Economics

The End of National Currency
By Benn Steil

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007
Summary: Global financial instability has sparked a surge in "monetary nationalism" -- the idea that countries must make and control their own currencies. But globalization and monetary nationalism are a dangerous combination, a cause of financial crises and geopolitical tension. The world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn.

Benn Steil is Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a co-author of Financial Statecraft.

THE RISE OF MONETARY NATIONALISM

Capital flows have become globalization's Achilles' heel. Over the past 25 years, devastating currency crises have hit countries across Latin America and Asia, as well as countries just beyond the borders of western Europe -- most notably Russia and Turkey. Even such an impeccably credentialed pro-globalization economist as U.S. Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin has acknowledged that "opening up the financial system to foreign capital flows has led to some disastrous financial crises causing great pain, suffering, and even violence."

The economics profession has failed to offer anything resembling a coherent and compelling response to currency crises. International Monetary Fund (IMF) analysts have, over the past two decades, endorsed a wide variety of national exchange-rate and monetary policy regimes that have subsequently collapsed in failure. They have fingered numerous culprits, from loose fiscal policy and poor bank regulation to bad industrial policy and official corruption. The financial-crisis literature has yielded policy recommendations so exquisitely hedged and widely contradicted as to be practically useless.

Antiglobalization economists have turned the problem on its head by absolving governments (except the one in Washington) and instead blaming crises on markets and their institutional supporters, such as the IMF -- "dictatorships of international finance," in the words of the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. "Countries are effectively told that if they don't follow certain conditions, the capital markets or the IMF will refuse to lend them money," writes Stiglitz. "They are basically forced to give up part of their sovereignty."

Is this right? Are markets failing, and will restoring lost sovereignty to governments put an end to financial instability? This is a dangerous misdiagnosis. In fact, capital flows became destabilizing only after countries began asserting "sovereignty" over money -- detaching it from gold or anything else considered real wealth. Moreover, even if the march of globalization is not inevitable, the world economy and the international financial system have evolved in such a way that there is no longer a viable model for economic development outside of them.

The right course is not to return to a mythical past of monetary sovereignty, with governments controlling local interest and exchange rates in blissful ignorance of the rest of the world. Governments must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory. National currencies and global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of currency crises and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism. In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today's instability.

THE GOLDEN AGE

Capital flows were enormous, even by contemporary standards, during the last great period of "globalization," from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. Currency crises occurred during this period, but they were generally shallow and short-lived. That is because money was then -- as it has been throughout most of the world and most of human history -- gold, or at least a credible claim on gold. Funds flowed quickly back to crisis countries because of confidence that the gold link would be restored. At the time, monetary nationalism was considered a sign of backwardness, adherence to a universally acknowledged standard of value a mark of civilization. Those nations that adhered most reliably (such as Australia, Canada, and the United States) were rewarded with the lowest international borrowing rates. Those that adhered the least (such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) were punished with the highest.

This bond was fatally severed during the period between World War I and World War II. Most economists in the 1930s and 1940s considered it obvious that capital flows would become destabilizing with the end of reliably fixed exchange rates. Friedrich Hayek noted in a 1937 lecture that under a credible gold-standard regime, "short-term capital movements will on the whole tend to relieve the strain set up by the original cause of a temporarily adverse balance of payments. If exchanges, however, are variable, the capital movements will tend to work in the same direction as the original cause and thereby to intensify it" -- as they do today.

The belief that globalization required hard money, something foreigners would willingly hold, was widespread. The French economist Charles Rist observed that "while the theorizers are trying to persuade the public and the various governments that a minimum quantity of gold ... would suffice to maintain monetary confidence, and that anyhow paper currency, even fiat currency, would amply meet all needs, the public in all countries is busily hoarding all the national currencies which are supposed to be convertible into gold." This view was hardly limited to free marketeers. As notable a critic of the gold standard and global capitalism as Karl Polanyi took it as obvious that monetary nationalism was incompatible with globalization. Focusing on the United Kingdom's interest in growing world trade in the nineteenth century, he argued that "nothing else but commodity money could serve this end for the obvious reason that token money, whether bank or fiat, cannot circulate on foreign soil." Yet what Polanyi considered nonsensical -- global trade in goods, services, and capital intermediated by intrinsically worthless national paper (or "fiat") monies -- is exactly how globalization is advancing, ever so fitfully, today.

The political mythology associating the creation and control of money with national sovereignty finds its economic counterpart in the metamorphosis of the famous theory of "optimum currency areas" (OCA). Fathered in 1961 by Robert Mundell, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has long been a prolific advocate of shrinking the number of national currencies, it became over the subsequent decades a quasi-scientific foundation for monetary nationalism.

Mundell, like most macroeconomists of the early 1960s, had a now largely discredited postwar Keynesian mindset that put great faith in the ability of policymakers to fine-tune national demand in the face of what economists call "shocks" to supply and demand. His seminal article, "A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas," asks the question, "What is the appropriate domain of the currency area?" "It might seem at first that the question is purely academic," he observes, "since it hardly appears within the realm of political feasibility that national currencies would ever be abandoned in favor of any other arrangement."

Mundell goes on to argue for flexible exchange rates between regions of the world, each with its own multinational currency, rather than between nations. The economics profession, however, latched on to Mundell's analysis of the merits of flexible exchange rates in dealing with economic shocks affecting different "regions or countries" differently; they saw it as a rationale for treating existing nations as natural currency areas. Monetary nationalism thereby acquired a rational scientific mooring. And from then on, much of the mainstream economics profession came to see deviations from "one nation, one currency" as misguided, at least in the absence of prior political integration.

The link between money and nationhood having been established by economists (much in the way that Aristotle and Jesus were reconciled by medieval scholastics), governments adopted OCA theory as the primary intellectual defense of monetary nationalism. Brazilian central bankers have even defended the country's monetary independence by publicly appealing to OCA theory -- against Mundell himself, who spoke out on the economic damage that sky-high interest rates (the result of maintaining unstable national monies that no one wants to hold) impose on Latin American countries. Indeed, much of Latin America has already experienced "spontaneous dollarization": despite restrictions in many countries, U.S. dollars represent over 50 percent of bank deposits. (In Uruguay, the figure is 90 percent, reflecting the appeal of Uruguay's lack of currency restrictions and its famed bank secrecy.) This increasingly global phenomenon of people rejecting national monies as a store of wealth has no place in OCA theory.

NO TURNING BACK

Just a few decades ago, vital foreign investment in developing countries was driven by two main motivations: to extract raw materials for export and to gain access to local markets heavily protected against competition from imports. Attracting the first kind of investment was simple for countries endowed with the right natural resources. (Companies readily went into war zones to extract oil, for example.) Governments pulled in the second kind of investment by erecting tariff and other barriers to competition so as to compensate foreigners for an otherwise unappealing business climate. Foreign investors brought money and know-how in return for monopolies in the domestic market.

This cozy scenario was undermined by the advent of globalization. Trade liberalization has opened up most developing countries to imports (in return for export access to developed countries), and huge declines in the costs of communication and transport have revolutionized the economics of global production and distribution. Accordingly, the reasons for foreign companies to invest in developing countries have changed. The desire to extract commodities remains, but companies generally no longer need to invest for the sake of gaining access to domestic markets. It is generally not necessary today to produce in a country in order to sell in it (except in large economies such as Brazil and China).

At the same time, globalization has produced a compelling new reason to invest in developing countries: to take advantage of lower production costs by integrating local facilities into global chains of production and distribution. Now that markets are global rather than local, countries compete with others for investment, and the factors defining an attractive investment climate have changed dramatically. Countries can no longer attract investors by protecting them against competition; now, since protection increases the prices of goods that foreign investors need as production inputs, it actually reduces global competitiveness.

In a globalizing economy, monetary stability and access to sophisticated financial services are essential components of an attractive local investment climate. And in this regard, developing countries are especially poorly positioned.

Traditionally, governments in the developing world exercised strict control over interest rates, loan maturities, and even the beneficiaries of credit -- all of which required severing financial and monetary links with the rest of the world and tightly controlling international capital flows. As a result, such flows occurred mainly to settle trade imbalances or fund direct investments, and local financial systems remained weak and underdeveloped. But growth today depends more and more on investment decisions funded and funneled through the global financial system. (Borrowing in low-cost yen to finance investments in Europe while hedging against the yen's rise on a U.S. futures exchange is no longer exotic.) Thus, unrestricted and efficient access to this global system -- rather than the ability of governments to manipulate parochial monetary policies -- has become essential for future economic development.

But because foreigners are often unwilling to hold the currencies of developing countries, those countries' local financial systems end up being largely isolated from the global system. Their interest rates tend to be much higher than those in the international markets and their lending operations extremely short -- not longer than a few months in most cases. As a result, many developing countries are dependent on U.S. dollars for long-term credit. This is what makes capital flows, however necessary, dangerous: in a developing country, both locals and foreigners will sell off the local currency en masse at the earliest whiff of devaluation, since devaluation makes it more difficult for the country to pay its foreign debts -- hence the dangerous instability of today's international financial system.

Although OCA theory accounts for none of these problems, they are grave obstacles to development in the context of advancing globalization. Monetary nationalism in developing countries operates against the grain of the process -- and thus makes future financial problems even more likely.

MONEY IN CRISIS

Why has the problem of serial currency crises become so severe in recent decades? It is only since 1971, when President Richard Nixon formally untethered the dollar from gold, that monies flowing around the globe have ceased to be claims on anything real. All the world's currencies are now pure manifestations of sovereignty conjured by governments. And the vast majority of such monies are unwanted: people are unwilling to hold them as wealth, something that will buy in the future at least what it did in the past. Governments can force their citizens to hold national money by requiring its use in transactions with the state, but foreigners, who are not thus compelled, will choose not to do so. And in a world in which people will only willingly hold dollars (and a handful of other currencies) in lieu of gold money, the mythology tying money to sovereignty is a costly and sometimes dangerous one. Monetary nationalism is simply incompatible with globalization. It has always been, even if this has only become apparent since the 1970s, when all the world's governments rendered their currencies intrinsically worthless.

Yet, perversely as a matter of both monetary logic and history, the most notable economist critical of globalization, Stiglitz, has argued passionately for monetary nationalism as the remedy for the economic chaos caused by currency crises. When millions of people, locals and foreigners, are selling a national currency for fear of an impending default, the Stiglitz solution is for the issuing government to simply decouple from the world: drop interest rates, devalue, close off financial flows, and stiff the lenders. It is precisely this thinking, a throwback to the isolationism of the 1930s, that is at the root of the cycle of crisis that has infected modern globalization.

Argentina has become the poster child for monetary nationalists -- those who believe that every country should have its own paper currency and not waste resources hoarding gold or hard-currency reserves. Monetary nationalists advocate capital controls to avoid entanglement with foreign creditors. But they cannot stop there. As Hayek emphasized in his 1937 lecture, "exchange control designed to prevent effectively the outflow of capital would really have to involve a complete control of foreign trade," since capital movements are triggered by changes in the terms of credit on exports and imports.

Indeed, this is precisely the path that Argentina has followed since 2002, when the government abandoned its currency board, which tried to fix the peso to the dollar without the dollars necessary to do so. Since writing off $80 billion worth of its debts (75 percent in nominal terms), the Argentine government has been resorting to ever more intrusive means in order to prevent its citizens from protecting what remains of their savings and buying from or selling to foreigners. The country has gone straight back to the statist model of economic control that has failed Latin America repeatedly over generations. The government has steadily piled on more and more onerous capital and domestic price controls, export taxes, export bans, and limits on citizens' access to foreign currency. Annual inflation has nevertheless risen to about 20 percent, prompting the government to make ham-fisted efforts to manipulate the official price data. The economy has become ominously dependent on soybean production, which surged in the wake of price controls and export bans on cattle, taking the country back to the pre-globalization model of reliance on a single commodity export for hard-currency earnings. Despite many years of robust postcrisis economic recovery, GDP is still, in constant U.S. dollars, 26 percent below its peak in 1998, and the country's long-term economic future looks as fragile as ever.

When currency crises hit, countries need dollars to pay off creditors. That is when their governments turn to the IMF, the most demonized institutional face of globalization. The IMF has been attacked by Stiglitz and others for violating "sovereign rights" in imposing conditions in return for loans. Yet the sort of compromises on policy autonomy that sovereign borrowers strike today with the IMF were in the past struck directly with foreign governments. And in the nineteenth century, these compromises cut far more deeply into national autonomy.

Historically, throughout the Balkans and Latin America, sovereign borrowers subjected themselves to considerable foreign control, at times enduring what were considered to be egregious blows to independence. Following its recognition as a state in 1832, Greece spent the rest of the century under varying degrees of foreign creditor control; on the heels of a default on its 1832 obligations, the country had its entire finances placed under French administration. In order to return to the international markets after 1878, the country had to precommit specific revenues from customs and state monopolies to debt repayment. An 1887 loan gave its creditors the power to create a company that would supervise the revenues committed to repayment. After a disastrous war with Turkey over Crete in 1897, Greece was obliged to accept a control commission, comprised entirely of representatives of the major powers, that had absolute power over the sources of revenue necessary to fund its war debt. Greece's experience was mirrored in Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and, of course, Argentina.

There is, in short, no age of monetary sovereignty to return to. Countries have always borrowed, and when offered the choice between paying high interest rates to compensate for default risk (which was typical during the Renaissance) and paying lower interest rates in return for sacrificing some autonomy over their ability to default (which was typical in the nineteenth century), they have commonly chosen the latter. As for the notion that the IMF today possesses some extraordinary power over the exchange-rate policies of borrowing countries, this, too, is historically inaccurate. Adherence to the nineteenth-century gold standard, with the Bank of England at the helm of the system, severely restricted national monetary autonomy, yet governments voluntarily subjected themselves to it precisely because it meant cheaper capital and greater trade opportunities.

THE MIGHTY DOLLAR?

For a large, diversified economy like that of the United States, fluctuating exchange rates are the economic equivalent of a minor toothache. They require fillings from time to time -- in the form of corporate financial hedging and active global supply management -- but never any major surgery. There are two reasons for this. First, much of what Americans buy from abroad can, when import prices rise, quickly and cheaply be replaced by domestic production, and much of what they sell abroad can, when export prices fall, be diverted to the domestic market. Second, foreigners are happy to hold U.S. dollars as wealth.

This is not so for smaller and less advanced economies. They depend on imports for growth, and often for sheer survival, yet cannot pay for them without dollars. What can they do? Reclaim the sovereignty they have allegedly lost to the IMF and international markets by replacing the unwanted national currency with dollars (as Ecuador and El Salvador did half a decade ago) or euros (as Bosnia, Kosovo, and Montenegro did) and thereby end currency crises for good. Ecuador is the shining example of the benefits of dollarization: a country in constant political turmoil has been a bastion of economic stability, with steady, robust economic growth and the lowest inflation rate in Latin America. No wonder its new leftist president, Rafael Correa, was obliged to ditch his de-dollarization campaign in order to win over the electorate. Contrast Ecuador with the Dominican Republic, which suffered a devastating currency crisis in 2004 -- a needless crisis, as 85 percent of its trade is conducted with the United States (a figure comparable to the percentage of a typical U.S. state's trade with other U.S. states).

It is often argued that dollarization is only feasible for small countries. No doubt, smallness makes for a simpler transition. But even Brazil's economy is less than half the size of California's, and the U.S. Federal Reserve could accommodate the increased demand for dollars painlessly (and profitably) without in any way sacrificing its commitment to U.S. domestic price stability. An enlightened U.S. government would actually make it politically easier and less costly for more countries to adopt the dollar by rebating the seigniorage profits it earns when people hold more dollars. (To get dollars, dollarizing countries give the Federal Reserve interest-bearing assets, such as Treasury bonds, which the United States would otherwise have to pay interest on.) The International Monetary Stability Act of 2000 would have made such rebates official U.S. policy, but the legislation died in Congress, unsupported by a Clinton administration that feared it would look like a new foreign-aid program.

