jump from 3.02 million in 2002 to 4.07 million in 2012 -- a 35 percent increase. Of the 30 specific occupations projected to grow fastest during those 10 years, seven are computer-related. (See Figure 4 for the fastest-growing computer-related occupations.) Thus, the recent downturn in I.T. is likely only a temporary break in a larger trend of robust job growth.

The wild claims that offshoring will gut employment in the I.T. sector are totally at odds with reality. I.T. job losses projected by Forrester amount to fewer than 32,000 per year -- relatively modest attrition in the context of 6 million I.T. jobs. These losses, meanwhile, will be offset by newly created jobs as computer and mathematical occupations continue to boom. The doomsayers are confusing a cyclical downturn with a permanent trend.

7. Globalization of Services Creates Enormous Opportunity for American Industry

Offshoring of I.T. services to India and elsewhere has been made possible by ongoing advances in computer and communications technologies. If those advances indeed pose a threat to domestic I.T. services industries, then it should be possible to trace the emergence of that threat in trade statistics, since offshoring registers as an increase in services imports.

Yet the fact is that the U.S. runs a trade surplus precisely in the I.T. services most directly affected by offshoring. In the categories of "computer and data processing services" and "database and other information services," American exports rose from $2.4 billion in 1995 to $5.4 billion in 2002, while imports increased from $0.3 billion to $1.2 billion. Thus, the U.S. trade surplus in these services has expanded from $2.1 billion to $4.2 billion.

Meanwhile, the same technological advances that have given rise to offshoring are facilitating the international provision of all kinds of services -- banking, accounting, legal assistance, engineering, medicine, and so on. The United States is a major exporter of services generally and runs a sizable trade surplus in services. In 2002, for example, service exports accounted for 30 percent of all U.S. exports and exceeded service imports by $64.8 billion. Accordingly, the increasing ability to provide services remotely is a commercial boon to many U.S.-based service industries. Although some jobs are doubtless at risk, the same trends that make offshoring possible are creating new opportunities, and new jobs, throughout the domestic economy.

8. Offshoring Creates New Jobs and Boosts Economic Growth

Although offshoring does eliminate jobs, it also yields important benefits. To the extent that companies can reduce costs by shifting certain operations overseas, they are increasing productivity. The process of competition ultimately passes the resulting cost savings on to consumers, which then spurs demand for other goods and services. Whether caused by the introduction of new technology or by new ways to organize work, productivity increases translate into economic growth and rising overall living standards.

In particular, offshoring encourages the diffusion of I.T. throughout the American economy. According to Catherine Mann at the Institute for International Economics, globalized production of I.T. hardware -- that is, the offshoring of computer-related manufacturing -- has accounted for 10 percent to 30 percent of the drop in hardware prices. The resulting increase in productivity encouraged the rapid spread of computer use and thereby added some $230 billion in cumulative additional GDP between 1995 and 2002.

Offshoring offers the potential to take a similar bite out of prices for I.T. software and services. Those price reductions will promote the further spread of I.T. and new business processes that take advantage of cheap technology. As Mann notes, health services and construction are two large and important sectors that today feature low I.T. intensity (as measured by I.T. equipment per worker) and below-average productivity growth. Diffusion of I.T. into these and other sectors could prompt a new round of productivity growth such as that provoked by the globalization of hardware production during the 1990s.

9. The Digital Revolution Has Been Eliminating White-Collar Jobs for Many Years

The attention now being paid to offshoring creates the impression that it is an utterly unprecedented phenomenon. But the very same technological advances that are making offshoring possible have been eliminating large numbers of white-collar jobs for many years now.

The diffusion of I.T. throughout the economy has caused major shakeups in the job market during the last decade. Voicemail has replaced receptionists; back-office record-keeping and other clerical jobs have been supplanted by computers; layers of middle management have been eliminated by better internal communications systems. In all these cases, jobs are not simply being transferred overseas; they are being consigned to oblivion by automation and the resulting reorganization of work processes.

The increased churn in white-collar jobs shows up in the Department of Labor's statistics on displaced long-tenured workers, defined as workers who have lost jobs they held for three years or more (Figure 5). During the 1981--82 recession blue-collar workers bore the brunt of long-tenured displacement, but by 1991-92 more than half of the long-held jobs lost were white-collar. Even in the better years that followed, innovation and job churn continued to displace white-collar workers at a higher rate than during the 1981-82 recession.

Offshoring is merely the latest manifestation of a well-established process. The only difference is that, with offshoring, I.T. is facilitating the transfer of jobs overseas. In either case, domestic jobs are lost to technological progress and rising productivity. Why is this downside taken in stride when jobs are eliminated entirely yet considered unbearable when the jobs are taken as hand-me-downs by Indians and other foreigners?

10. Fears That the U.S. Economy Is Running Out of Jobs Are Nothing New

Because of the recent recession, the U.S. economy has suffered from a shortage of jobs, as evidenced by the rise in the unemployment rate. There is a natural temptation under these conditions to fear that this temporary setback is the beginning of some permanent reversal of fortune, that the shortage of jobs is here to stay and will only grow worse.

To calm such fears, it is useful to recall that similar anxieties have surfaced before. Again and again, over many decades, cyclical downturns in the economy have prompted predictions of permanent job shortages. And each time, those predictions were belied by the ensuing economic expansion.

Back in the 1930s, the brutal and persistent unemployment caused by the Great Depression gave rise to theories of "secular stagnation." A number of leading economists -- including, most prominently, Harvard's Alvin Hansen -- argued that declining population growth and the increasing "maturity" of the industrial economy meant that we could no longer rely on private-sector job creation to provide full employment. The stagnationist thesis eventually fell out of fashion once the postwar economic boom gathered steam.

The return of higher unemployment in the late 1950s and early '60s led to a revival of the stagnationist fallacy, this time in the guise of an "automation crisis." The ongoing progress of factory automation, combined with the growing visibility of electronic computers, led many Americans to believe, once again, that the economy was running out of jobs. During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy, who ran on a pledge to "get the country moving again," warned that automation "carries the dark menace of industrial dislocation, increasing unemployment, and deepening poverty." The American Foundation on Automation and Unemployment, a joint industry-labor group created in 1962, claimed breathlessly that automation was "second only to the possibility of the hydrogen bomb" in its challenge to America's economic future. For the record, U.S. employment in 1962 stood at 66.7 million jobs -- roughly half the current total.

In the early 1980s, the coincidence of a severe recession and a string of competitive successes by Japanese producers at the expense of high-profile American industries sparked predictions of the imminent "deindustrialization" of the American economy. As financier Felix Rohatyn complained, in a fashion typical of the time, "We cannot become a nation of short-order cooks and saleswomen, Xerox-machine operators and messenger boys....These jobs are a weak basis for the economy." Along similar lines, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) fretted that "American workers will end up like the people in the biblical village who were condemned to be hewers of wood and drawers of waters." It should be noted that U.S. manufacturing output has roughly doubled since 1982.

In the early 1990s, another recession resulted in yet another job shortage scare. Ross Perot won 19 percent of the presidential vote in 1992 with a campaign that, among other things, railed against the "giant sucking sound" of jobs lost to Mexico and other foreign countries. That same year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele published a widely discussed jeremiad, America: What Went Wrong?, about the decline and fall of the country's middle class. That hand wringing was followed in short order by one of the most remarkable expansions in American economic history.

Again and again, serious and influential voices have raised the cry that the sky is falling. It never does. The root of their error is always the same: confusing a temporary, cyclical downturn with a permanent reduction in the economy's job-creating capacity.

In recent years, many Americans have lost their jobs and suffered hardship as a result. Many more have worried that their jobs would be next. There is no point in denying these hard realities, but just as surely there is no point in blowing them out of proportion. The U.S. economy is not running out of good jobs; it is merely coming out of a recession. And regardless of whether economic times are good or bad, some amount of job turnover is an inescapable fact of life in a dynamic market economy.

This fact cannot be wished away by blaming foreigners, and it cannot be undone by trade restrictions. The innovation and productivity increases that render some jobs obsolete are also the source of new wealth and rising living standards. Embracing change and its unavoidable disruptions is the only way to secure the continuing gains of economic advancement.

Should We Invade Iraq?

blindsey@cato.org (Brink Lindsey) bbbb@osu.edu (John Mueller) — Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 EST

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has articulated a new foreign policy for the United States. The "containment" of hostile states has been replaced by a policy of military "pre-emption" and "defensive intervention," which sanctions U.S. military action even against states that are not imminent threats. War with Iraq may be the first major expression of this new policy (as of press time, no shooting had yet begun).

Is such a preventive war justified? In late October, we asked John Mueller and Brink Lindsey to argue the issue on reason online. Mueller, who makes the case against war, holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War (1994), Quiet Cataclysm: Reflections on the Recent Transformation of World Politics (1997), and Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989). reason Contributing Editor Brink Lindsey makes the case for war. He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism (2002). He also publishes www.brinklindsey.com.

The debate unfolded over the week of October 28-November 1, with each participant responding within hours of the other's posting. Readers interested in more information can visit reason.com/debate/ai-debate1.shtml, which includes links to reader responses and reason's archive of 9/11-related coverage.

What's the Rush?

The devil du jour is a feeble tyrant.
John Mueller

In preparing for a war against Iraq, military planners seem to anticipate a walkover. The Iraqi military performed badly in the Gulf War of 1991: Saddam Hussein promised the mother of all battles, but his troops delivered instead the mother of all bugouts. And the planners note that Iraq is even weaker now.

Moreover, the regime appears to enjoy very little support. Saddam Hussein lives in such fear of his own military forces that he keeps them out of Baghdad. It is generally anticipated that most of the military will not fight for him -- indeed, that there may be substantial defections to the invaders even among the comparatively coddled Republican Guard.

In addition, the regime really controls only a shard of the country. The Kurds have established a semi-independent entity in the north, and the hostility toward Saddam's rule is so great in the Shiite south that government officials often consider the region hostile territory.

Advocates of a war with Iraq insist such a venture is necessary because Iraq's feeble, wretched tyranny is somehow a dire and gathering threat to the entire area and even to the United States. Saddam's inept, ill-led, exhausted, and thoroughly demoralized military force, it is repeatedly argued, will inevitably be used by its leader for blackmail and regional dominance, particularly if it acquires an atomic bomb or two.

Exactly how this might come about is not spelled out. The notion that Israel, with a substantial nuclear arsenal and a superb and highly effective military force, could be intimidated out of existence by the actions or fulminations of this pathetic dictator can hardly be taken seriously. And the process by which Saddam could come to dominate the oil-producing states in the Middle East is equally mysterious and fanciful. Apparently, he would rattle a rocket or two, and everyone would dutifully jack up the oil price to $90 a barrel.

Saddam's capacity for making daffy decisions is, it is true, considerable. But he seems mostly concerned with self-preservation -- indeed, that is about the only thing he is good at. And he is likely to realize that any aggressive military act in the region is almost certain to provoke a concerted, truly multilateral counterstrike that would topple his regime and remove him from existence. Even if he ordered some sort of patently suicidal adventure, his military might very well disobey, or simply neglect to carry out, the command. His initial orders in the Gulf War, after all, were to stand and fight the Americans to the last man. When push came to shove, his forces treated that absurd order with the contempt it so richly deserved.