Polanyi was wrong when he claimed that because people would never accept foreign fiat money, fiat money could never support foreign trade. The dollar has emerged as just such a global money. This phenomenon was actually foreseen by the brilliant German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel in 1900. He surmised:

"Expanding economic relations eventually produce in the enlarged, and finally international, circle the same features that originally characterized only closed groups; economic and legal conditions overcome the spatial separation more and more, and they come to operate just as reliably, precisely and predictably over a great distance as they did previously in local communities. To the extent that this happens, the pledge, that is the intrinsic value of the money, can be reduced. ... Even though we are still far from having a close and reliable relationship within or between nations, the trend is undoubtedly in that direction."

But the dollar's privileged status as today's global money is not heaven-bestowed. The dollar is ultimately just another money supported only by faith that others will willingly accept it in the future in return for the same sort of valuable things it bought in the past. This puts a great burden on the institutions of the U.S. government to validate that faith. And those institutions, unfortunately, are failing to shoulder that burden. Reckless U.S. fiscal policy is undermining the dollar's position even as the currency's role as a global money is expanding.

Four decades ago, the renowned French economist Jacques Rueff, writing just a few years before the collapse of the Bretton Woods dollar-based gold-exchange standard, argued that the system "attains such a degree of absurdity that no human brain having the power to reason can defend it." The precariousness of the dollar's position today is similar. The United States can run a chronic balance-of-payments deficit and never feel the effects. Dollars sent abroad immediately come home in the form of loans, as dollars are of no use abroad. "If I had an agreement with my tailor that whatever money I pay him he returns to me the very same day as a loan," Rueff explained by way of analogy, "I would have no objection at all to ordering more suits from him."

With the U.S. current account deficit running at an enormous 6.6 percent of GDP (about $2 billion a day must be imported to sustain it), the United States is in the fortunate position of the suit buyer with a Chinese tailor who instantaneously returns his payments in the form of loans -- generally, in the U.S. case, as purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds. The current account deficit is partially fueled by the budget deficit (a dollar more of the latter yields about 20-50 cents more of the former), which will soar in the next decade in the absence of reforms to curtail federal "entitlement" spending on medical care and retirement benefits for a longer-living population. The United States -- and, indeed, its Chinese tailor -- must therefore be concerned with the sustainability of what Rueff called an "absurdity." In the absence of long-term fiscal prudence, the United States risks undermining the faith foreigners have placed in its management of the dollar -- that is, their belief that the U.S. government can continue to sustain low inflation without having to resort to growth-crushing interest-rate hikes as a means of ensuring continued high capital inflows.

PRIVATIZING MONEY

It is widely assumed that the natural alternative to the dollar as a global currency is the euro. Faith in the euro's endurance, however, is still fragile -- undermined by the same fiscal concerns that afflict the dollar but with the added angst stemming from concerns about the temptations faced by Italy and others to return to monetary nationalism. But there is another alternative, the world's most enduring form of money: gold.

It must be stressed that a well-managed fiat money system has considerable advantages over a commodity-based one, not least of which that it does not waste valuable resources. There is little to commend in digging up gold in South Africa just to bury it again in Fort Knox. The question is how long such a well-managed fiat system can endure in the United States. The historical record of national monies, going back over 2,500 years, is by and large awful.

At the turn of the twentieth century -- the height of the gold standard -- Simmel commented, "Although money with no intrinsic value would be the best means of exchange in an ideal social order, until that point is reached the most satisfactory form of money may be that which is bound to a material substance." Today, with money no longer bound to any material substance, it is worth asking whether the world even approximates the "ideal social order" that could sustain a fiat dollar as the foundation of the global financial system. There is no way effectively to insure against the unwinding of global imbalances should China, with over a trillion dollars of reserves, and other countries with dollar-rich central banks come to fear the unbearable lightness of their holdings.

So what about gold? A revived gold standard is out of the question. In the nineteenth century, governments spent less than ten percent of national income in a given year. Today, they routinely spend half or more, and so they would never subordinate spending to the stringent requirements of sustaining a commodity-based monetary system. But private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars. Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the dollar's decline. A new gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even without government support.

COMMON CURRENCIES

Virtually every major argument recently leveled against globalization has been leveled against markets generally (and, in turn, debunked) for hundreds of years. But the argument against capital flows in a world with 150 fluctuating national fiat monies is fundamentally different. It is highly compelling -- so much so that even globalization's staunchest supporters treat capital flows as an exception, a matter to be intellectually quarantined until effective crisis inoculations can be developed. But the notion that capital flows are inherently destabilizing is logically and historically false. The lessons of gold-based globalization in the nineteenth century simply must be relearned. Just as the prodigious daily capital flows between New York and California, two of the world's 12 largest economies, are so uneventful that no one even notices them, capital flows between countries sharing a single currency, such as the dollar or the euro, attract not the slightest attention from even the most passionate antiglobalization activists.

Countries whose currencies remain unwanted by foreigners will continue to experiment with crisis-prevention policies, imposing capital controls and building up war chests of dollar reserves. Few will repeat Argentina's misguided efforts to fix a dollar exchange rate without the dollars to do so. If these policies keep the IMF bored for a few more years, they will be for the good.

But the world can do better. Since economic development outside the process of globalization is no longer possible, countries should abandon monetary nationalism. Governments should replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.

Europeans used to say that being a country required having a national airline, a stock exchange, and a currency. Today, no European country is any worse off without them. Even grumpy Italy has benefited enormously from the lower interest rates and permanent end to lira speculation that accompanied its adoption of the euro. A future pan-Asian currency, managed according to the same principle of targeting low and stable inflation, would represent the most promising way for China to fully liberalize its financial and capital markets without fear of damaging renminbi speculation (the Chinese economy is only the size of California's and Florida's combined). Most of the world's smaller and poorer countries would clearly be best off unilaterally adopting the dollar or the euro, which would enable their safe and rapid integration into global financial markets. Latin American countries should dollarize; eastern European countries and Turkey, euroize. Broadly speaking, this prescription follows from relative trade flows, but there are exceptions; Argentina, for example, does more eurozone than U.S. trade, but Argentines think and save in dollars.

Of course, dollarizing countries must give up independent monetary policy as a tool of government macroeconomic management. But since the Holy Grail of monetary policy is to get interest rates down to the lowest level consistent with low and stable inflation, an argument against dollarization on this ground is, for most of the world, frivolous. How many Latin American countries can cut interest rates below those in the United States? The average inflation-adjusted lending rate in Latin America is about 20 percent. One must therefore ask what possible boon to the national economy developing-country central banks can hope to achieve from the ability to guide nominal local rates up and down on a discretionary basis. It is like choosing a Hyundai with manual transmission over a Lexus with automatic: the former gives the driver more control but at the cost of inferior performance under any condition.

As for the United States, it needs to perpetuate the sound money policies of former Federal Reserve Chairs Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan and return to long-term fiscal discipline. This is the only sure way to keep the United States' foreign tailors, with their massive and growing holdings of dollar debt, feeling wealthy and secure. It is the market that made the dollar into global money -- and what the market giveth, the market can taketh away. If the tailors balk and the dollar fails, the market may privatize money on its own.

www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002--2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

Posted by lmurx at 5:24 PM 1 comments

After this year the majority of people will live in cities

The world goes to town

May 3rd 2007
From The Economist print edition
After this year the majority of people will live in cities. Human history will ever more emphatically become urban history, says John Grimond (interviewed here)
Bridgeman

WHETHER you think the human story begins in a garden in Mesopotamia known as Eden, or more prosaically on the savannahs of present-day east Africa, it is clear that Homo sapiens did not start life as an urban creature. Man's habitat at the outset was dominated by the need to find food, and hunting and foraging were rural pursuits. Not until the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, did he start building anything that might be called a village, and by that time man had been around for about 120,000 years. It took another six millennia, to the days of classical antiquity, for cities of more than 100,000 people to develop. Even in 1800 only 3% of the world's population lived in cities. Sometime in the next few months, though, that proportion will pass the 50% mark, if it has not done so already. Wisely or not, Homo sapiens has become Homo urbanus.

In terms of human history this may seem a welcome development. It would be contentious to say that nothing of consequence has ever come out of the countryside. The wheel was presumably a rural invention. Even city-dwellers need bread as well as circuses. And if Dr Johnson and Shelley were right to say that poets are the true legislators of mankind, then all those hills and lakes and other rural delights must be given credit for inspiring them.

But the rural contribution to human progress seems slight compared with the urban one. Cities' development is synonymous with human development. The first villages came with the emergence of agriculture and the domestication of animals: people no longer had to wander as they hunted and gathered but could instead draw together in settlements, allowing some to develop particular skills and all to live in greater safety from predators. After a while the farmers could produce surpluses, at least in good times, and the various products of the villagers—grain, meat, cloth, pots—could be exchanged. Around 2000BC metal tokens, the forerunners of coins, were produced as receipts for quantities of grain placed in granaries. Not coincidentally, cities began to take shape at about the same time.

They did so, first, in the Fertile Crescent, the sweep of productive land that ran through Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, from which Jericho, Ur, Nineveh and Babylon (pictured above) would emerge. In time came other cities in other places: Harappa and Mohenjodaro in the Indus valley, Memphis and Thebes in Egypt, Yin and Shang cities in China, Mycenae in Greece, Knossos in Crete, Ugarit in Syria and, most spectacularly, Rome, the first great metropolis, which boasted, at its zenith in the third century AD, a population of more than 1m people.

Living together meant security. But people also drew together for the practical advantages of being in a particular place: by a river or spring, on a defensible hill or peninsula, next to an estuary or other source of food. Also important, argue historians, was a settlement's capacity to draw people to it as a meeting-place, often for sacred or spiritual purposes. Graves, groves, even caves might become shrines or places for ceremonies and rituals, to which people would make a pilgrimage. Man did not live by bread alone.

But bread, in the broadest sense, was important. People came to cities not just to worship but to trade—the shrine was often the market, too—and the goods they bought and sold were not just farm products but the manufactures of urban artisans and skilled workers. The city became a centre of exchange, both of goods and of ideas, and so it also became a centre of learning, innovation and sophistication.

This was so not just in the Fertile Crescent but, over the centuries, in Alexandria and Amsterdam, Cambay and Constantinople, London and Lisbon, Teotihuacán and Tenochtitlán. It was in the city that man was liberated from the tyranny of the soil and could develop skills, learn from other people, study, teach and develop the social arts that made country folk seem bumpkins. Homo urbanus did not just live in a town: he was urbane.

Cities were much more than all of this, of course, and they were not all the same. As they developed, some were most notable for their religious role (latter-day Rome), as the hub of an empire (Constantinople, Vijayanagara), as centres of administration (Beijing), political development (Florence), learning (Bologna, Fez), commerce (Hamburg) or a special product (Toledo). Some flourished, some died, their longevity depending on factors as varied as conquest, plague, misgovernment or economic collapse.
Technology turns even-handed

Whatever the particular circumstances of a city, though, its vigour was likely to be affected by technological change. Just as it was improvements in farming that brought about the surpluses that made possible the first fixed settlements, so it was improvements in transport that made possible the development of trade on which the prosperity of so many cities depended. Other technological changes made it possible to survive in a city. The Romans, for instance, constructed aqueducts to bring fresh water to their towns and sewers to provide sanitation.

But only the rich benefited. Most Romans, and many city-dwellers throughout history, lived in squalor, and many died of it. Towns were crowded and insanitary; people were often malnourished; and disease spread fast. Though cities grew in size and number for long periods, they could decline and fall, too. Between 1000 and 1300 Europe's urban population more than doubled, to about 70m (thanks partly to a new system of crop rotation, made possible by better tools). Then, with the Black Death, it fell by a quarter. Country people died too, but the city-dwellers were especially vulnerable. Their health depended above all on clean water and sanitation, which few had, and cheap soap and medicines, which had yet to be invented.

Not surprisingly, the next big change in the development of the city also turned on a leap in technology: the invention of engines and manufacturing machinery. The Industrial Revolution did nothing at first to make urban life easier, but it did provide jobs—lots of them. With the new factories of the industrial age that began in the late 18th century was born an entirely new urban era. Peasants left the land in their multitudes to live in new cities, first in the north of England, then all over Europe and North America. By 1900, 13% of the world's population had become urban.

The latest leap, from 13% to 50% in just 107 years, also owes something to science and technology: improvements in medicine, coupled with new knowledge about ways to avoid disease, have enabled more and more people to live together without succumbing as once they did to diarrhoea, tuberculosis, cholera and other pestilences. The same developments, however, have similarly lengthened lives in the countryside, leading to a huge increase in rural population. Human ingenuity has not matched this increase with commensurate growth in rural prosperity. As a result, ever more villagers have been upping sticks to seek a better life in the city.
Mary Evans

The sheer scale and speed of the current urban expansion make it unlike any of the big changes that have punctuated urban history. It mostly consists of poor people migrating in unprecedented numbers, and then producing babies on a similarly unprecedented scale. It is thus largely a phenomenon of poor and middle-income countries; the rich world has put most of its urbanisation behind it.

In poor countries, though, the trend is set to continue. The United Nations forecasts that today's urban population of 3.2 billion will rise to nearly 5 billion by 2030, when three out of five people will live in cities. The increase will be most dramatic in the poorest and least-urbanised continents, Asia and Africa. They are the ones least able to cope. Already over 90% of the urban population of Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda, three of the world's most rural countries, live in slums.

Within ten years the world will have nearly 500 cities of more than 1m people. Most of the newcomers will be absorbed in a metropolis of up to 5m people. But some will live in a megacity, defined as home to 10m or more inhabitants. In 1950 only New York and Tokyo could claim to be as big, but by 2020, says the UN, nine cities—Delhi, Dhaka, Jakarta, Lagos, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, São Paulo and Tokyo—will have more than 20m inhabitants. Greater Tokyo already has 35m, more than the entire population of Canada.
Corbis

The Megalopolis of the ancient world was in Arcadia, a part of Greece cited by Virgil as a model of happy, rural simplicity. The cities that now go by that generic name are far from Arcadian. Successful these places may be, if success is measured by growth of population. But most are in poor countries and many, if not most, of their inhabitants live in slums.

In the rich world, though, the city is undergoing very different changes. Many of the new towns that flourished in the Industrial Revolution and the manufacturing era that followed have been losing population. Even New York, for so long the epitome of urban sophistication, went through a bad patch in the 1970s. Some cities retain their role as administrative centres, by virtue of their political status. Some are still trading hubs, by virtue of their geographical position. Some endure simply because they have reached an equilibrium. But others struggle.

Of the traditional reasons for urban living, several (the presence of the shrine, the proximity of food) have lost their importance. Some of what the city provided (shops, factories) can now be offered in suburban malls or industrial parks—or in low-cost urban rivals in the developing world. Security, once one of the main reasons for huddling together, is often now more elusive in the druggy streets of the metropolis than in the exurbs. And technology, which has usually favoured urban progress, now enables people to work in rural bliss on home computers. No wonder so many cities find that in order to flourish they have to reinvent themselves.

Nearly all rich-country cities, whether prospering or declining, worry about transport, pollution, energy, pockets of poverty and so on. These offer troubles a-plenty. But they are of a different order to those faced by poor-country cities, whose problems are vastly greater and resources vastly smaller. While rich cities fret over a relatively modest ebb and flow of population, poor cities must cope with a tidal wave of migrants.

So the history of the city has come to a fork. This survey will explore the diverging paths of rich and poor, and the prospects for the city if the developing world can one day clamber out of poverty. First, though, it looks at the urban reality awaiting the Dick Whittingtons of the 21st century.

Posted by lmurx at 5:19 PM 0 comments

Referendum: The 2006 Midterm

Referendum: The 2006 Midterm




Congressional Elections
GARY C. JACOBSON
Collectively, the American electorate treated the 2006 midterm
congressional elections as a classic referendum on the performance of the
president and his party. Most voters held negative views of both George W.
Bush and his Republican partisans in Congress, and as a consequence, Democrats
won majority control of both chambers for the first time in twelve years.
Table 1 summarizes the results. Democrats picked up thirty seats in the House,
fifteen more than necessary to take over, winning a majority one seat larger than
that held by the Republicans in the previous Congress. They also gained six Senate
seats, all taken fromRepublican incumbents, to win a one-seatmajority in the
upper house. Remarkably, Democrats lost not a single seat in either body, the
first election in U.S. history in which a party retained all of its congressional seats.
According to the political science literature, party fortunes in midterm elections
are broadly shaped by three basic factors: the number of seats the president’s
party already holds, how well the economy is performing, and how the
public views the president’s performance in office.1 Although there is no consensus
on the relative importance of each condition or the way they ultimately
influence voters’ decisions, in combination, they do predict midterm partisan seat
swings with considerable accuracy. This was true in 2006 as well; for example, a
simple model employing standard measures of these variables predicts a twentysix
seat gain for Democrats in the House.2 Because the economy was doing
quite well by customary measures, the model attributes the Republican losses to
the President’s extraordinarily low standing with the public. Bush’s 38 per-
GARY C. JACOBSON is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. He
is the author of several books and numerous articles on congressional elections. His most recent book
is A Divider, Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People.
1 For a discussion of this literature and a full set of citations, see Gary C. Jacobson, The Politics of
Congressional Elections, 6th ed. (New York: Longman, 2006), 154–170.
2 The model is in ibid, p. 156, updated to include 2004; with Bush’s approval at 38 percent and real
per capita income up 3.0 percent between the third quarter of 2005 and the third quarter of 2006, and
Political Science Quarterly Volume 122 Number 1 2007 1
cent approval rating in the Gallup Poll taken just before the election was the
lowest for any president since Harry Truman in 1950; had his rating been as
high as it had been in 2002 (63 percent approving), and with the strong economy,
the model predicts that the parties would have broken about even.
All such models need to be taken with a large grain of salt, however, because
their predictions have wide error bands that would include almost any plausible
result (in this model, one standard deviation of the predicted swing covers plus
or minus sixteen seats—that is, for 2006, a Democratic gain of from thirteen to
thirty-five seats). Without question, a strongly pro-Democratic national tide was
running in 2006, but it was by no means certain that it would be sufficient to
overcome the formidable structural advantage the Republicans now enjoy in
congressional elections and deliver control of Congress to the Democrats. The
Republicans’ advantage derives from the fact that their usual voters are distributed
more efficiently across districts and states than are Democratic voters.
As an illustration, consider that the Democrat, Al Gore, won the national popular
vote over George W. Bush by about 540,000 of the 105 million votes cast in
2000, yet the distribution of the 2000 presidential vote across current House
districts yields 240 districts in which Bush won more votes than Gore but only
195 in which Gore outpolled Bush.3 Similarly, Bush won thirty states to Gore’s
twenty despite losing the popular vote nationally.
TABLE 1
Membership Changes in the House and Senate in the 2006 Elections
Republicans Democrats Independents
House of Representatives
At the time of the 2006 election 232 202 1
Elected in 2006 202 233
Incumbents reelected 188 191
Incumbents defeated 22 0
Open seats retained 14 12
Open seats lost 8 0
Senate
At the time of the 2006 election 55 44 1a
After the 2006 election 49 50 1
Incumbents reelected 8 15
Incumbents defeated 6 0
Open seats retained 1 2 1
Open seats lost 0 0
aBernard Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, replaced Senator James Jeffords, a
one-time Republican, who in 2001, became an independent, caucusing with the Democrats, in one of Vermont’s
Senate seats.
3 The principal reason for this Republican advantage is demographic: Democrats win a disproportionate
share of minority and other urban voters, who tend to be concentrated in districts with
with Republicans’ seat ‘‘exposure’’ at 2.3 percent, the point prediction is that Democrats pick up
twenty-six seats. Other models predict modest to considerably larger Democratic gains.
2 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
The Republicans’ structural advantage is nothing new. As Figure 1 shows,
except after the 1964 election, a notably larger proportion of House districts have
leaned Republican than have leaned Democratic (partisan leaning defined here
as having the district vote for the Party’s presidential candidate at least two
percentage points above the national average in the concurrent or most recent
presidential election).4 But changes in electoral behavior over the past thirty
years, particularly the growing partisan consistency of presidential and congressional
voting, has made the advantage far more significant. In past decades,
Democrats were able to win a substantial share of these Republican-leaning
seats, as high as 44 percent in the 1970s (Figure 2). Their ability to win such seats
has fallen sharply since the 1980s, and this is the main reason it was not a
foregone conclusion that Democrats would win the House in 2006. Republicans
lopsided Democratic majorities. But successful Republican gerrymanders in Florida, Michigan, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and, after 2002, Texas did enhanced the Party’s advantage, increasing the number of
Bush-majority districts by 12, from 228 to 240. See Gary C. Jacobson, ‘‘Polarized Politics and the 2004
Congressional and Presidential Elections,’’ Political Science Quarterly 120 (Summer 2005): 201–203.
4 The substantive point is unchanged if the standard is five rather than two percentage points; entries
are missing for 1962 and 1966 because redistricting altered too many to allow a reliable estimate.
FIGURE 1
District Partisan Advantage, 1952–2004
51 51 50 51 50
40
51 51 49 48 50 50 48 45
50 50 50 50 47 47 50 49 51 52 53
12 12 15 15
12
15
12 12 18 19 15 15 17
18
18 18 14 14 17 17 13 13 11 9 8
36 36 35 34
38
45
37 37
34 34 35 35 35 37
32 32 36 36 36 36 37 37 37 39 39
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
1952
1954
1956
1958
1960
1962
1964
1966
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
Percent
Republican Advantage Neutral Democratic Advantage
Source: Compiled by author.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 3
have never done particularly well in Democratic territory and remain less
successful than Democrats in this regard; but this is not a problem for them,
because their structural advantage would deliver comfortable Republican House
majorities even if they won only Republican-leaning districts.5 A comparable
analysis shows that similar trends also apply to states as electoral units.6
To understand what Democrats were up against in 2006, it is instructive
to compare their opportunities to those available to the Republicans in 1994, the
year the GOP gained fifty-six House seats and eight Senate seats to win full
control of Congress for the first time in more than four decades. Using the
district-level presidential vote to estimate the underlying district partisanship as
in Figure 2, I calculated that in 1994, Democrats defended sixty-five districts
that leaned Republican (that is, the Republican presidential candidate had run at
least 2 percentage points better than his national average in the district in 1992)
5 Democrats have also done worse in the dwindling number of evenly balanced districts. From the
1950s through the 1980s, they won 66 percent of these districts; since 1992, they have won 53 percent.
6 Gary C. Jacobson, ‘‘Competition in U.S. Congressional Elections’’ in Michael P. McDonald and
John Samples, eds., The Marketplace of Democracy (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution,
2006), 46–50.
FIGURE 2
Winning against the Partisan Grain, by Decade
25
37
44
36
21
13
5
15
12
10
12
7
0
10
20
30
40
50
1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2002-2004
Percent
Democrats Winning Republican-Leaning Districts
Republicans Winning Democratic-Leaning Districts
Note: Leaning districts are defined as those in which the district-level presidential vote was at least two
percentage points higher than the national average for that election.
4 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
and another forty-nine districts that could be classified as neutral between the
parties (districts where the presidential vote was within two percentage points of
average). Thus, at least in the abstract, Republicans had 114 likely Democratic
targets; they won forty-seven of these seats, comprising 83 percent of their fiftysix
seat gain that year. In 2006, Republicans defended only thirteen seats in
Democratic-leaning districts and another twenty in neutral districts for a total of
only thirty-three ostensibly vulnerable targets. Democrats won twelve of these
seats; the remaining eighteen they gained had to be won on Republican turf.
The configuration of Senate contests also offered more opportunities to Republicans
in 1994 than to Democrats in 2006. In 1994, twenty-two of the thirtyfive
seats to be contested were held by Democrats, and retirements had left
nine of them open; Republicans took six of the open seats and defeated two
incumbents to gain their eight seats. In 2006, Republicans defended fifteen seats,
only one of which was open. Moreover, only three were in states won by the
Democratic presidential candidate in either 2000 or 2004. Democrats won two
of these three ‘‘blue’’ states (Pennsylvania and Rhode Island), but their other
four takeovers occurred in ‘‘red’’ states, and all six were achieved by defeating
sitting Republicans. A national political tide was surging at least as strongly for
the Democrats in 2006 as it had been for the Republicans in 1994, but the Republicans
were defending higher ground, and so the total damage they suffered
was not as extensive.
SOURCES OF THE DEMOCRATIC TIDE
The primary source of the pro-Democratic tide in 2006 was public unhappiness
with the Iraq War and its originator, George W. Bush. Figure 3 displays the
trends in support for the war and approval of Bush’s job performance through
October 2006.7 The two trends track one another closely and move in similar
ways in response to events in Iraq. Cross-sectional analyses also find a close
relationship between opinions on Bush and the war; respondents give consistent
responses—approve of Bush and support the war, or disapprove of Bush
and oppose the war—an average of 84 percent of the time in polls spanning this
period.8 These opinions are far more tightly linked than they were for Bush’s
predecessors in comparable situations—Harry Truman with the Korean War
7 Bush job approval is the Lowess-smoothed summary of responses to 771 polls conducted by the
Gallup, CBS News/New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington
Post, Quinnipiac, Newsweek, Time, CNN, Bloomberg, Associated Press, and Pew Center for the
People and Press polls reported at http://www.pollingreport.com. Support for the Iraq War is the
Lowess-smoothed summary of 579 polls asking a wide variety of questions (more than forty different
wordings in all) assessing opinions on the war from the same survey sources as well as Fox News,
Knowledge Networks, and Zogby polls.
8 In secondary analysis of 107 of these polls, mean consistency was 83.8 percent with a standard
deviation of 2.9 percent.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 5
(60 percent consistent), and Lyndon Johnson with the VietnamWar (64 percent
consistent).9 In any single survey, the direction of causality is ambiguous—prior
attitudes toward Bush shape reactions to the war, assessments of the war shape
evaluations of Bush—but there seems little doubt that growing disillusionment
with the war has dragged down Bush’s approval ratings over time.
As Figure 3 indicates, public disillusionment with the war was more gradual
than precipitous over the two years following Bush’s reelection, falling
about 10 percentage points over this period. Responses to other questions concerning
the war and its justifications also reveal a gradual erosion of optimism
and support, but with a more pronounced downturn just before the 2006 election.
Figure 4, which displays the trend in beliefs that the war was going well,
serves as an example. Belief that the war in Iraq has made Americans safer
from terrorist attacks shows a similar trajectory and by election day had fallen
below 40 percent. Perhaps more ominous for Republicans, growing pessimism
about the war and its consequences was shared by their own partisans and
FIGURE 3
Approval of George W. Bush and Support for the War in Iraq
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
January-01
April-01
July-01
October-01
January-02
April-02
July-02
October-02
January-03
April-03
July-03
October-03
January-04
April-04
July-04
October-04
January-05
April-05
July-05
October-05
January-06
April-06
July-06
October-06
Percent
Support the Iraq War Approve of Bush's Job Performance
Iraq invaded
Saddam Hussein captured
Iraqi election
Abu Ghraib scandal
Terrorist attacks
Source: See footnote 7.
9 See Gary C. Jacobson, ‘‘Public Opinion and the War in Iraq’’ (paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, 30 August–3 September
2006), 25.
6 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
political independents as well as Democrats (Figure 5), although the partisan
gap on these questions remains very large, with Republicans typically on the
order of 45 percentage points more optimistic than Democrats.10
The distribution of responses to virtually all the diverse questions regarding
the Iraq War places self-identified independents considerably closer, on
average, to Democrats than to Republicans.11 The same holds for evaluations
of the President, with important consequences for voting behavior in 2006,
discussed below. As Figure 6 makes clear, partisan divisions on evaluations of
Bush’s performance continued to be huge during his second term; indeed, by
this measure, Bush is by a wide margin the most divisive president since modern
opinion surveys began asking the approval question more than seventy years
10 See Gary C. Jacobson, A Divider, Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People (New
York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 224–232.
11 The independent category includes those who, when asked, say they lean toward one of the
parties, because data on partisan leaners are not consistently available in the surveys analyzed here.
FIGURE 4
How Well is the War in Iraq Going?
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
March-03
May-03
July-03
September-03
November-03
January-04
March-04
May-04
July-04
September-04
November-04
January-05
March-05
May-05
July-05
September-05
November-05
January-06
March-06
May-06
July-06
September-06
November-06
Percent Positive
Very well/somewhat well (CBS/NY Times) Very well/fairly well (Pew) Very well/moderately well (Gallup)
Sources: CBS News/New York Times, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and Gallup
polls, accessed at http://pollingreport.com/iraq.htm, 16 November 2006.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 7
ago.12 Although he lost points among ordinary Republicans between his
reelection in 2004 and the midterm, four of five still approved of his performance,
and he was on an upswing with his partisan base as the election
approached. Meanwhile, approval among Democrats had fallen to single digits,
with trends among both sets of partisans, then, pointing to another election
featuring very high levels of party-line voting. The most consequential trend,
however, appears among independents, whose approval ratings of the President
fell about 15 points between the 2004 and 2006 elections.
The sharp partisan divisions provoked by the President made it harder for
Republican campaigns to exploit what was, by the usual measures, a robust
economy. To an extraordinary degree, partisanship now colors Americans’
perceptions of almost anything that can be associated with Bush, including
national economic conditions. Republicans reacted to improving economic in-
FIGURE 5
Evaluations of How Well the War in Iraq is Going, by Party
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
March-03
May-03
July-03
September-03
November-03
January-04
March-04
May-04
July-04
September-04
November-04
January-05
March-05
May-05
July-05
September-05
November-05
January-06
March-06
May-06
July-06
September-06
November-06
Percent Positive
Republicans - very/somewhat well (CBS/NY Times) Republicans - very/fairly well (Pew)
Democrats - very/somewhat well (CBS/NY Times) Democrats - very/fairly well (Pew)
Independents - very/somewhat well (CBS/NY Times) Independents - very/fairly well (Pew)
12 Jacobson, Divider, 6–7.
8 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
dicators by upgrading their assessments, but Democrats and independents have
been comparatively slow to acknowledge the good news (Figure 7). Part of the
reason may be that the benefits of recent economic growth have gone disproportionately
to the affluent and have yet to be felt by ordinary working
people, but whatever the reasons, the data suggest that extolling the economy
was not a particularly effective Republican message for attracting even those
Democrats and independents who thought the economy was a more important
electoral concern than Iraq.
A second major source of the pro-Democratic national tide was public
discontent with the Republican-controlled Congress. In surveys taken during
the month preceding the election, Congress’ approval ratings averaged 27 percent,
lower than Bush’s and only a few points above where they had been when
Republicans had swept the Democrats out in 1994.13 Various scandals, some
involving members’ financial relations with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff,
others regarding improper personal behavior, not only gave the Democrats
13 See http://www.pollingreport.com/CongJob.htm, accessed 6 November 2006.
FIGURE 6
Approval of George W. Bush’s Job Performance, 2001–2006, by Party Identification
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
January-01
March-01
May-01
July-01
September-01
November-01
January-02
March-02
May-02
July-02
September-02
November-02
January-03
March-03
May-03
July-03
September-03
November-03
January-04
March-04
May-04
July-04
September-04
November-04
January-05
March-05
May-05
July-05
September-05
November-05
January-06
March-06
May-06
July-06
September-06
November-06
Percent Approving
Republicans Democrats Independents
Sources: 323 CBS News/New York Times and Gallup polls.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 9
one of their main campaign themes—vote to reject the Republicans’ ‘‘culture of