During the last half-century American policy makers have become hysterical over a number of Third World dictators, among them Egypt's Nasser, Indonesia's Sukarno, Cuba's Castro, Libya's Qaddafi, and Iran's Khomeini. In all cases, the threat these devils du jour posed to American interests proved to be highly exaggerated. Nasser and Sukarno are footnotes, Castro a joke, and Qaddafi a mellowed irrelevance, while Khomeini's Iran has become just about the only place in the Middle East where Americans are treated with popular admiration and respect.

Significantly, Iran is also just about the only place in the area where the United States has been unable to meddle during the last 20 years. And it is possible there is a lesson here.

With characteristic self-infatuation, American leaders like to declare their country to be "the world's only remaining superpower" or "the indispensable nation." But this self-proclaimed status doesn't mean that it is obligatory or possible or wise for the United States to seek to run the world.

Or even the Middle East. American interests there are limited. There is a romantic and sentimental attachment to Israel, of course, but that country seems fully capable of taking care of itself. In time, perhaps, and probably after a change of leadership on both sides, mediation efforts between Israel and the Palestinians can become productive again. But for now at least the conflict is so deep that there is little any outsider (even an "indispensable" one) can do about it.

Quite a bit of oil comes from the Middle East, of course, but discussions of the American interest on that score tend to ignore simple economics. The area already is dominated by an entity, OPEC, which would dearly love to hike the price for the commodity. It is constrained from doing so not by warm and cuddly feelings toward its customers but by the grim economic realization that such a policy would reduce demand, intensify the search for new petroleum sources, and bring about a worldwide inflation that would raise the prices of imported commodities even more than any gains obtained by an increase in the oil price. Whatever happens in the region, this fundamental market reality is likely to mellow and correct incidental distortions.

In the meantime, monarchs in a number of countries may gradually be coming to the realization that they are out of date, rather in the way Latin American militarists more or less voluntarily decided during the last quarter century to relinquish control to democratic forces. If this does happen, however, the process will be impelled, as in Latin America, primarily by domestic forces, not outside ones.

A humanitarian argument could be made for a war against Iraq -- to liberate its people from a vicious tyranny and from the debilitating and destructive effects of the sanctions which the United States apparently is incapable of relaxing while Saddam Hussein remains in power. Such a war would have to be kept inexpensive in casualties, and the United States would have to be willing to hang on for quite some time to help rebuild the nation, something experience suggests is unlikely.

But calls for war do not stress this argument. Instead, they raise alarms about vague, imagined international threats that, however improbable, could conceivably emanate from a miserable and pathetic regime. In due course, nature (there have been persistent rumors about cancer) or some other force will remove our devil du jour. The situation calls for patient watchfulness, not hysteria.

No More 9/11s

The case for invading Iraq
Brink Lindsey

John Mueller tries to make light of Iraq. Feeble, inept, pathetic, and daffy are some of the adjectives he uses to describe the blood-soaked, predatory regime now in power there. The implication is that only the paranoid could find in Saddam Hussein's buffoonery any cause for serious concern.

Well, I beg to differ. Iraq is no joke: The crimes that the Ba'athist regime there has committed and may intend to commit in the future are deadly serious business. Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has invaded two of its neighbors, lobbed missiles at two other countries in the region, systematically defied U.N. resolutions that demand its disarmament, fired on U.S. and coalition aircraft thousands of times over the past decade, and committed atrocious human rights abuses against its own citizens, including the waging of genocidal chemical warfare against Iraqi Kurds. In short, this is a regime that is responsible for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths.

Meanwhile, Iraq has a long record of active support for international terrorist groups. Indeed, it apparently has staged terrorist attacks of its own directly against the United States. I am speaking of Iraq's likely involvement in the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993.

Most ominously, Iraq has been engaged for many years in the monomaniacal pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It reportedly has significant stockpiles of biological weapons, and its aggressive, large-scale nuclear program is thought to be at most a few years away from success. The fact that Iraq has been willing to endure ongoing sanctions, and thus the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue, rather than dismantle its WMD programs shows the ferocity of its commitment to maximizing its destructive capabilities.

In light of the above, I would support military action against Iraq even if 9/11 had never happened and there were no such thing as Al Qaeda. After all, I supported the Gulf War back in 1991 in the hope of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime before it fulfilled its nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, quagmire was plucked from the jaws of victory in that conflict, and so today we are faced with concluding its unfinished business. In my view, standing by with "patient watchfulness" while predatory, anti-Western terror states become nuclear powers is irresponsible and dangerous folly.

As for the headline question, "What's the rush?," my reply is: North Korea. In 1994 President Clinton, with the help of former President Carter, swept the Korean threat under the rug and trusted that "nature," or something, would deal with that "devil du jour." Now North Korea's psychopathic regime informs us that it has nuclear weapons, a fact that vastly complicates any efforts to prevent the situation from getting even worse. We can look forward to similar complications with Iraq unless we act soon.

The case for action against Iraq is further strengthened by the unfortunate facts that 9/11 did happen and Al Qaeda does exist. Here is the grim reality: Radical Islamism is in arms against the West, and its fanatical followers have pledged their lives to killing as many of the infidel as they possibly can. American office workers in New York and Washington, French seamen in Yemen, Australian tourists in Bali, Russian theatergoers in Moscow -- nobody is safe. However exactly this conflict arose, it is now in full flame. And let there be no mistake: This is a fight to the death. Either we crush radical Islamism's global jihad, or thousands, even millions, more Americans will die.