corruption’’—but also gave them a chance to pick up seats that would not have
been available absent badly tainted Republican incumbents.14 The public also
took a dim view of the Congress’ legislative productivity.15 Negative views of
the Congress, the President, and the war left two-thirds of the electorate dissatisfied
with the way things were going in the United States and believing
that the country had gotten off on the wrong track.16 If the Democrats could
not achieve a national victory under these conditions, it is hard to imagine when
they ever would.
14 These include the seats formerly held by Tom Delay, Bob Ney, and Mark Foley, all of whom had
resigned under a cloud, as well as those defended by Don Sherwood, CurtWeldon, and, in the Senate,
by Conrad Burns.
15 ‘‘Public Disillusionment with Congress at Record Levels,’’ survey report, Pew Research Center
for the People and the Press, 20 April 2006, accessed at http://people-press.org/reports/display.
php3?ReportID=275, 17 November 2006.
16 See the numerous poll results on these questions, accessed at http://www.pollingreport.com/
right.htm, 6 November 2006.
FIGURE 7
Rating of the Economy, 2001–2006
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
March-01
May-01
July-01
September-01
November-01
January-02
March-02
May-02
July-02
August-02
October-02
December-02
February-03
April-03
June-03
August-03
October-03
December-03
February-04
April-04
June-04
August-04
October-04
December-04
February-05
April-05
June-05
August-05
October-05
December-05
February-06
April-06
June-06
August-06
October-06
Percent "Fairly Good" or "Very Good"
Republicans Democrats Independents
Source: Sixty-five CBS News/New York Times polls.
10 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
STRATEGIC POLITICIANS IN 2006
Favorable national conditions do not, however, automatically deliver victories
to the favored party. Elections are still fought at the local level, and the quality
of candidates and the vigor of their campaigns are crucial determinants of
outcomes. Voters rarely toss out incumbents unless they are offered a qualified
replacement; national issues need effective local sponsors to have their full
electoral impact. Thus, the effects of national political forces are mediated by
the strategic decisions of potential candidates and by the people who control
campaign resources. Unless the favored party’s leaders and activists anticipate
a helpful national tide and prepare to take advantage of it, its effects will be
muted.17
The Democrats certainly had reason to believe early on that 2006 would be
a good year for them, allowing plenty of time to mobilize candidates and
resources. Responses to the generic House vote question—asking respondents
which party’s candidate they would vote for if the election were held today,
without specifying any candidate’s name—typically gave them a wide lead well
before the election year, a good five points ahead of where they had been at
comparable periods heading into other recent elections (Figure 8). Even discounting
the fact that generic polls always tend to exaggerate the Democrats’
support, the lead was large enough by the end of 2005 to conclude that majority
status was within reach.
This atmosphere helped with recruitment of candidates and fund raising,
and Rahm Emanuel, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee, and his counterpart in the Senate, Charles Schumer, did an effective
job on both fronts. The proportion of Democratic House challengers with
experience in elective office—one measure of candidate quality—was only average
for recent decades (17 percent), but, as always, experienced candidates were
much more likely to be found in open seats and potentially competitive districts.
Emanuel’s main innovation was to encourage and support candidacies of moderate
to conservative Democrats in districts where mainstream national Democrats
would have faced poor prospects.
More important, though, was that the campaigns of a large proportion
of Democratic candidates showing any promise at all were amply financed
through some combination of contributions and independent spending by party
or outside organizations. Final campaign finance data are not yet available, but
preliminary reports show that the campaigns of at least forty-seven of the fiftyfive
Democrats pursuing Republican-held House seats who ended up with at
least 46 percent of the major-party vote were backed by more than $1 million in
contributions and party spending. Of the remaining eight, two won anyway. For
17 Gary C. Jacobson and Samuel Kernell, Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 19–34; Gary C. Jacobson, ‘‘Strategic Politicians and the Dynamics
of House Elections, 1946-86,’’ American Political Science Review 83 (September 1989): 773–793.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 11
only four or five races do the financial data suggest that party officials overlooked
a promising candidate who might have won with a more generous
infusion of cash, an impressive record, considering that the number of seats
estimated to be in play by election handicappers kept growing as the election
drew nearer.18 Republicans also invested massively to defend their vulnerable
House seats—preliminary data indicate that the losing Republican incumbents
on average outspent their Democratic challengers by more than 50 percent19—
and it is conceivable that their efforts saved some incumbents (eleven Democrats
won more than 49 percent of the major-party vote but fell short of a
majority). In general, however, the outcomes of campaigns abundantly funded
by both sides are not determined by who spends more, but by voters’ responses
to the candidates and messages the money is spent to promote.20
FIGURE 8
Generic House Vote Intention, 1999–2006 (Registered/Likely Voters)
30
35
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
January-99
April-99
July-99
October-99
January-00
April-00
July-00
September-00
December-00
April-01
July-01
September-01
December-01
April-02
July-02
September-02
December-02
April-03
July-03
September-03
December-03
March-04
June-04
September-04
December-04
March-05
June-05
September-05
December-05
March-06
June-06
September-06
Percent Democratic of Two-Party Vote
Actual vote, 2000: 49.8%
Share of seats: 49.0%
Actual vote, 2002: 47.8%
Share of seats: 47.2%
Actual vote, 2004: 48.5%
Share of seats: 46.5%
Actual vote, 2006: 53.1%
Share of Seats: 53.3%
Source: Compiled by author, largely from data reported at http://www.pollingreport.com, various dates.
18 The five were Larry Kissel (NC 8, 49.9%), VictoriaWulsin (OH 2, 49.4%), Sharon Reiner (MI 7,
48.4%), Nancy Ann Skinner (MI 9, 47.3%), and Larry Grant (ID 1, 47.2%). By Charlie Cook’s calculations,
the number of Republican seats in play (defined as toss-up or leaning Democratic) grew
from 11 in May to 42 in October; see The Cook Political Report accessed at http://www.cookpolitical.
com/races/house/default.php, 6 November 2006.
19 ‘‘House Winners Raised a Record Average of $1.1 Million,’’ press release, Campaign Finance
Institute, 8 November 2006 accessed at http://www.cfinst.org/pr/110806b.html, 27 November 2006.
20 Jacobson, Politics of Congressional Elections, 41–47.
12 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Democrats also fielded strong challenges to Republican Senators wherever
prospects looked at all promising,21 and the campaign of every Democrat (and
Republican) in any of the Senate races where the outcome was at all in doubt
was lavishly funded through a combination of contributions, party spending, and
independent spending campaigns. Preliminary data show that the amounts put
into the campaigns of competitive Democrats ranged from more than $8 million
in the low-population states of Montana and Rhode Island to more than $20
million (Missouri); their Republican opponents were at least as well funded. No
Senate candidate in even the most marginally competitive race could reasonably
complain about a shortage of campaign resources.
In short, anticipating a favorable national tide, Democratic operatives, candidates,
and contributors positioned themselves to exploit it, an essential condition
for actually realizing the anticipated gains.
CAMPAIGN STRATEGIES
The national climate of opinion gave the Democrats their main campaign
strategies: Attack Republicans for loyally supporting the President and his
misconceived war and for sharing a ‘‘culture of corruption’’ in Congress,
emphasizing the latter especially in states and districts where the incumbent’s
personal record gave the charge local resonance. Frame the choice in national
terms, urging voters to use their franchise to express their unhappiness with the
Republican regime and, most particularly, its leader. Aside from criticizing the
war, emphasize making health care more accessible, raising the minimum wage,
and protecting Social Security—issue domains in which majorities consistently
trust Democrats more than Republicans.
Republican candidates faced a more complicated set of options. One,
standard for the circumstances, was to try to distance themselves from their
party and President (for example, by criticizing aspects of the war or calling for
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation), instead emphasizing their
independence, devotion to local interests, and record of delivering valued
projects and services to constituents. The public mood, as well as their Democratic
opponents, worked against this strategy, and it was no more successful
than it had been for Democratic incumbents facing the public’s wrath in 1994.22
An alternative strategy, promoted by the Bush administration and the
President’s political advisor, Karl Rove, was to replace the war in Iraq with
terrorism and homeland security as the dominant electoral focus. The President
obviously had a huge stake in the election, considering its implications for his
21 The list of Democratic challengers in the seven tightest races includes three candidates who had
held statewide offices (governor, attorney general, auditor), two U.S. Representatives, a president of
the state senate, and a former secretary of the navy. The Democrats who retained open seats for the
party were also experienced candidates: the attorney general for Minnesota’s largest county and two
U.S. Representatives (counting Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats).
22 Jacobson, Politics of Congressional Elections, 176–182.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 13
remaining legislative agenda as well as the prospect that his administration
could spend its final two years fending off hostile congressional probes of its
decisions and actions. Thus, during the summer, the administration orchestrated
a coordinated, no-holds-barred counterattack against Democratic critics of
Bush and the Iraq War. Taking advantage of the public’s attention to events
commemorating the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Bush and his
allies sought not only to reinforce the idea that the war in Iraq and the war on
terrorism were one and the same, but also to elevate the conflict to the
equivalent of World War II and the Cold War. The President drew cautionary
parallels between Osama bin Laden’s anti-U.S. fulminations and Lenin’s What
Is To Be Done and Hitler’s Mein Kampf,23 claiming the mantle of Franklin
Roosevelt and Harry Truman as presidents who stood fast in the face of global
threats.24 In addresses delivered around the same time, Vice President Dick
Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld also variously quoted Roosevelt, took the fight
against Nazism and fascism as precedent, and, more to the political point,
charged that critics of the administration’s policies believed that ‘‘vicious
extremists can be appeased’’25 and that ‘‘retreat from Iraq would satisfy the
appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone’’26
The central message was that Islamic jihadists were as profound a threat
to the existence of the United States as the Axis powers and the Soviet Union
had once been. Democrats, by questioning the wisdom of the Iraq War or the
administration’s conduct of the fight against terrorism more generally, revealed
themselves as appeasers who were blind to the terrorist threat and, if given
control of Congress, would put the security of the United States at grave risk.
As Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee put it,
‘‘The president’s effort to keep Americans safe will grind to a halt with
Democrats in control….’’27 Later in the campaign, Bush told a Republican rally
that ‘‘however they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to
this: the terrorists win and American loses.’’28 The campaign was, in short, a
23 GeorgeW. Bush, ‘‘President Discusses the Global War on Terror,’’ transcript of speech delivered
6 September 2006, accessed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/print/20060905-4.
html, 10 November 2006.
24 George W. Bush, ‘‘President’s Address to the Nation,’’ transcript of speech delivered 9 September
2006, accessed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060911-3.html, 10November 2006.
25 Donald Rumsfeld, (address to the 88th annual American Legion national convention, Salt Lake
City, Utah, 29 August 2006), accessed at http://www.defenselink.mil/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1033,
10 November 2006.
26 Richard B. Cheney, ‘‘Vice President’s Remarks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National
Convention,’’ (speech, Veterans of ForeignWars national convention, Reno, Nevada, 28 August 2006),
accessed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060828-4.html, 10 November 2006.
27 Quoted in Dan Froomkin, ‘‘Off Message,’’ accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html, 18 September 2006.
28 George W. Bush, ‘‘Remarks by the President at Georgia Victory 2006 Rally,’’ Statesboro, GA,
30 October 2006, accessed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061030-4.html, 20 November
2006.
14 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
concerted effort to use the specter of jihadist terrorism to frighten enough
voters into voting Republican in 2006 to keep the Party in control of the House
and Senate, replicating at the congressional level Bush’s successful strategy
against John Kerry in 2004.29
The administration’s campaign included a tactical component in the form
of legislative proposals, submitted to Congress in September, that would put
terrorist suspects outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions, legalize
(unspecified) coercive methods of interrogation, authorize military tribunals to
try terrorist suspects without the usual constitutional protections (including
habeas corpus), and permit the interception of telephone and e-mail messages
between American citizens and contacts abroad without a court order. This
agenda was designed to put Democrats on the spot; any sensitivity to the human
rights or civil liberties issues raised by these proposals, indeed, any opposition
to giving the President unchecked powers to deal with anyone suspected of
links to terrorists as he saw fit, invited the charge of being soft on terrorists.
Those Democrats who balked at this extraordinary delegation of power to the
executive were attacked for being opposed to ‘‘giving President Bush the tools
he needs to protect our country’’ and unwilling to ‘‘bring justice before the eyes
of the children and widows of September 11.’’30 Democrats countered that the
abrogation of fundamental rights for persons accused of terrorism was un-
American, invited international condemnation, and was not needed to combat
and prosecute terrorists. The Republicans had succeeded in cornering them,
however, and fear of being labeled soft on terrorism or willing to ‘‘coddle’’ the
perpetrators of September 11 was enough to induce thirty-four House and twelve
Senate Democrats to support the President’s position on final passage of the bill
authorizing the tribunals and procedures for handling suspected terrorists.
If anyone doubted the terrorism agenda’s electoral motivation, Republican
leaders’ comments after passage laid them to rest. Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist: ‘‘Do [voters] want to be voting for a party that does unabashedly say, FWe’re
going to have victory in this war on terrorism,_ or a party that says, FWe’ve got to
surrender?_ House Speaker Dennis Hastert: Democrats ‘‘were so bent on protecting
criminals … they’re not allowing us to prosecute these people. The 130
most treacherous people probably in the world, and they want to…release them
out into the public eventually.’’31 (The Democrats who advocated surrender to
terrorists or releasing them from custody naturally went unnamed, as they were
wholly imaginary.)
As an attempt to change the subject and to refocus public attention from
what was happening in Iraq to the domestic terrorist threat, the administration’s
29 Jacobson, Divider, 196–197.
30 The first is a quote from John Boehner, Republican majority leader; the second is from James
Sensenbrenner, Jr., chair of the Judiciary Committee; see Charles Babington, ‘‘House Approves Bill
on Detainees,’’ The Washington Post, 28 September 2006.
31 Doyle McManus, ‘‘Detainee Bill Boosts the GOP,’’ Los Angeles Times, 30 September 2006.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 15
campaign largely failed. Although polling data suggested a small upturn in
Republican prospects in late September, whatever traction the campaign had
achieved was soon lost in damaging revelations about the conduct and consequences
of the Iraq War 32 and a revival of the scandal issue with the exposure
and resignation of a Republican congressman whose inappropriate
attentions to male House pages had been known to Republican leaders for
months if not years.33 Moreover, surveys turned up little evidence that ordinary
citizens were swayed by the administration’s rhetoric; it appears, at most, to have
simply reinforced existing (highly partisan) views. In doing so, it may nonetheless
have helped the Republican cause by reviving support among Republican voters
who had been showing signs of disillusionment with the war and thus the
President (see Figure 6). Democrats and independents were a much harder sell;
most of them had long since stopped believing what Bush and his allies were
saying about the war and its justifications.34 The greatest obstacle to the
administration’s attempt to change the subject, however, was the steady stream
of bad news coming out of Iraq; during October, American battle deaths exceeded
100 for the first time since January 2005, and sectarian violence produced
the highest Iraqi monthly civilian death toll recorded to that date.35
The Republicans’ other notable tack, taking a hard-line stance on immigration
through an enforcement-only policy and voting to build a 700-mile fence
along the Mexican border, was also ineffective in attracting voters beyond the
Party’s conservative base. It cost the Party’s candidates support among Latino
voters, the fastest growing segment of the electorate, and was not all that popular
with other groups, either.36 Tellingly, two Republican House candidates in
Arizona, one a six-term incumbent, the other seeking a Republican-held open
seat, who made sealing the border the centerpiece of their campaigns ended up
losing. Republicans also revived their traditional charges that Democrats in
power would raise taxes, overspend, and stunt economic growth, but tax and
spending issues were not high on the list of public concerns in 2006.
As the election approached, the Republicans’ last hope was to outmobilize
the Democrats, as they had in 2002 and 2004, with a carefully prepared
32A classified report from April summarizing the consensus of sixteen U.S. intelligence-gathering
agencies, leaked in late September, concluded that the terrorist threat was growing rather than
shrinking and that the Iraq War was increasing rather than diminishing the number of terrorists. See
‘‘Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate. Trends in Global Terrorism:
Implications for the United States,’’ April 2006, accessed at http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/
nation/documents/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments_092606.pdf, 29 September 2006. Shortly thereafter,
Bob Woodward published State of Denial (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), the title
declaring the book’s thesis.
33 Jackie Calmes, ‘‘Scandal May Further Alienate Republican Base,’’ The Wall Street Journal,
3 October 2006.
34 Jacobson, ‘‘Public Opinion and the War in Iraq,’’ 24–25.
35 Nancy Trejos, ‘‘UN: Iraqi Civilian Deaths at New High,’’ The Washington Post, 22 November 2004.
36 See the collection of survey data at http://www.pollingreport.com/immigration.htm, accessed
18 November 2006.
16 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
get-out-the-vote operation micro-targeting conservative Republicans and other
voters whose tastes or other characteristics supposedly opened them to Republican
appeals. The experience of the earlier elections, and Karl Rove’s confident
prediction that Republicans would retain their majorities, based, he said, on his
own internal analyses that ignored the polls,37 kept Democrats nervous until the
end, but the pro-Democratic national tide proved too strong to be contained by
any of the Republicans’ organizational countermeasures.
THE NATIONALIZED ELECTION
The Democrats’ efforts to nationalize the election and to make it a referendum
on President Bush and the Republican Congress largely succeeded. As Figure 9
shows, more than a third of the electorate said that their vote for Congress was a
vote against Bush, a noticeably larger proportion than for any of his three
predecessors at midterm, including Bill Clinton in 1994. The reversal from 2002,
when an unusually high proportion of voters said their vote would be an
expression of support for President Bush, is especially striking. The proportion
of voters who said control of Congress would be a factor in their vote was also
considerably higher than usual (Figure 10). Democrats were especially inclined
to take this view (more than 70 percent did so); they were also more enthusiastic
about voting than Republicans.38 Negative opinions of presidential performance
tend to motivate voters more strongly than positive opinions,39 and
among Democrats, strongly negative views of Bush were the norm in 2006. The
extent to which hostility to the President and the Iraq War animated ordinary
Democrats was underlined by the fate of Senator Joseph Lieberman, Al Gore’s
running mate in 2000 but a staunch Bush ally in the Iraq War, who lost the
Connecticut Democratic primary to an anti-war candidate and had to depend
on Republican votes to win reelection as an independent (he continues to
caucus with the Democrats).40
37 ‘‘Karl Rove on Why He Believes the RepublicansWill Keep the House and Senate Despite Polls
to the Contrary,’’ interview broadcast by NPR’s All Things Considered, 24 October 2006, accessed at
http://www.npr.org/about/press/061024_rove.html, 24 November 2006.
38 ‘‘Republicans Cut Democratic Lead in Campaign’s Final Days,’’ research report, Pew Research
Center for the People and Press, 6 November 2006, accessed at http://people-press.org/reports/
display.php3?ReportID=295, 27 November 2006.
39 Samuel Kernell, ‘‘Presidential Popularity and Negative Voting: An Alternative Explanation of
the Midterm Congressional Decline of the President’s Party,’’ American Political Science Review 71
(March 1977): 44–66.
40 According to the exit poll, Lieberman won the votes of 70 percent of the Republicans, 33 percent
of the Democrats, and 54 percent of the independents; only 21 percent of Republicans voted for the
Republican candidate, suggesting an extraordinarily high level of strategic voting on their part.
Connecticut exit poll results are available at http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/
states/CT/S/01/epolls.0.html, accessed 28 November 2006.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 17
VOTING BEHAVIOR IN 2006
Results of the major academic election surveys are not yet available for analysis,
but pre-election surveys and the election day exit poll provide a consistent
account of the broad shifts in voting behavior that contributed to the Democrats’
victory in 2006. As in other recent elections, partisans were very loyal to
their House candidates (Table 2). But whereas in 2002 and 2004, Republicans
were a few points more loyal than were Democrats, the opposite was true in
2006. Moreover, according to the exit polls, the partisan composition of the
electorate was slightly more favorable to the Democrats in 2006 than it had
been in 2004. However, the largest single contribution to the Democrats’ gains,
according to these data, came from independents.41 Voters classifying themselves
as independents had favored Republican candidates in 2002 and had
given the Democrats a modest edge in 2004; in 2006, they broke decisively for
41 Independents who lean toward one of the parties—and who are usually as loyal as weak
partisans—have to be treated as independents in this analysis, because these surveys do not consistently
distinguish partisan leaners from pure independents.
FIGURE 9
Is Your Vote For Congress a Vote For or Against the President?
21
21
15
22
18
15
36
23
26
17
20
31
18
19
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Reagan 1982 (1)
Reagan 1986 (2)
GHW Bush 1990 (1)
Clinton 1994 (3)
Clinton 1998 (7)
GW Bush 2002 (4)
GW Bush 2006 (10)
Percent
Against the President For the President
Note: The number of polls averaged for each year is in parentheses.
Source: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, ‘‘October 2006 Survey on Electoral
Competition: Final Topline,’’ 17–22 October 2006, accessed at http://people-press.org/reports/
questionnaires/293.pdf, 15 November 2006.
18 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
the Democrats. Calculations based on 2004 and 2006 exit poll data indicate that
nearly half the total vote swing to Democratic House candidates between these
elections was supplied by independent voters, although they comprise only
about a quarter of the electorate.
Statewide exit polls indicate that independent voters were also the key
to Democratic victories over Republican Senate incumbents in several of the
‘‘red’’ states. The distribution of partisans and the incidence of party-line voting
reported in Montana, Missouri, and Virginia suggest that the Democrat would
not have won without a clear majority of independent voters (Table 3). It is
noteworthy that Harold Ford, who won but a bare majority of the independent
vote in Tennessee, was the only Democrat in a hotly contested Senate race who
came up short. Ohio evidently would have gone to the Democrat even without
the lopsided support of independents. The same is true of Pennsylvania, but the
Democratic victory in the other ‘‘blue’’ state, Rhode Island, was a product of
the Party’s two-to-one advantage in party identifiers and their desertion of
incumbent Republican Lincoln Chafee; he won 46 percent of the Democrats’
votes in 2000 but only 15 percent in 2006. A similar, if less-pronounced partisan
advantage, ensured that a Democrat retained the only Democratic Senate seat
considered in play on election day (held by Robert Menendez in New Jersey).
FIGURE 10
Is the Issue of Which Party Controls Congress a Factor in Your Vote?
45 46 44 43
58
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
1998 (5) 2000 (2) 2002 (5) 2004 (1) 2006 (6)
Percent "Yes"
Note: The number of polls averaged for each year is in parentheses.
Source: See Figure 9.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 19
A compelling explanation for the Democrats’ lead among independents
in 2006 is provided by the data in Figure 6 showing that the distribution of independents’
opinions on Bush’s performance had grown much more similar
to that of Democrats than of Republicans. In surveys taken during the month
before the election, Bush’s average approval rating among independents of
29 percent was 50 points below his average rating among Republicans (79 percent)
and only 20 points above his rating among Democrats (9 percent). Similarly,
independents’ average level of support for the Iraq War during this
period, at 36 percent, was more than twice as far below that of Republicans
(73 percent) as it was above that of Democrats (19 percent).42 The relationship
between these opinions and voters’ preferences in 2006 is illustrated in
Figure 11. Views on Bush and the Iraq War affected the preferences of people
in all three categories but made a much larger difference for independents
than for partisans. Thus, the predominantly negative opinions on Bush and
the war among independent voters produced a decisive Democratic advantage
in this segment of the electorate.
AGGREGATE VOTING PATTERNS
Although a strong pro-Democratic national tide was running in 2006, it was
not by itself sufficient to deliver control of Congress to the Democrats. The
Democrats’ share of the total House vote nationally increased by nearly five
percentage points over 2004, and the vote swing to Democrats in districts
contested in both 2004 and 2006 averaged a little over five points. But only five
42 See Gary C. Jacobson, A Divider Not a Uniter: GeorgeW. Bush and the American People, updated
with a postscript for 2006 (New York: Pearson Longman, forthcoming, 2008).
TABLE 2
Partisan and Independent Voters in U.S. House Elections, 2002–2006 (Percentages)
Loyal Republicans Loyal Democrats Independents Voting Democratic
2002 Pre-election polls (5)a 95 94 46
2004 Pre-election polls (3) 96 94 55
2004 Exit poll 93 91 52
(37)b (37) (24)
2006 Pre-election polls (5) 94 97 61
2006 Exit poll 92 93 59
(36) (38) (26)
Sources: Pre-election polls from ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times, Gallup,
Newsweek, and Pew Research Center for the People and Press polls taken in late October and early November
of the election year; ABC and Pew polls did not ask the House vote question in 2004. Exit poll data are from the
National Election Poll exit polls; data include major-party voters only.
aNumber of polls averaged.
bPercent of respondents in partisan category in the exit polls.
20 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
of the thirty Democratic pickups would have been achieved with a five-point
increase in the Democratic vote over 2004; nineteen required swings of ten or
more points to put the Democrat above 50 percent. The actual swing in the
districts Democrats took from Republicans averaged fourteen points, exceeding
ten points in twenty-three of them. These results underline the crucial
contribution of the Democrats’ strategic deployment of campaign resources—
candidates, money, personnel—to their success in turning a favorable partisan
tide into the victories that produced their House majority. The tide by itself was
not enough; in most districts, it had to be effectively exploited by Democratic
candidates at the district level to have an impact.43 Nonetheless, a couple of lowspending,
relatively obscure Democrats did win unexpected victories, not so
much because local voters had changed their opinions of the Republican
incumbent but because so many former supporters thought it more important
this time to vote their opposition to the Republican regime and its leader.44
The Democrats’ average share of the total vote cast for senator was also up
a little more than five points over 2000, the last time the same set of seats was
contested. Their Senate majority depended on local Democratic swings larger
than the national average in two states (Ohio and Rhode Island), but their
other takeovers came in states where the Republican’s vote margin in 2000
43 Jacobson, Politics of Congressional Elections, 199–200.
44 This category would include Carol Shea-Porter, who defeated Joseph Bradley III in New
Hampshire, and David Loebsack, who defeated James Leach in Iowa.
TABLE 3
Partisan and Independent Voting in Hotly Contested Senate Elections, 2006 (Percentages)
Loyal Republicans Loyal Democrats Independents Voting Democratic
Montana 89 91 63
Burns (R) vs. Tester (D) (39)a (32) (29)
Missouri 91 92 54
Talent (R) vs. McCaskill (D) (39) (37) (25)
Ohio 86 91 65
DeWine (R) vs. Brown (D) (37) (40) (23)
Virginia 93 94 56
Allen (R) vs. Webb (D) (39) (36) (26)
Tennessee 94 93 51
Corker (R) vs. Ford, Jr. (D) (38) (34) (28)
Pennsylvania 86 93 72
Santorum (R) vs. Casey (D) (38) (43) (19)
Rhode Island 94 84 45
Chaffee (R) vs. Whitehouse (D) (18) (38) (44)
New Jersey 90 92 48
Kean, Jr. (R) vs. Menendez (D) (28) (41) (31)
Source: VNS exit polls available at http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/, accessed 10 November 2006;
data include major-party voters only.
aPercent of respondents in partisan category.
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 21
had been narrow enough to be overcome with no more than a five-point swing.
Four of the defeated Republicans had themselves entered the Senate by
defeating incumbents, underlining the basic competitiveness of these states. The
Senate results repeat the pattern evident in several other elections (notably
1980, 1982, 1986, and 1994) in which one party swept the lion’s share of the
hotly contested races.45
CONSEQUENCES
Historical parallels to the 2006 midterm congressional elections can be found
in the elections of 1950 and 1966 as well as 1994. In all three of these elections,
the economy was in decent shape but voters were unhappy with the president,
in the first two cases, in part because of increasingly unpopular wars (Korea and
Vietnam, respectively), and the president’s party suffered.46 None of these
elections, however, produced a durable change in the party balance in the
electorate, and, according to the data now available, there is little reason to
believe 2006 will be any different. The new Democratic majorities are far from
secure. Democrats did pick up nine seats in Democratic-leaning districts and
FIGURE 11
Opinions on George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and the Candidate Preference in 2006
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
80% 16% 32% 65% 9% 87% 74% 19% 29% 63% 16% 78%
Percent Preferring
the Republican
House Candidate
Approve Disapprove Right Thing Wrong Thing
Republicans Independents Democrats Republicans Independents Democrats
Bush's Job Performance Rating Judgment on Going to War in Iraq
Percent in Category :
Source: SRBI/Time Magazine Poll #2006-3970, 1–3 November 2006.
45 Jacobson, Politics of Congressional Elections, 200–204.
46 Truman’s Democrats lost a net twenty-eight House seats and five Senate seats in 1950; Johnson’s
Democrats lost forty-seven House seats and four Senate seats in 1966.
22 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
four in neutral districts (as defined for Figure 1), but eighteen were won in
Republican-leaning territory, including ten districts that had given Bush at least
55 percent of the vote in 2000 and 2004. Even with the advantages of incumbency,
retaining their House majority will be no simple task, for the Republicans’
formidable structural advantage remains securely in place.
The election did disprove one familiar canard: that partisan gerrymandering
has virtually eliminated competitive House districts. At sixty, the number of
House seats won with less than 55 percent of the major-party vote in 2006
was the highest since 1948. The election also confirmed that incumbents’
electoral safety is contingent rather than automatic; fourteen of the twenty-two
losing Republican incumbents had coasted in with more than 60 percent of the
vote in 2004.47 But it is also true that it required a powerful partisan tide to
produce such results. Competition should also be comparatively widespread and
intense in 2008, particularly if, following the usual pattern, the pro-Democratic
tide recedes and Republicans see a chance to win back the Congress.
The Democrats’ prospects for keeping their majorities in 2008 will of course
depend to a considerable extent on what these majorities do in the 110th Congress.
As in 1994, the election was far more a rejection of the ins than an
endorsement of the outs (the mythology regarding the contribution of their
‘‘Contract with America’’ to the Republican triumph in 1994 notwithstanding48).
If the election conveyed any mandate, it was for a change of direction in Iraq,
greater honesty in Congress, and, perhaps, more congressional attention to
matters affecting the lives of ordinary people, such as, for example, access to
medical care. None of these will be easy to achieve. Although most voters are
unhappy with the course of the Iraq War, most also oppose immediate withdrawal,
and congressional Democrats have not found it easy to articulate a
plausible strategy for ending American involvement without leaving behind a
bloody civil war and a vast humanitarian disaster. President Bush will continue to
have the final say in the war’s conduct, and having declared Iraq the main front in
the war on terrorism, it is difficult to imagine that he will disengage short of
something that could be portrayed as victory, for doing so would be to concede
failure on his presidency’s defining mission. Ethics reform in Congress is never
easy, and it is unlikely that Democrats will swear off the earmarking that has
come to symbolize the problem, for it has become part of the pork-barrel culture
that is encoded in the DNA of the institution.49 A Democratic Congress
may be able to boost the minimum wage, but making health care universal and
affordable or shoring up Social Security and Medicare for future retirees are far
47 Thomas Mann, Unsafe at Any Margin: Interpreting Congressional Elections (Washington DC:
American Enterprise Institute, 1980); Jacobson, Politics of Congressional Elections, 48–49.
48 Gary C. Jacobson, ‘‘The 1994 House Elections in Perspective,’’ Political Science Quarterly 111
(Summer 1996): 209.
49 Diana Evans, Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork Barrel Projects to Build Majority Coalitions in
Congress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
THE 2006 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS | 23
more difficult tasks. And any legislation that cannot win significant Republican
backing will be subject to filibuster in the Senate and Bush’s vetoes.
Republican losses occurred disproportionately among their few remaining
moderates, moving the Party’s center of gravity to the right for the 110th Congress.
The incoming Democrats are ideologically diverse and will most likely
increase the Party’s overall ideological dispersion in both chambers, underlining
the challenge leaders will face trying to unify the Party behind a common
legislative agenda. The consensus of postelection punditry that Democrats will
succeed politically only if they pursue popular centrist policies, resisting any
impulse toward a hard left turn, seems well founded. Among the mass public,
self-described conservatives outnumber liberals by a widemargin, and moderates
outnumber both. Elementary arithmetic makes it plain that Democrats will have
to retain the support of the centrist, swing voters who were essential to their
victory in 2006 if they are to have any chance of repeating it in 2008