Iraq occupies a strategic position in the war against Islamist terror along several dimensions. First, Iraq's WMD programs threaten to stock the armory of Al Qaeda & Company. Saddam Hussein's regime has a long and inglorious history of reckless aggression and grievous miscalculation. The decision to use terrorist intermediaries to unleash, say, Iraqi bioweapons against the United States strikes me as an entirely plausible scenario, assuming that Iraq's leadership can convince itself that the attack could be carried out with "plausible deniability." Given that more than a year has gone by since last fall's anthrax letter scare and we still have no idea who was responsible, the threat posed by Iraq's WMD programs is far from idle. It is, in fact, intolerable.

Second, the resolution -- one way or another -- of our longstanding conflict with Iraq will have vitally important repercussions in the larger war against terror. If we proceeded to remove the Ba'athist regime from power, we would make it clear that the United States means business in dealing with terrorism and its sponsors. All those countries that continue, more than a year after 9/11, to demonstrate their incapacity or unwillingness to root out the terrorists in their midst (e.g., Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen) would have newly strengthened incentives to do the right thing. If, on the other hand, all the tough talk against Iraq turned out to have been hot air, U.S. credibility would sustain a major blow. Al Qaeda would be emboldened by perceived American weakness, and countries that have to balance fear of the United States against fear of Islamists at home would be inclined to take U.S. displeasure less seriously.

Finally, regime change in Iraq offers the opportunity to attack radical Islamism at its roots: the dismal prevalence of political repression and economic stagnation throughout the Muslim world. The establishment of a reasonably liberal and democratic Iraq could serve as a model for positive change throughout the region. Of course, the successful rebuilding of Iraq will not be easy, but we cannot shrink from necessary tasks simply because they are hard. And we cannot simply assume that "nature" will bring freedom to a region that has never known it on a time scale consistent with safeguarding American lives.

Mueller's "What, me worry?" attitude captures perfectly the prevailing opinion about Afghanistan circa September 10, 2001. The Taliban were more a punch line than a serious foreign policy issue; only the most fevered imagination could see any threat to us in that miserable, dilapidated country. The next day, 3,000 Americans were dead.

We can't let that happen again.

Suicide Watch

Betting on Saddam's recklessness
John Mueller

It may be useful to parse the argument for a preventive war against Iraq as developed by Brink Lindsey into two considerations: the military threat Iraq presents or is likely to present, and the regime's connection to international terrorism.

The notion that Iraq presents an international military threat seems to be based on three propositions:

1) Iraq will have a small supply of atomic weapons in a few years.

2) Once it gets these arms, Saddam Hussein won't be able to stop himself from engaging in extremely provocative acts such as ordering the military invasion of a neighbor or lobbing missiles at nuclear-armed Israel -- acts that are likely to trigger a concerted multilateral military attack upon him and his regime.

3) If Saddam issues such a patently suicidal order, his military -- which he himself distrusts -- will dutifully carry it out, presumably with more efficiency, effectiveness, and élan than it demonstrated in the Persian Gulf War.

I will leave it to those more expert in the field to assess the first proposition. At worst we have a window of a few years before the regime is able to acquire atomic arms. Some experts seem to think it could be much longer, while others question whether Saddam's regime will ever be able to gather or make the required fissile material. Effective weapons inspections, of course, would reduce this concern.

The second proposition rests on an enormous respect for what I have called Saddam's "daffiness" in decision making. I share at least part of this respect. Saddam does sometimes act on caprice, and he often appears to be out of touch -- messengers bringing him bad news rarely, it seems, get the opportunity to do so twice. At the same time, however, he has shown himself capable of pragmatism. When his invasion of Iran went awry, he called for retreat to the prewar status quo; it was the Iranian regime that kept the war going. After he invaded Kuwait in 1990, he quickly moved to settle residual issues left over from the Iran-Iraq War so that he had only one enemy to deal with.

Above all, Saddam seems to be entirely nonsuicidal and is primarily devoted to preserving his regime and his own personal existence. His brutal killing (and gassing) of Kurds was carried out because they were in open rebellion against him and in effective or actual complicity with invading Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War. Much of his obstruction of arms inspectors seems to arise from his fear that agents among them will be used fatally to triangulate his whereabouts -- a suspicion that press reports suggest was not exaggerated. If Saddam does acquire nuclear arms, accordingly, it seems most likely that he will use them as all other leaders possessing such weapons have since 1945: to deter an invasion.

The third proposition is rarely considered in discussions of the war, but it is important. One can't simultaneously maintain that Iraq's military forces will readily defect and can easily be walked over -- a common assumption among our war makers -- and also that this same pathetic military presents a serious international threat.

The argument connecting Iraq to terrorism is mostly based on arm waving. As Lindsey notes, international terrorists are based all over the world -- in fact, just about everywhere except Iraq. Their efforts are hardly likely to be deflated if Iraq's regime is defeated. Indeed, it seems likely that an attack will supply them with new recruits, inspire them to more effort, and provide them with inviting new targets in the foreign military and civilian forces that occupy a defeated, chaotic Iraq. Lindsey suggests that a war is required to make it "clear that the United States means business in dealing with terrorism." I would have thought this was already extremely clear.

Terrorism, like crime, has always existed and always will. It cannot be "crushed," but its incidence and impact can be reduced, and some of its perpetrators can be put out of business. But this is likely to come about through patient, diligent, and persistent international police work rather than costly wars based on tenuous reasoning.