Posted by lmurx at 4:46 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Vartkes's List




Vartkes's List


Of the million or more Armenians executed by Ottoman Turks 90 years ago, thousands had insurance from New York Life. A slip-and-fall lawyer uncovered the list of policyholders and, by forcing the company to pay their heirs, gave voice to the victims of genocide.


By Michael Bobelian

VARTKES YEGHIAYAN ENTERED THE LOS ANGELES FEDERAL COURTHOUSE more nervous than on any other day of his career. He wore the fraying navy suit that had seen him through many victories in the slip-and-fall cases that he typically handled. Sixty-five, his hair white and body plump, the lawyer Yeghiayan was 14 years into a different kind of case, a class action lawsuit against an insurance company that had failed to honor his clients' policies.

To the surprise and anger of his colleagues, Yeghiayan had turned down a substantial settlement seven months before. For reasons that don't often enter into the calculations of a legal dispute, Yeghiayan wanted more for his clients than the amount the insurer had offered. His ancestors were Armenian, and for most of his life he had heard stories of a day in April 1915 when Ottoman soldiers rounded up Armenian families to begin a slaughter that would last for eight years and claim at least a million lives.

His clients, some 2,300, were heirs of the slaughter's victims who had purchased life insurance policies that had never been redeemed. Yeghiayan wanted the insurer to pay his clients so that they would get the money they were owed, but also as an act of public recognition for a genocide that most Armenians believed had been too little noticed—and that its perpetrators had consistently denied. In Yeghiayan's view, a settlement could serve both purposes only if it were large enough to attract the world's attention. Otherwise, he would seek the recognition that his people deserved by trying the case in court.

That November morning in 2001, Yeghiayan was on his way to a last-minute settlement conference before a hearing on whether his case would be dismissed. He walked into a small room off the lawyers' lounge near United States District Judge Christina Snyder's courtroom. It was filled with lawyers from each side of the case. The judge had given them 30 minutes to see if they could reach agreement, but Yeghiayan didn't need that much time. The entire group had worked out terms that they hoped he would accept, and a lawyer slid a settlement proposal across the table.

"I'm not going to sign," Yeghiayan said.

THE SOUTHWESTERN CAUCASUS IS A REGION OF RUGGED MOUNTAINS between the Black and Caspian seas, with deep valleys that intersect like the boulevards of a city. Mount Ararat dominates the landscape and marks the center of the ancient Armenian civilization. In the spring, melting snow and ice flow down the slopes to rivers like the Aras. The ground surrounding the mountain is dark with lava and scattered with embedded stones—some beige and hard, others red and brittle, still others glossy and black.

Armenians emerged in the Caucasus during the first millennium B.C. It is not known whether they traveled there from Asia Minor, as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed, or were native to the land. In A.D. 301, King Trdat III made Armenia the first Christian nation. Mythology has it that he converted his empire from paganism in gratitude to a Christian monk, who made the king human again after he went on a killing spree and was changed into a wild boar. About a century later, another monk created the Armenian alphabet, and the combination of a written language and a state religion solidified the Armenian culture, allowing it to resist assimilation by Arabs, Tatars, and others who invaded Armenia over the following centuries.

By the 1800s, most Armenians lived under Ottoman rule. The few inhabiting the Turkish capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul), were among the empire's wealthiest merchants and intellectual elite, while the rest worked as farmers and artisans in regions to the capital's south and east. The Islamic Ottomans treated the Christian Armenians as second-class citizens, though, and Armenian demands for equality soon shattered what had long been a largely peaceful relationship between the peoples.

In 1894, the growing tension provoked Armenians to protest against their Turkish rulers, and Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the head of the Ottoman Empire, ordered mass killings of Armenians. The massacres started in the Black Sea city of Trebizond, 650 miles east of Istanbul, and quickly spread throughout the empire. The deadliest incidents occurred in Urfa, near the Syrian border to the south, where soldiers burned a cathedral with 3,000 Armenians inside. Between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians perished in the violence from 1894 to 1896. In 1908, troubled by growing disorder in the sprawling Ottoman Empire, a group of army officers called the Young Turks seized power from Abdul Hamid and promoted pan-Turkism, a nationalist ideology that advocated eliminating minorities like the Armenians. In their first year in power, the Young Turks orchestrated the execution of between 15,000 and 25,000 Armenians.

As this new wave of violence swept the empire, a middle-class merchant named Setrak Cheytanian watched with horror from his home in Kharput, a city in central Turkey and a stop on the Silk Road, an ancient system of caravan trails from China to the Mediterranean Sea. Fearing the worst for himself and wanting to provide for his wife, parents, and two children, the 35-year-old Cheytanian bought a life insurance policy from an agent of New York Life Insurance Company in July 1910. For an annual premium of 155.73 French francs, the policy obligated the company to pay Cheytanian's named beneficiaries 3,000 francs (about $580 at the time) plus dividends upon his death or, if he outlived the policy's 20-year term at his request.

Life for Cheytanian and other Armenians grew more precarious as World War I approached. Concern for the Christian minority had prompted France and Britain to support Armenian rights and, to some extent, restrain the Ottomans from greater abuses. But in 1914, Turkey entered World War I on Germany's side, cutting off Armenians from their European supporters. At the insistence of her father and her brother-in-law Cheytanian, Yegsa Marootian and her 9-year-old daughter, Alice, left Kharput for New York City to join Cheytanian's brother, who had emigrated there several years before. As they left, Cheytanian gave Yegsa his life insurance policy, figuring that if anything happened to him, it would be easier for her to collect on the policy in New York, where the insurer was headquartered.

VARTKES YEGHIAYAN WAS BORN IN 1936 to a wealthy family in Ethiopia that sheltered him excessively, even from the family's history. His mother's close ties to the nation's imperial family—her godmother was the wife of the Emperor Haile Selassie—allowed him entry to the best schools and, at age 11, he attended an American boarding school in Cyprus. There he befriended many Turkish students, and he was puzzled when some of his fellow Armenians would call the Turks "murderers." Why they should be called murderers remained a mystery for Yeghiayan through high school and into college at the University of California, Berkeley, where his father insisted that he go because, his father explained, "The future is in America."

Yeghiayan started as a pre-med major at Berkeley and switched to history, a course of study that might have explained the connection between Turks and murder, but Yeghiayan's teachers never mentioned the topic. Other Armenian students told him stories of their families' hardships in Turkey, and he pretended to know what they were talking about, offering the little he could gather from his reading about Turkey at the library. But it was not until 1961, when his father died and he attended the funeral in Ethiopia with his relatives and the aging friends of his father, that Yeghiayan began to understand his family's—and his people's—unspeakable past.

In the early days of World War I, when the Ottoman military included Armenian soldiers, an assault on Russian forces at Turkey's eastern front backfired, costing the Turks about 90,000 men. Humiliated and looking for a scapegoat, the Turkish commander blamed the treachery of Armenian soldiers for the disaster and arranged for their expulsion from the military. At about the same time, Turkey's leading Islamic cleric declared a jihad, or holy struggle, against all Christians except those living in Germany and other Turkish allies. By 1915, the Armenians were isolated, largely unarmed, and the targets of a religious death warrant. Dr. Khachig Boghosian, a prominent psychologist and leader of the Armenian community in Istanbul, described in his memoirs what happened on the night of April 23:


After supper, I went to the house of my neighbor . . . and we passed the time playing backgammon and piano. I left and came home at 1:30 a.m. and went to bed; everything was calm, both inside and outside of the house. I had just lain down and was on the verge of falling asleep, when the outside doorbell rang loudly three times. My sister Esther hurriedly went downstairs, opened the door and, after exchanging a few words, rushed upstairs and knocked on my door, telling me that the police wanted me.


Similar scenes played out across Istanbul as 250 Armenian leaders were arrested and sent to camps in central Turkey. The head of the Armenian Church pleaded with the United States for help. At the request of America's Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, asked Turkish leaders to stop their campaign against the Armenians. His appeals were ignored, and the United States, then neutral in the war it would enter two years later, could only repeat its request. The Turks began to execute Armenian leaders across the empire, hoping to preclude any organized resistance to the massacres that it planned to undertake soon. The Young Turks declared that they would make Turkey for the Turks alone.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1915, Turkish death squads systematically assembled large groups of Armenians in Erzerum, Kharput, and other Armenian enclaves and hung or shot the adult men. Among the dead in Kharput was the merchant Setrak Cheytanian. The gangs then evicted women and children and forced them to march through the desert to camps in central Turkey and, finally, to the outskirts of the Ottoman Empire in what is now Syria. Carrying almost nothing to eat or drink, the deportees fought over provisions during the marches. All were vulnerable to the kidnappings, rapes, and murders that the Turks and Kurds guarding them committed at random. Countless women were sold as concubines. Children were pried from their mothers' arms and given to Turkish families. Describing the deportations, Leslie Davis, the American consul in Kharput, wrote to his superior in Istanbul, "I do not believe it is possible for one in a hundred to survive, perhaps one in a thousand."

By 1923, the Turks had systematically executed between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians and evicted 500,000 more from a homeland that they had occupied for 2,500 years. It was one of the century's first instances of mass extermination, and it would become known by Armenians, and later by much of the world, as the Armenian genocide.

Among the genocide's survivors was Yeghiayan's father, Boghos. None of Boghos's friends who later attended his funeral could tell Yeghiayan exactly how or when, in the course of the war and the massacres, Boghos lost his parents and four sisters in Konya, a city in southwestern Turkey. Arab nomads found the nine-year-old Boghos and disguised the green-eyed, flaxen-haired boy with girl's clothing so that he could survive in their company. In 1919, according to his friends, he walked out of the desert and appeared in Aleppo, a city in northern Syria where tens of thousands of Armenian refugees were gathered after the war. Going through his father's possessions after the funeral, Yeghiayan found in Boghos's wallet a photograph showing Boghos dressed in shepherds' robes. Yeghiayan had never seen the photo before, because Boghos had apparently never shown it to any member of his family. He had shared his memories of Turkey and the massacre of Armenians only with fellow survivors.

THE WAR AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SO MANY ARMENIANS hopelessly complicated the efforts of the New York Life Insurance Company to operate in Turkey. By 1921, an attorney at the company's offices in Istanbul had authorized the payment of death benefits on 1,300 of the 3,600 policies held by Armenians, but, with no one trying to collect on the other policies, "that was the closing of the book at that point," William Werfelman Jr., a vice president at New York Life, explained recently. The insurer pulled out of Turkey later in 1921.

By then, Yegsa Marootian had been living in Staten Island, N.Y., for several years, and her family had grown to include three children in addition to her daughter Alice. Yegsa was largely cut off from news of Turkey and her Armenian relatives, but somehow she had gotten word by 1925 that her brother-in-law Cheytanian was dead. She had kept the life insurance policy that he had given her, and, with her family financially strapped, Yegsa was eager to collect the death benefit of 3,000 francs, by that time worth about $143 (and roughly $1,600 today).

As Cheytanian had instructed, she contacted the New York headquarters of New York Life about redeeming the policy, and a company agent told her that she needed a certificate of inheritance—essentially, a death certificate—to prove that Cheytanian had died. The agent recommended that she get one through the Armenian Church, as many other Armenian beneficiaries had done. There is no record of Yegsa's response to the agent or of her life over the following 30 years, but by 1956 she had moved to Los Angeles and obtained the certificate of inheritance. According to a letter dated in June of that year, New York Life instructed Yegsa to come to its offices in Pasadena, Calif., to "discuss the matter" of her brother-in-law's insurance policy.

AFTER GRADUATING FROM BERKELEY IN 1959, Yeghiayan worked at a law firm and earned a degree from Lincoln Law School of San Jose, a night school, in 1965. He soon joined California Rural Legal Assistance, a nonprofit group that represented agricultural workers and, after Ronald Reagan became governor in 1967, gained notoriety as a thorn in Reagan's side. But Yeghiayan's attention never strayed far from his Armenian heritage. The genocide stories that he had heard from his college classmates and his father's friends stayed with him, and, beginning in the late 1960s, on every April 24—the anniversary of the genocide—he tried to lead Armenians in demonstrations at the Turkish consulate in Los Angeles. "My view was the Turks . . . tried to exterminate us and failed," he explained. "On April 24, we should remind them of that failure." When he could not be in Los Angeles, Yeghiayan joined Armenians wherever he was to commemorate the loss. In 1980, after serving five years as an assistant director of international operations for the Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., Yeghiayan set up a law practice in Glendale, Calif. He helped Armenians immigrate to the United States and handled personal injury cases for the local Armenian community, which is now the largest in America.

But Yeghiayan says it was not until 1987, as he approached his 51st birthday, that he stumbled on the cause that would become his passion. While reading Henry Morgenthau's memoir, he came across a passage that recounted a conversation between the former ambassador to Turkey and his frequent interlocutor, Mehmet Talaat Pasha, the Turkish interior minister and one of the leading Young Turks. Talaat was committed to the elimination of Armenians from Turkey, and while the slaughter was occurring, he mentioned to Morgenthau the substantial business that New York Life and other American insurers had done with Armenians:


"I wish," Talaat now said, "that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats to the State. The Government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?" This was almost too much, and I lost my temper. "You will get no such list from me," I said, and I got up and left him.


Morgenthau was appalled by the Turk's greed in trying to squeeze profit from the Armenians' slaughter, and the story caught Yeghiayan's attention. What happened to these policies? Were they ever paid? If so, to whom?

He investigated, beginning with a letter to the U.S. State Department. He was referred to the National Archives, and after further conversations he received 600 pages of correspondence and other documents on microfiche. As best Yeghiayan could determine, the death benefits on thousands of unredeemed insurance policies remained unpaid.

Yeghiayan saw how he could do more for Armenians than protest in front of the Turkish consulate every April 24. By his calculation, New York Life and other insurance companies owed the heirs of genocide victims millions, maybe tens of millions, of dollars in benefits. So far, the world had largely ignored the Armenian genocide. Insurance benefits weren't reparations, but they would give the victims' heirs something of value and, more important, forcing their payment could be a way of getting people to recognize that something horrible had happened in Turkey more than 70 years before. "I knew we had to file a lawsuit," Yeghiayan said. "The question was, Do we have a client?"

THROUGH THE EARLY 1970s, few Armenians spoke publicly of the massacre, and most of the survivors were interested more in rebuilding their lives than in demanding justice. That seemed fine to much of the world. The Soviet Union, which had invaded and annexed Armenia in 1920, prohibited Armenians from discussing the genocide. The Soviets did not want to stir nationalist sentiments that might provoke unrest, and they were eager to gain Turkey as an ally. In the United States, the phrase "starving Armenians," used in the 1920s by mothers to remind their children why they should eat their vegetables, was quickly forgotten. The American lapse of memory resulted more from neglect than policy, but there was little incentive to remind people of the tragedy: The United States wanted to remain an ally of Turkey, a valuable buffer between the Soviets and the Middle East.