Nasty Realities

Evading them won't make us safe.
Brink Lindsey

John Mueller sees correctly that the Iraq problem has two aspects: 1) regional security and 2) global terrorism. Unfortunately, he fails to grasp the nasty realities of either.

Mueller's assessment of the regional threat posed by a nuclear Iraq is nothing short of fantastic. He pooh-poohs the possibility that Iraq might invade one or more of its neighbors and argues that Saddam Hussein "is primarily devoted to preserving his regime and his own personal existence." Huh? Try telling that to Iran and Kuwait.

Mueller needs to read Mark Bowden's superb, chilling profile of Saddam in the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic. Bowden makes clear that Saddam sees himself as a world-historical figure, a man destined to lead pan-Arabia back to greatness. Perversely, every brush with disaster and death "has strengthened his conviction that his path is divinely inspired and that greatness is his destiny." Why on earth should we suppose that a nuclear arsenal -- built in reckless defiance of the United States and the world -- would temper rather than inflame Saddam's raging megalomania?

Mueller blithely assumes that any future Iraqi aggression would be "likely to trigger a concerted multilateral military attack upon him and his regime" and thus "patently suicidal." Excuse me, but there was no multilateral response to Iraq's attack on Iran, and the world would have been all too happy to acquiesce in Kuwait's disappearance had the first President Bush not stepped in and forced the issue. What makes Mueller think the world would rush in to confront a nuclear-armed Iraq? That task, inevitably, would fall to the United States. Mueller's counsel boils down to this: The United States should avoid war with a relatively weak Iraq today so that it can tangle with a nuclear adversary tomorrow.

What about the nexus between Iraq and terrorism, which Mueller dismisses as so much "arm waving"? Allow me to quote Bowden's article once more, this time from a scene in which Saddam is addressing Iraqi military leaders who run terrorist training camps: "He told [them] that they were the best men in the nation, the most trusted and able. That was why they had been selected to meet with him, and to work at the terrorist camps where warriors were being trained to strike back at America. The United States, he said, because of its reckless treatment of Arab nations and the Arab people, was a necessary target for revenge and destruction. American aggression must be stopped in order for Iraq to rebuild and to resume leadership of the Arab world."

This meeting occurred back in 1996 -- before the recent heating up of the conflict. So much for Saddam's live-and-let-live foreign policy.

Bellicose rhetoric is one thing; the ability to back it up is something altogether more serious. Here is the ultimate threat, the one that Mueller can't even bring himself to discuss: Iraqi biological or nuclear weapons might someday be put in the hands of terrorist groups. If that were to happen, America could experience horrors that would dwarf those unleashed on September 11.

Opponents of action against Iraq argue that we can rely on deterrence to protect us from such atrocities: No country, not even one as rash as Iraq, would dare to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States because of the threat of overwhelming retaliation. That argument has considerable force with respect to a direct attack by Iraq, but it fails completely to confront the possibility that Iraq could use terrorist intermediaries to do its dirty work while masking its own involvement. How is deterrence supposed to work when WMD lack a return address?

Recall, again, last year's anthrax attacks. We still don't know who was responsible, or whether there was any foreign state involvement. Just this week, a Washington Post article cast considerable doubt on the FBI's favored theory that the murders were the work of a disgruntled American scientist -- and suggested that an Iraqi role remains a live possibility.

Go back a few more years, to the 1993 plot to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait. It appears that the attack was an Iraqi operation, but as Seymour Hersh showed in a 1993 New Yorker article in which he reviewed the less-than-airtight case in depth, the fact is we're not really sure.

Welcome to the shadowy world in which we now live. A world in which deterrence no longer suffices. A world in which the judicious use of American power to pre-empt looming threats may be all that stands between us and catastrophe.

Here is what we know about the current Iraqi regime: It has weapons of mass destruction and is actively seeking to add to its arsenal. It is rabidly hostile to the United States. It has an established track record of predatory conduct and a demonstrated willingness to take extreme risks in pursuing its predatory ambitions. There is not another country on earth that matches Iraq's combination of destructive capacity, anti-American animus, and recklessness in projecting power. In a shadowy world, this much is clear: We are not safe while the present regime rules Iraq.

Deterring the Egomaniac Dictator

War is not necessary to keep a street thug in check.
John Mueller

Brink Lindsey wants to argue that Saddam Hussein is reckless, but even he concedes that "no country, not even one as rash as Iraq, would dare to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States because of the threat of overwhelming retaliation." That is, it is entirely possible to deter Iraq. This deterrent would surely hold for an attack on Israel, which has an enormous retaliatory capacity and an even greater incentive to respond than the U.S. I would suggest that it holds as well for just about any substantial military provocation that Saddam might consider.

It is true that much of the world managed to contain its outrage when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. But that was because the attack was directed against Khomeini's seemingly expansionary theocracy, which was seen to be a bigger threat at the time. It is simply not true that "the world" was "all too happy to acquiesce in Kuwait's disappearance" when Iraq invaded it in 1990. There was almost universal condemnation of the attack, even from Iraq's erstwhile friend and ally, the Soviet Union, and the debate was over tactics: whether to use war immediately to push back the aggression or to wait to see if sanctions could do the trick.

Reaction to a third Saddam adventure would surely follow the Kuwait pattern, except that the troops would now go all the way to Baghdad. Moreover, as I've suggested, Saddam's army, which even he finds unreliable, would be unlikely to carry out patently suicidal orders even if they were issued -- as it showed in the Gulf War of 1991.

Lindsey's appreciation for Saddam's egomania is fully justified. It's just that egomania is standard equipment for your average Third World tyrant. Indonesia's Sukarno haughtily withdrew from the United Nations and set up his own competing operation in Djakarta (only China joined); Egypt's Nasser (Saddam's sometime inspiration), who planned to unite and dominate the Arab world, died quietly in bed after being humiliated by Israeli arms; Khomeini's global revolution has essentially been voted out even in its Iranian homeland; and Cuba's Castro probably still hopes to become the new Simón Bolívar of Latin America. Self-important street thugs like Saddam Hussein love to flail and fume in the company of sycophants, but that doesn't make them any less pathetic.

We are left with the warning that Saddam will give weapons of mass destruction to shadowy terrorists to deliver for him. Lindsey is unusual in suggesting that Saddam might do this with nuclear weapons (which, of course, he doesn't have and perhaps never will have). Most observers assume he would selfishly keep them himself to help deter an attack on Iraq.

The case is more plausible for chemical or biological weapons -- which, however, have proven to be so difficult to deploy effectively that it is questionable whether they should be considered weapons of "mass destruction" at all, as Gregg Easterbrook pointed out in the October 7 issue of The New Republic. But terrorists may be after these weapons anyway, and the question is whether it is worth a war to eliminate one of many potential sources. Moreover, as Daniel Benjamin noted in the October 31 Washington Post, the best CIA assessment is that Saddam and Al Qaeda are most likely to bed together if his regime is imminently threatened by the preventive war (it would be in no reasonable sense an act of pre-emption) that Lindsey so ardently advocates.

Weighing the Risks

There's no invisible hand to protect us.
Brink Lindsey

I argue that Iraq is a serious threat to the surrounding region and to us. John Mueller disagrees. I contend that toppling the current Iraqi regime will aid in the broader campaign against Islamist terrorism. Mueller worries that an invasion of Iraq will backfire.

Risks of action, risks of inaction: Which are greater? Solid facts are few and far between; we're forced to make our way based on hypotheticals and maybes and historical analogies. How can we have any confidence that we are weighing the risks intelligently?

One point in my favor is that I am actually weighing the risks. That's why I support military action against Iraq: I believe the risks of inaction outweigh the risks of action.

I am not a reflexive hawk. I opposed our recent military adventures in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans. I would not support military action against, say, Burma, merely because its government is despicable. Odious as it is, the Burmese regime poses no significant threat to its neighbors or to us. I would not have supported making war on China in the 1960s, even though its rulers were wildly anti-American and seeking to develop a nuclear arsenal. Despite the threat China posed to us, the risks of acting were far too great (especially the possibility of an escalation with the Soviets) and the price of victory against such a formidable and fanatical adversary would have been far too high. In that situation, deterrence and diplomacy (in particular, playing the Chinese and Soviets against each other) were the better options.

So on the general question of preventive war -- whether to make war now in order to avoid a worse war later -- my position is: It depends on the circumstances. The decision whether to go to war should turn on a pragmatic assessment of relative risks. Sometimes the balance will tilt in favor of action, sometimes not. In the particular case of Iraq in 2002, I believe the balance tilts strongly toward action.

Many who oppose invading Iraq (I won't ascribe this view to Mueller, since he did not spell out his general position clearly) reject the kind of pragmatic assessment that I think is called for. They believe that preventive war is just a bad idea, period -- that it's wrong, or at least reckless, to fire the first shot unless you're absolutely sure the other guy is about to squeeze the trigger.

When I'm debating the Iraq question with someone like that, we're talking past each other. I'm explaining the reasons that led me to my conclusion. He's marshaling evidence in support of a predetermined conclusion.

Not that there's anything wrong, in general, with predetermined conclusions -- they're called principles. But all principles aren't created equal. Some are sound, some are iffy, and some are downright worthless.

What about the principle of no preventive wars? Specifically, what is the basis for assuming that preventive wars always make matters worse? In economic policy, there are solid grounds for the principle of no government meddling with markets. Market competition has enormous advantages over government action in making use of and coordinating dispersed information, in encouraging innovation, in supplying appropriate incentive structures, and so on. Accordingly, anyone arguing that government intervention in the marketplace can improve economic performance has an extremely difficult case to make.

Many libertarians slide easily from noninterventionism in domestic affairs to noninterventionism abroad, believing they're on equally firm footing with both positions. But they're not, because the fact is that there's no invisible hand in foreign affairs. There are no equilibrating mechanisms or feedback loops in the Hobbesian jungle of predatory dictatorships and fanatical terrorist groups that give us any assurance that, if the United States were only to stand aside, things would go as well for us in the world as they possibly could.

Accordingly, it seems to me that a no-exceptions policy against preventive war rests ultimately on an untenable assumption: that unrousable passivity on the part of the greatest and most powerful country that ever existed will somehow yield the most favorable achievable conditions in the world -- that, in an intricately interconnected world, leaving everything outside our physical borders to the wolves will ensure that everything turns out for the best.

I don't buy it. Hostile regimes bent on relentless expansion and pursuing weapons of mass destruction are a threat to global security. Hostile regimes that could put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists are a direct threat to the lives of Americans. If regimes fitting either of these descriptions don't change their ways, military action against them should be an option.

Iraq's current regime fits both descriptions. It is not going to change its ways. The risks of war are real but manageable. Let's act before it's too late.

Weighing the Risks

blindsey@cato.org (Brink Lindsey) — Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 EST

I argue that Iraq is a serious threat—to the surrounding region and to us. John Mueller disagrees. I contend that toppling the current Iraqi regime will aid in the broader campaign against Islamist terrorism. Mueller worries that an invasion of Iraq will backfire.

Risks of action, risks of inaction—which are greater? Solid facts are few and far between; we're forced to make our way on the basis of hypotheticals and maybes and historical analogies. How can we have any confidence that we are weighing the risks intelligently?