In Turkey itself, the government and most Turks denied that the genocide had occurred, a position established soon after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's most successful World War I general and the leader of a nationalist movement to rid the nation of minorities and foreign influence. Under Ataturk, official history held that a purely Turkish republic emerged from a war of liberation with imperialist Europe rather than, in large part, from a campaign to cleanse Turkey of its Armenian minority. By describing the nation as "a new birth," this revision of history allowed Turks to forget the past. It permitted them to avoid the shame and other "psychological crises generated by the legacy of the past," explained the historian Taner Akcam, a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota who, in the 1970s, became one of the first Turkish academics to publicly acknowledge the genocide.

After 1923, Turkish schools taught that thousands of Armenians died during World War I as an unfortunate consequence of disease, famine, and war. Other Armenians were executed or deported because they participated in insurrections, students were told, but total deaths and deportations numbered far less than a million, because not that many Armenians lived in Turkey at the time. The Turkish government reinforced these teachings by prosecuting anyone who publicly questioned them, including Akcam, who was sentenced in 1976 to 10 years in prison, though he escaped to Germany after a year.

Despite a half century of reticence, many Armenians believed it was essential to prove that the defining event of their history was not fiction and, during the 1970s, they began to speak out. In the United States they created national advocacy organizations like the Armenian Assembly, started in 1972, and in 1975 they persuaded the U.S. House of Representatives to designate April 24 as a national day of remembrance for the genocide (the Senate did not pass the resolution). Armenian terrorists struck Turkish targets in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, killing dozens of Turkish diplomats. In 1981, they took 60 hostages at the Turkish consulate in Paris. These and other efforts to gain recognition for the genocide made Turkey even more determined to block that recognition. In the United States, the Turks exploited their strategic value as a military counterweight to the Soviet Union. During a 1987 House debate, Congressman James M. Leath, a Texas Democrat, explained his opposition to legislation that characterized the events of 1915 to 1923 as genocide. "It does not have anything to do with genocide," he said. "It does not have anything to do with our feelings against what happened to the Armenians. The bottom line is that . . . the president of Turkey, the Turkish people, say if you do this, you hurt your security." The legislation failed to pass.

THERE IS NO RECORD OF WHAT HAPPENED after New York Life invited Yegsa Marootian to its Pasadena offices in 1956. She may not have gone, or she may have failed to complete some other step required to claim death benefits under the life insurance policy. In any event, the company never refused to pay her. When Yegsa died in 1982, the policy was still outstanding.

Alice Asoian, Yegsa's oldest child, inherited the policy but thought little about it until 1989, when she noticed an advertisement in a local newspaper seeking "insurance papers." The ad had been placed by Yeghiayan. It had been running for several weeks, prompting dozens of local Armenians to send him photos of deceased relatives but no insurance policies or other evidence that the relatives were insured. Yeghiayan despaired of finding a client who could get his lawsuit off the ground, but then he received a phone call from Alice. When he visited her home in Irvine, she brought out a shoebox containing the original life insurance policy of Setrak Cheytanian, all the premium payment stubs, and correspondence between Yegsa and New York Life dating back to the 1920s. Yeghiayan, it seemed, had a client.

But the reality was not so simple. In 1994, as Yeghiayan prepared the lawsuit, Alice died, and the policy's beneficiary changed again. This time, it was Alice's brother, Martin Marootian. Fortunately for Yeghiayan, Martin took to the role of plaintiff with enthusiasm.

A retired pharmacist and gentle-spoken grandfather, Marootian, 90, was proud to recount his family's saga. "This is the man in question," he said during a recent interview, pointing to his Uncle Cheytanian wearing a fez and a walrus moustache in a 1905 photograph. Of the 11 Armenians in the photo, only Marootian's mother, Yegsa, and his sister, Alice, had survived the massacre. He stressed that he appreciated the historic opportunity that the lawsuit represented for him and for other Armenians. "I wanted," he said, "to tie the genocide to our case."

YEGHIAYAN PLANNED TO MAKE THE CASE A CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT on behalf of every beneficiary of every life insurance policy purchased from New York Life by a victim of the genocide. On the basis of historical records, he estimated the class at 2,300 people. But the case presented a monumental challenge for Yeghiayan and his four-lawyer firm in Glendale. His wife, who helped run the firm, was an immigration lawyer, and Yeghiayan had worked mostly on small personal-injury cases. Alone, they could not cover the extraordinary expenses of a lawsuit that would surely take years or handle the thousands of documents that would be traded between the parties. Yeghiayan knew that he needed help, and in 2000, after he filed the case in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, he hired two Los Angeles-area lawyers with experience in class actions and an interest in seeing the Armenian genocide recognized. One was Brian Kabateck, whose grandparents had survived the genocide. The other was William Shernoff, who had worked on lawsuits seeking reparations for the Holocaust.

The team faced serious legal obstacles almost immediately. The biggest was the expiration of the statute of limitations, the legally prescribed time limit for suing over the policies. "The only way I was going to get around the statute of limitations," acknowledged Yeghiayan, "was to say . . . there is no statute of limitations on genocide." He knew it was a weak argument, and he reached out again for help, this time to California's politically powerful Armenian community. With the assistance of former California Governor George Deukmejian and state Senator Charles Poochigian, both of Armenian ancestry, Yeghiayan persuaded the California Legislature to extend the statute of limitations. With that obstacle to the lawsuit removed, lawyers on both sides reached a tentative settlement for $10 million in April 2001.

Kabateck, Shernoff, and New York Life issued press releases announcing the settlement. But when Marootian learned of the deal, he rejected it, saying the lawyers were pressuring him to give up. Yeghiayan immediately denied having agreed to settle and accused his colleagues of going behind his back. Later in April, he fired Shernoff and Kabateck.

The falling out threatened to end the lawsuit, but Yeghiayan persuaded Mark Geragos, another lawyer of Armenian descent, to join him, and Geragos talked Yeghiayan into reconciling with Shernoff and Kabateck. No sooner was the team back together, though, than it had to face the motion to dismiss that New York Life had filed before the settlement fell through. Among other points, the insurer argued that the plaintiffs could not sue in Los Angeles, because the policies specified French or English courts as the forums for any legal disputes. Yeghiayan's team responded that it would be unfair to require elderly clients like Marootian to sue abroad, but the lawyers feared that the case was on shaky ground. Almost every suit tied to compensation for long-ago injustices, from the Holocaust to American slavery to South African apartheid, had failed because of problems like a lack of evidence. Though this suit was based on insurance contracts, only Marootian had a documented policy.

On November 28, 2001, the day of the hearing on the motion to dismiss, Yeghiayan entered Judge Snyder's courtroom minutes after rejecting the settlement offer from New York Life. He placed his litigation bag on the wooden table facing the judge's bench and sat down. The Marootians were in the audience behind him, and around them sat dozens of Armenians whom Yeghiayan had invited.

As they waited for Judge Snyder to take the bench, her clerk appeared from a side door and announced an unexpected development. There would be no hearing, because the judge had reached a decision on the motion to dismiss. The clerk approached the dozen or so lawyers with copies of the judge's written ruling, and, almost simultaneously, they turned to the last page of the decision. "All I wanted to see was that last sentence," Yeghiayan recalled. It said, "NYLIC's motion to dismiss . . . is hereby DENIED."

THE VICTORY FORCED NEW YORK LIFE BACK TO THE NEGOTIATING TABLE, but the case was not over. The company still blamed the rejection of the April 2001 settlement on Yeghiayan, and it "didn't trust him after that," said Shernoff. "They would say, 'If he agrees today, how do we know he's not going to turn on us tomorrow?' "

Mediations before two retired judges and dozens of negotiating sessions failed to bring the parties closer, and in 2003, Geragos and Kabateck asked California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi to get involved. Garamendi had helped negotiate settlements between insurance companies and plaintiffs seeking reparations for the Holocaust. In the fall, he flew to New York City to meet with Seymour Sternberg, the CEO of New York Life, and after two sessions they broke the deadlock. In January 2004, New York Life agreed to pay $20 million, twice the amount offered in 2001. Yeghiayan knew that it was enough.

Dozens of documents gathered as evidence in the lawsuit—including the first list of the names, addresses, and occupations of many of the massacre's victims—were put online, providing fresh details of the slaughter. Last October, the French insurance company AXA settled a similar lawsuit (also Yeghiayan's) for $17 million, prompting Aram I, a spiritual leader of the Armenian Church outside Armenia, to praise the two settlements for "raising awareness" of the Armenian genocide. Hundreds of newspapers and television stations reported the settlements and mentioned the genocide. The Turkish Daily News, published in Ankara, was one of the newspapers that ran a story. It referred to the genocide as "the disputed events between the Ottoman Empire and its Armenian citizens at the beginning of the 20th century."


Michael Bobelian is a lawyer and freelance journalist based in New York.

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2006/feature_bobelian_marapr06.msp

Posted by lmurx at 3:58 PM 0 comments

Security Lessons from The Israeli Trenches




Security Lessons from The Israeli Trenches

By Thomas H. Henriksen

A half-century of counterterrorism

Reflecting on last summer’s Hezbollah-Israel border conflict reminds us just how long the Jewish state has had to fight for its existence against enemies that have now become our foes. American practitioners of counterinsurgency have too often studied the lessons of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War or the British in Malaya while neglecting the very relevant experiences of the Israel Defense Force over the past several decades in combating terrorism and insurgency.1 Located in the heart of the Middle East, Israel’s combat theater much more closely resembles America’s challenges in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa in terms of culture, history, and political/religious persuasion than that of communist-inspired guerrillas in Asia several decades ago.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has faced terrorism, insurgencies, and attacks from sub-state actors operating with non-Western goals and values, along with conventional wars and existential threats from aspiring nuclear nations such as Iraq and Iran. Israel’s versatility and adaptability in successfully combating threats not only has defended the survival of the embattled nation but also has made it an intriguing case study. As such, the Israel Defense Force’s military actions have been — and are — a laboratory for methods, procedures, tactics, and techniques for the United States, which now faces the same Islamist adversaries across the planet.

These long- distance Israeli strikes should have served as a model for what would be required of the United States.

Years before the United States launched its retaliatory airstrikes on Qaddafi’s Libya, al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, or the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, Israel had staged commando raids and counterstrikes against terrorist networks and sovereign states that facilitated their assaults. It conducted a contemporary version of the international preemptive strike when its Air Force famously destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 after a failed Iranian air force effort to accomplish the same goal the previous year. Although Operation Babylon initially elicited international opprobrium, it was later judged beneficial to halting Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. In 1985, the iaf mounted another less well-known long-distance airstrike necessitating midair refueling against the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters south of Tunis. This attack eliminated several key plo figures.

These long-distance Israeli strikes should have served as a model for what would be required of the United States. The extended-range hostage rescue by the Israeli Defense Force at Entebbe airport in July 1976 preceded a similar but unsuccessful American foray into Iran just four years later. In the Israeli case, terrorists hijacked an Air France commercial jet bound for Paris from Tel Aviv, after a stopover in Athens, on June 27, 1976, and rerouted it to Uganda. Upon reaching Entebbe, the four hijackers — two from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two from West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang — enjoyed the collaboration of Ugandan President Idi Amin.

Provided intelligence from the idf’s a’man (the Hebrew acronym for Agaf Mode’In), its intelligence branch, the Sayeret Mat’kal (the General Staff’s own reconnaissance commando unit) mobilized, rehearsed its plans, flew 2,500 miles, and struck at the Entebbe airport, rescuing more than 100 passengers and crew with a minimum loss of life.2

But Israel’s dramatic rescue did not serve as a model for the United States. In April 1980, Washington launched its own deep-penetration raid to rescue 52 American hostages who had been seized in the U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran five months earlier. The spearpoint of the effort called for a mix of Delta Force, Green Berets, and U.S. Army Rangers. Despite lengthy preparations, the 600-mile flight ended in disaster at its Desert One rendezvous when three of the Sea Stallion helicopters mechanically broke down and a fourth was destroyed in an accidental crash at the site. The costs also included eight U.S. lives, captured documents revealing the names of Iranians willing to help the rescue team, and an American humiliation.

To be sure, not all Israeli operations have ended so happily or mythically as the Entebbe venture. Palestinian groups have ambushed idf patrols, rained rockets down on Israeli civilians, and killed bus riders or café-goers with suicide bombs with regularity. But in its grinding counterinsurgency operations and its counterterrorist sweeps, Israel’s missions could furnish abundant lessons and even warnings for American strategists willing to observe and profit from them.

Israeli operations

A bit of historical reflection on Israeli experiences is instructive. Not long after its Independence War, the new country underwent the first of the terrorist attacks by irregular fighters that endure to this day. These intruders came from across Israel’s borders. From guerrilla training camps in the Sinai Desert or the Gaza Strip, Egyptian intelligence officers trained Palestinians whom they recruited from refugee camps. Starting in 1964 with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, terrorist infiltrations also picked up from Jordan. The attacks soon caused hundreds of Israeli deaths.

At first, idf units engaged Palestinian infiltrators and even Jordanian troops in head-on firefights. Later, Israel employed defensive measures, such as clearing vegetation that concealed terrorist movements, implanting mines, and erecting electronic fences monitored by closed-circuit tv cameras. The Israelis also inserted Arabic-speaking intelligence and undercover operatives into the Palestinian population to expose and break up terrorist cells.

The combination of active and passive measures complicated the plo intrusions, though it did not completely halt them. But more than enough interceptions took place that a genuine people’s war never took root among the occupied Palestinians living in the West Bank. Therefore, though young men, and sometimes women, in the West Bank towns stoned Israeli security forces, as in the first intifada, they did not pose the same danger as those launching rockets or ground attacks from Lebanon or Gaza. This noteworthy measure of more or less closing a porous border to the flow of men and arms necessary to sustain an insurgent uprising warrants careful study by other military forces facing a similar challenge.

Lessons also can be gleaned from Israeli counterterrorist operations in the Gaza Strip. Here, squads of soldiers functioned more as policemen and detectives than as combat infantrymen. Formally under Egyptian control, Gaza, along with the West Bank, fell to Israel during the 1967 war. Israel ruled directly but strove to permit Gazans to live normal lives, engage in commerce, work within Israel, and receive public services. Although they resented Israeli rule, Gazans experienced economic improvements in their daily lives, something that the anti-Israel guerrillas determined to disrupt in a preview of post-Saddam Iraq.

Among this population operated some 800 terrorists within Yasir Arafat’s plo and George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp), which funneled in money, arms, and trained cadres from Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria through Egypt. The plo and pflp established underground cells, recruited young men, staged attacks on the idf, killed suspected Israeli collaborators, and generally destabilized Gazan society through torture, murder, and intimidation. As is typical in most guerrilla wars, violence hit the civilian population hardest in order to block cooperation between it and the government. Operating in the teeming refugee camps or thick orange groves, the plo and pflp enjoyed classic advantages of elusive guerrillas in cover and evasion from easy detection by Israeli counterinsurgency forces.

In the teeming refugee camps and thick orange groves, the PLO and PFLP eluded detection by the Israelis.

In 1971, Major General Ariel Sharon, commander of Israel’s southern zone, turned his attention to Gaza’s mushrooming insurgency. General Sharon hit upon a unique method of subdividing Gaza and crippling movement and communication among terrorist units: He assigned squads of elite soldiers to each zone, in which they were to learn intimately the paths, orchards, houses, and other features as well as the routine comings and goings of the inhabitants. Anything out of the ordinary aroused their interest and possibly their deadly response. Dressing soldiers as Arabs, planting undercover squads, turning captured terrorists into agents, the idf generated intelligence that led to dead or captured guerrillas.3

Incessant cross-border mayhem necessitated aggressive Israeli intelligence-gathering. Paid Arab informants, while sometimes useful, constituted only one type of intelligence and required time and effort to verify validity. The Israelis decided on using special military units not just to execute deterrence raids based on intelligence gained from other sources but also to initiate operations to obtain intelligence. They operated on the principle that he who waits in counterterrorism is lost. Thus, in the mid-1950s, Israeli authorities lifted a page from one particular World War ii-era platoon of the pal’mach (units sanctioned by the British to wage guerrilla war against German forces): the Arab Platoon. Made up of Middle Eastern Jews who could speak and pass as Arabs, the Platoon insinuated agents into Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria to conduct irregular warfare and to gather intelligence. Disbanded by the British near the end of the war, the Arab Platoon concept lay dormant until the 1950s when Israeli special forces resurrected units and undercover agents, which later functioned within the hyper-tense environments of the West Bank and Gaza territories. Unique to Israeli forces among Western armies, the idf deliberately conducted military actions to flush out intelligence along with their retaliatory and deterrence ends.