One point in my favor is that I am actually weighing the risks. That's why I support military action against Iraq: I believe the risks of inaction outweigh the risks of action. I am not a reflexive hawk: I opposed our recent military adventures in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans. I would not support military action against, say, Burma, merely because its government is despicable. Odious as it is, the Burmese regime poses no significant threat to its neighbors or to us. I would not have supported making war on China in the 1960s, even though its rulers were wildly anti-American and seeking to develop a nuclear arsenal. Despite the threat China posed to us, the risks of acting were far too great (especially the possibility of an escalation with the Soviets) and the price of victory against such a formidable and fanatical adversary would have been far too high. In that situation, deterrence and diplomacy (in particular, playing the Chinese and Soviets against each other) were the better options.

So on the general question of preventive war—whether to make war now in order to avoid a worse war later—my position is: It depends on the circumstances. The decision whether to go to war should turn on a pragmatic assessment of relative risks. Sometimes the balance will tilt in favor of action, sometimes not. In the particular case of Iraq in 2002, I believe the balance tilts strongly toward action.

Many who oppose invading Iraq (I won't ascribe this view to Mueller, since he did not spell out his general position clearly) reject the kind of pragmatic assessment that I think is called for. They believe that preventive war is just a bad idea, period—that it's wrong, or at least reckless, to fire the first shot unless you're absolutely sure the other guy is about to squeeze the trigger.

So when I'm debating the Iraq question with someone like that, we're talking past each other. I'm explaining the reasons that led me to my conclusion. He's marshalling evidence in support of a predetermined conclusion.

Not that there's anything wrong, in general, with predetermined conclusions—they're called principles. But all principles aren't created equal. Some are sound, some are iffy, and some are downright worthless.

What about the principle of no preventive wars? Specifically, what is the basis for assuming that preventive wars always make matters worse? In economic policy, there are extremely solid grounds for the principle of no government meddling with markets. Market competition has enormous advantages over government action in making use of and coordinating dispersed information, in encouraging innovation, in supplying appropriate incentive structures, etc. Accordingly, anyone arguing that government intervention in the marketplace can improve economic performance has an extremely difficult case to make.

Many libertarians slide easily from noninterventionism in domestic affairs to noninterventionism abroad, and believe that they're on equally firm footing with both positions. But they're not, because the fact is that there's no invisible hand in foreign affairs. There are no equilibrating mechanisms or feedback loops in the Hobbesian jungle of predatory dictatorships and fanatical terrorist groups that give us any assurance that, if the United States were only to stand aside, things would go as well for us in the world as they possibly could.

Accordingly, it seems to me that a no-exceptions policy against preventive war rests ultimately on an untenable assumption—on the implicit belief that unrousable passivity on the part of the greatest and most powerful country that ever existed will somehow yield the most favorable achievable conditions in the world. That, in an intricately interconnected world, leaving everything outside our physical borders to the wolves will ensure that everything turns out for the best.

Iraq's current regime fits both descriptions. It is not going to change its ways. The risks of war are real but manageable. Let's act before it's too late.

Nasty Realities

blindsey@cato.org (Brink Lindsey) — Thu, 31 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EST

John Mueller sees correctly that the Iraq problem has two aspects: (1) regional security and (2) global terrorism. Unfortunately, he fails to grasp the nasty realities of either.

Mueller needs to read Mark Bowden's superb—and chilling—profile of Saddam in the May 2002 issue of The Atlantic. Bowden makes clear that Saddam sees himself as a world-historical figure—a man destined to lead pan-Arabia back to greatness. Perversely, every brush with disaster and death "has strengthened his conviction that his path is divinely inspired and that greatness is his destiny." Why on earth should we suppose that a nuclear arsenal—built in reckless defiance of the United States and the world—would temper rather than inflame Saddam's raging megalomania?

Mueller blithely assumes that any future Iraqi aggression would be "extremely likely to trigger a concerted multilateral military attack upon him and his regime" and thus "patently suicidal." Excuse me, but there was no multilateral response to Iraq's attack on Iran, and the world would have been all too happy to acquiesce in Kuwait's disappearance had President Bush 41 not stepped in and forced the issue. What makes Mueller think that the world would rush in to confront a nuclear-armed Iraq? That task, inevitably, would fall to the United States. Mueller's counsel boils down to this: The United States should avoid war with a relatively weak Iraq today so that it can tangle with a nuclear adversary tomorrow.

What about the nexus between Iraq and terrorism, which Mueller dismisses as so much "arm-waving"? Allow me to quote Bowden's article once more, this time from a scene in which Saddam is addressing Iraqi military leaders who run terrorist training camps:

He told [them] that they were the best men in the nation, the most trusted and able. That was why they had been selected to meet with him, and to work at the terrorist camps where warriors were being trained to strike back at America. The United States, he said, because of its reckless treatment of Arab nations and the Arab people, was a necessary target for revenge and destruction. American aggression must be stopped in order for Iraq to rebuild and to resume leadership of the Arab world.

This meeting occurred back in 1996—before the recent heating up of the conflict. So much for Saddam's live-and-let-live foreign policy.

Opponents of action against Iraq argue that we can rely on deterrence to protect us from such atrocities. No country, not even one as rash as Iraq, would dare to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States because of the threat of overwhelming retaliation. That argument has considerable force with respect to a direct attack by Iraq, but it fails completely to confront the possibility that Iraq could use terrorist intermediaries to do its dirty work while masking its own involvement. How is deterrence supposed to work when WMDs lack a return address?

Recall, again, last year's anthrax attacks. We still don't know who was responsible, or whether there was any foreign state involvement. Just this week, a Washington Post article cast considerable doubt on the FBI's favored theory that the murders were the work of a disgruntled American scientist—and suggested that an Iraqi role remains a live possibility.

Go back a few more years—to the 1993 plot to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait. It appears that the attack was an Iraqi operation—but the fact is we're not really sure. Read this 1993 New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh for an in-depth review of the less-than-airtight case.

Welcome to the shadowy world in which we now live. A world in which deterrence no longer suffices. A world in which the judicious use of American power to preempt looming threats may be all that stands between us and catastrophe.

Here is what we know about the current Iraqi regime. It has weapons of mass destruction and is actively seeking to add to its arsenal. It is rabidly hostile to the United States. It has an established track record of predatory conduct and a demonstrated willingness to take extreme risks in pursuing its predatory ambitions. There is not another country on earth that matches Iraq's combination of destructive capacity, anti-American animus, and recklessness in projecting power. In a shadowy world, this much is clear: We are not safe while the present regime rules Iraq.

No more 9/11s

blindsey@cato.org (Brink Lindsey) — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 00:00:00 EST

John Mueller tries to make light of Iraq. "Feeble," "inept," "pathetic," and "daffy" are some of the adjectives he uses to describe the blood-soaked, predatory regime now in power there. The implication is that only the paranoid could find in Saddam Hussein's buffoonery any cause for serious concern.

Well, I beg to differ. Iraq is no joke: The crimes that the Baathist regime there has committed and may intend to commit in the future are deadly serious business. Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has invaded two of its neighbors, lobbed missiles at two other countries in the region, systematically defied U.N. resolutions that demand its disarmament, fired on U.S. and coalition aircraft thousands of times over the past decade, and committed atrocious human rights abuses against its own citizens—including the waging of genocidal chemical warfare against Iraqi Kurds. In short, this is a regime that is responsible for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths.

Meanwhile, Iraq has a long record of active support for international terrorist groups. Indeed, it has apparently staged terrorist attacks of its own directly against the United States—here I am speaking of Iraq's likely involvement in the attempted assassination of former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993.

Most ominously, Iraq has been engaged for many years in the monomaniacal pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. It reportedly has significant stockpiles of biological weapons, and its aggressive, large-scale nuclear program is thought to be at most a few years away from success. The fact that Iraq has been willing to endure ongoing sanctions—and thus the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue—rather than dismantle its WMD programs shows the ferocity of its commitment to maximizing its destructive capabilities.

In light of the above, I would support military action against Iraq even if 9/11 had never happened and there were no such thing as Al Qaeda. After all, I supported the Gulf War back in 1991 in the hope of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime before it fulfilled its nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, quagmire was plucked from the jaws of victory in that earlier conflict, and so today we are faced with concluding its unfinished business. In my view, standing by with "patient watchfulness" while predatory, anti-Western terror states become nuclear powers is irresponsible and dangerous folly.

As to the headline question, "What's the rush?," my reply is: North Korea. In 1994 President Clinton, with the help of former President Carter, swept the Korean threat under the rug and trusted that "nature," or something, would deal with that "devil du jour." Now North Korea's psychopathic regime informs us that it has nuclear weapons—a fact that vastly complicates any efforts to prevent the situation from getting even worse. We can look forward to similar complications with Iraq unless we act soon.

The case for action against Iraq is further strengthened by the unfortunate facts that 9/11 did happen and Al Qaeda does exist. Here is the grim reality: Radical Islamism is in arms against the West, and its fanatical followers have pledged their lives to killing as many of the infidel as they possibly can. American office workers in New York and Washington, French seamen in Yemen, Australian tourists in Bali, Russian theatergoers in Moscow—nobody is safe. However exactly this conflict arose, it is now in full flame. And let there be no mistake: This is a fight to the death. Either we crush radical Islamism's global jihad, or thousands—or even millions—more Americans will die.

Iraq occupies a strategic position in the war against Islamist terror along a number of different dimensions. First, Iraq's WMD programs threaten to stock the armory of Al Qaeda & Company. Saddam Hussein's regime has a long and inglorious history of reckless aggression and grievous miscalculation. The decision to use terrorist intermediaries to unleash, say, Iraqi bioweapons against the United States strikes me as an entirely plausible scenario—assuming that Iraq's leadership can convince itself that the attack could be made with "plausible deniability." Given that more than a year has gone by since last fall's anthrax letter scare and we still have absolutely no idea who was responsible, the threat posed by Iraq's WMD programs is far from idle. It is, in fact, intolerable.

Second, the resolution—one way or another—of our longstanding conflict with Iraq will have vitally important repercussions in the larger war against terror. If we proceeded to remove the Baathist regime from power, we would make it extremely clear that the United States means business in dealing with terrorism and its sponsors. All those countries that continue, more than a year after 9/11, to demonstrate their incapacity or unwillingness to root out the terrorists in their midst (e.g., Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc.) would have newly strengthened incentives to do the right thing. On the other hand, if all the tough talk against Iraq turned out to have been hot air, U.S. credibility would sustain a major blow. Al Qaeda would be emboldened by perceived American weakness, and countries that have to balance fear of the United States against fear of Islamists at home would all take a big shift toward taking U.S. displeasure less seriously.

Mueller's "What, me worry?" attitude captures perfectly the prevailing opinion about Afghanistan circa September 10, 2001. The Taliban were more a punch line than a serious foreign-policy issue; only the most fevered imagination could see any threat to us in that miserable, dilapidated country. The next day, three thousand Americans were dead.

We can't let that happen again.