Unlike the modus operandi of pre-9/11 U.S. Special Operations Forces, which had an “intel-drives-ops” approach, the Israelis utilized a cyclical posture of operations feeding intelligence feeding more operations. Intelligence-seeking operations are now more frequent in the American special-ops community, but they are still not a staple of military actions. America’s forces often lack enough “actionable intelligence” in Iraq. The dearth of Arabic language skills, reliable human intelligence (humint) from trustworthy agents, and the symbiotic integration of collection with analysis and operations keeps us far behind needs. Many Israeli company-sized regular army units include an Arabic-speaking interrogator to access information quickly so as to preempt terrorist attacks. Civilian and military officials frequently make a point of emphasizing the centrality of humint to Israel’s defense.4

In self-defense, Israel also reintroduced into contemporary usage the technique of targeted killings, although its governments have often disclaimed responsibility for specific attacks on terrorists and provided no official statistics on the number of deaths.5 The practice of targeted killings has ebbed and flowed with the intensity of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The methods involved have also varied with the circumstances and include booby-trapped packages, helicopter gunships, f–16 fighters, car bombs, and commando operations. Helicopter fire, for instance, eliminated Sayyed Abbas Musawi, the Hezbollah secretary general, in 1992. One ingenious method saw the use of a booby-trapped cell phone in January 1996 that exploded to kill Hamas member Yahya Ayyash, known among Palestinians as “the engineer” for his bomb-making expertise. One authority on Israeli responses to terrorism credited the assassinations of two key Egyptians in the 1950s with the suspension of Egypt-based fedayeen raids for ten years, thereby demonstrating their early effectiveness against cross-border assaults.6 Possibly the best-known counterattacks took place against perpetrators of the slaughter of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In a series of preventive strikes to block further massacres, Mossad agents undertook 13 killings against the Black September movement, an amorphous branch of Fatah, which is the largest plo organization.7

Israeli authorities stepped up targeted killings in response to the number of attacks on the country’s civilian population with the outbreak of the second intifada in fall 2000 after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations. Palestinian terrorists intensified their suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. The Palestinians’ increased use of suicide bombers also changed the calculus of the uprising. Hence, the second intifada witnessed a drastic change in the ratio of Jews killed to Palestinians, reaching 1 to 3, whereas in the first intifada it had been 1 to 25.8

The frequency and mode of Israeli counterattack also changed substantially during the second intifada. The Israelis eliminated many mid-level facilitators of Palestinian terrorist organizations. In 2001, more than 20 were reported killed by snipers or helicopter gunships in what the Israeli government termed, in its Hebrew phrasing, “targeted thwarting.” The majority of those eliminated have been second-level terrorists, except for Mustafa Zibri, the pflp secretary general, and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the main leader of Hamas, who ordered most of the suicide bombings that killed over 1,000 Israelis during the second intifada.

The counteroffensive did reduce the organizing and execution of terrorist bombings on Israeli civilians. Given the near impossibility of defending countless terrorist targets in streets, restaurants, airports, bus stations, and other public sites, preemption of attacks is the only reasonable deterrent measure.9 The Israeli government frequently notified the Palestinian Authority of those on its list for terrorist activities. If the pa failed to arrest the terrorist organizers, or, as often happened, alerted them instead, then the idf put them in its gunsights.10

U.S. targeted killing operations

America’s use of targeted killings has lagged behind that of the Israelis despite many provocations. There are two broad explanations for America’s hesitancy to act. First, despite a spate of terrorist attacks on American officials, citizens, and military personnel stretching back over three decades, the United States argued it could not strike back due to an absence of actionable intelligence on those responsible. Second, in the past the U.S. remained wedded to conventional diplomacy and security arrangements rather than utilizing unconventional means to combat terrorism. Even after Hezbollah murderers drove a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 American troops, the Reagan administration never acted on a planned bombing mission against one of the group’s training camps in Lebanon. Some in the administration worried about the cut-and-run approach of withdrawing U.S. forces months later. Secretary of State George Shultz prophetically called for action beyond “passive defense” to include “preemption and retaliation” in a speech at the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan in October 1984.11 That advice helped precipitate a limited air attack by Ronald Reagan against Libya two years later.

The first successful, acknowledged application of post-9/11 targeted killing tactics was in Yemen, not Iraq.

After the Qaddafi near-miss, the United States made a second attempt at a targeted killing in 1998 against Osama bin Laden for his role in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed 12 Americans and hundreds of Africans. Acting on intelligence placing bin Laden and his inner circle at a camp near the city of Khost on August 20, U.S. naval vessels in the Arabian Sea launched 79 Tomahawk missiles that slammed into both the Afghan terrorist installations and the al-Shifa plant near Khartoum. Operation Infinite Reach killed an estimated 20 to 30 people in the training camps and demolished the Sudanese chemical plant, which was linked to al Qaeda. But bin Laden and his top lieutenants escaped the strike, having perhaps been tipped off by Pakistani intelligence.

The first successful, acknowledged application of post-9/11 targeted killing tactics turned out to be in Yemen, not Iraq. The cia fired a lethal missile and killed an alleged associate of bin Laden and five suspected al Qaeda operatives in the first days of November 2002. An unmanned Predator drone unloaded its deadly five-foot-long Hellfire rocket straight into a vehicle carrying Qaed Salem Sinan al-Harithi, a suspected al Qaeda leader and an accessory in the U.S.S. Cole bombing, as he and his driving companions drove 100 miles east of Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. This time Washington justified the threshold-crossing assassinations because the traveling party was considered a military target — combatants — under international law.

Other targeted killings followed. Nineteen months later in the tribal agency of Pakistan’s South Waziristan, another al Qaeda-linked leader, Nek Mohammad, met a similar fate by a laser-guided Hellfire from a pilotless Predator. In a strike on January 13, 2006, it was reported, cia agents fired missiles from a Predator on a mud-brick compound in Damadola, Pakistan, targeting al Qaeda facilitators. The airstrike reportedly killed Abu Khabab al-Masri (Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar), who had trained al Qaeda fighters in chemical and biological explosives, and Abu Ubayda al-Misri, who had headed insurgent operations in the southern Afghanistan province of Kunar, among others. An even more spectacular application of taking down a jihadi terrorist came with the death of the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a safe house north of Baghdad on June 8, 2006, when two f–16 jets dropped 500-pound precision bombs.

Despite the apparent adoption of Israeli defense tactics, the United States has resorted only to missile strikes or aerial bombardments in its targeted killings. And these have taken place far beyond U.S. borders. It has not succeeded — at least publicly — in commando raids with the specific mission of shooting to death a known terrorist residing within a country that enjoys de jure peace with the United States. Israel, on the other hand, has undertaken several such operations. Among the most notable was a special operations removal of Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), a Yasir Arafat loyalist and deputy plo commander, who oversaw numerous terrorist assaults with many victims. Operating from Tunisia, Abu Jihad made for an elusive target. An elaborately planned assassination operation involving the Mossad, naval special forces, and the iaf was carried out in 1988 by Sayeret Mat’Kal, which infiltrated a posh suburb of Tunis.

The Clinton administration discussed at length whether Special Operations Forces should be sent either to try to capture or to kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, but nothing came of the deliberations, hence possibly losing an opportunity to remove the terrorist mastermind before the 9/11 attacks. The Clinton White House desired to escape the blame if a subsequent investigation construed an authorizing memo as a shoot-to-kill order from the president.12 The Israeli elite secret units proved far bolder in their raids because, in part, they enjoyed the backing of their political leaders.

Lebanon: Invasion, Counterinsurgency, Withdrawal

Just as anti-israel terrorism anticipated attacks against Americans, so also did Israel’s nearly two-decade battle with the intractable insurgency in Lebanon eerily presage U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather than fixating on the lessons of the Vietnam War, American students of war would have benefited from looking at Israel’s incursions into Lebanon during the 1980s and 1990s. They might also have gained insights and warnings of unanticipated resistance in the post-invasion phase following the “shock and awe” offensive in the Iraq War. An ounce of anticipation would have gone a long way toward adequate preparation for America’s largest counterinsurgency enterprise since the Vietnam War.

The Israelis helped Lebanese civilians cross over into Israel for sanctuary, food, work, and medical treatment.

By the late 1970s, southern Lebanon had erupted as the primary Arab-Israeli battlefield. The plo and pflp had established bases there after being forcibly expelled from Jordan. Before actually occupying southern Lebanon, Israel made repeated armed forays into the adjoining borderlands as retribution for and deterrence against Palestinian assaults. Another part of the Israeli strategy embraced the so-called Good Fence policy that provided security while enabling Lebanese civilians to cross over into Israel for sanctuary, food, employment, and medical treatment. As such, it represented a quasi-“hearts and minds” campaign to win over anti-plo elements and to stabilize the southern reaches of Lebanon. This objective coalesced in a major nonmilitary effort to bolster a population friendly to Israel. Despite the efforts of the idf and its local Christian-Shiite allies, the plo persisted in firing Katyusha rockets, lobbing mortar rounds, and launching terrorist attacks from Lebanese soil.

These deadly assaults made Lebanon a virtual national obsession among Israelis and led to a large-scale conventional invasion of the coastal country on June 6, 1982, in Operation Peace for Galilee. Six and a half Israeli army divisions pushed deep into Lebanon, seizing more than a third of the country (almost to the Beirut-Damascus Highway that bisects the nation) by the time the first cease-fire went into effect. The conventional phase of this blitzkrieg intervention largely succeeded in sweeping most plo guerrillas back from the southern border.

The Lebanon incursion attained one of Israel’s goals at the end of August, when the plo agreed to evacuate Beirut under a U.S.-brokered agreement to spare the seaside capital from further destruction. Nearly 15,000 plo fighters and their dependents departed for Tunisia, and others went to Syria. In time, some plo fighters drifted back to operate in southern Lebanon, however. But the installation of a friendly government, the other main invasion goal, eluded Israel. The resulting instability led Israel to reevaluate its earlier plans for a short-duration occupation of Lebanon and to plan instead for a more lengthy stay so as to protect its northern border. This decision and Israel’s conduct of the resulting Shiite conflict, in the words of one counterinsurgency expert, became “one of the most disastrous chapters in Israeli military history.”13

The invasion and subsequent occupation caused a major political realignment. Whereas the southern Shiite population had originally looked to Israel for assistance against the Sunni-dominated plo, in the 1980s, this community turned against the foreign occupiers. From this resistance emerged Hezbollah (the “Party of God”). The Iran-Syria alliance formed during the 1980s Iraq-Iran War facilitated Tehran’s support of Hezbollah as Damascus became a conduit for Iranian arms, funds, and instructors to reach its co-religionists in Lebanon. The guerrilla warfare and terrorism that soon greeted the idf in Lebanon foretold a pattern that U.S. and coalition forces would encounter in Iraq. A long porous border with a hostile Syria also foretold what would befall U.S. forces in Iraq after the 2003 invasion when the American-led coalition faced an adversarial Iran and Syria in post-Hussein Iraq.

The guerrilla warfare and terrorism the IDF braved in Lebanon foretold a pattern U.S. forces would face in Iraq.

Suicide bombings, later the bane of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, loomed large early on in the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. In November 1982, a Hezbollah suicide bomber struck an idf headquarters building in Tyre, killing 75 Israeli soldiers. Almost exactly a year later, another Shiite suicide bomber repeated the feat, killing 28 Israeli security officials at the idf/Shin Bet headquarters near Tyre. Between the two attacks, the U.S. embassy in West Beirut was bombed. Even more devastatingly, the American military felt firsthand a Shiite suicide attack when a truck bomber detonated a massive explosion against the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. These attacks should have served as a red flag to the top civilian war planners in the Pentagon ahead of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Over the 18-year occupation, the idf experienced scores of suicide bombings that killed and maimed many of its soldiers as the insurgency spread. Adoption of this tactic by Hezbollah and its military wing, Islamic Resistance, was facilitated by the presence of a 1,500-strong contingent of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who used it against Iraqi troops during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War. The protracted conflict and the political failure to secure a peace settlement with a friendly government in Beirut led the idf first to a pullout from central Lebanon in late 1982 and then to another pullback in 1985 to a narrow belt of six to ten miles along the Israeli frontier. The smaller area yielded no security for the idf, which continued to suffer roadside bombings and suicide attacks by Hezbollah insurgents taking shelter among the civilian villagers, thus reducing the idf’s advantage in firepower. The idf struck back with helicopter-fired missiles and daring special forces raids to kill or capture guerrilla leaders, but though they were effective they were not on a decisive scale.

After nearly two decades on Lebanese soil, Jerusalem yanked the last of its IDF units out in a disorderly withdrawal in 2000.

The ambushing of thin-skinned Israeli vehicles in southern Lebanon also heralded later trouble for U.S. convoys and patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American-built m113 armored personnel carrier was particularly vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades and roadway blasts. Nearly two decades after Lebanon, U.S. Army and Marine infantrymen incurred heavy casualties while riding in unarmored Humvees on roadways around Baghdad, Ramadi, and Fallujah until the vehicles were “up-armored” to afford a modicum of protection from smaller explosions.

Israeli popular opinion, like that of other Western societies in similar wars, gradually turned against the protracted Lebanese intervention with its trickle of casualties, well-publicized charges of mistakes resulting in the deaths of innocents, and mounting cost. While Israeli soldiers sustained fewer casualties than their Shiite opponents, the deaths of idf troops had a corrosive political impact in Israeli society. The Lebanon conflict also drained defense resources and demoralized some idf units. Although a series of Israeli governments wanted a settlement with Syria before departing, they were unable to reach accords with Damascus. Finally, after nearly two decades on Lebanese soil, Jerusalem yanked the last of its idf units out in a disorderly withdrawal in 2000. A decade and a half before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, one American analyst perceptively wrote about the idf’s encounter with Hezbollah, saying the “vicious circle of resistance and reaction provides a warning to other states that may become involved in especially sensitive occupations.”14

Although Israel could not impose its political will on Lebanon through invasion and occupation, it did emerge from the quagmire with its northern border initially less violated than it had been before the 1982 invasion. Cross-border attacks were not nearly as frequent as they had been in the pre-invasion period. The reason is that Hezbollah was biding its time to arm and train its forces. Before Hezbollah crossed over the Israeli border in 2006 to capture two idf soldiers and thereby spark the July 2006 war, it had already become a virtual “state within a state” in southern Lebanon. It elected 14 representatives to the 128-seat Lebanese parliament, assumed two Cabinet posts, ran schools and hospitals, and secretly amassed arms and some 14,000 rockets to rain down on Israel with the concurrence of its Iranian patron.

Urban warfare and counterterrorism

Before this past summer’s rocket shower — in fact, a year before Washington unleashed Operation Iraqi Freedom — the idf waged successful counterterrorist operations in the West Bank, undertaking large-scale urban combat operations in April 2002 in several cities, including Jenin and Nablus, as part of its Operation Defensive Shield. As specific case studies, Jenin and Nablus provide useable lessons. The fighting in Nablus’s Kasbah and in Jenin’s Palestinian refugee camp displayed unique features and constituted the biggest military engagements in the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War.

Jenin’s Palestinian refugee camp was the second largest in the West Bank. As a consequence of the Oslo Accords, the Jenin camp had come under the Palestinian Authority, which provided civil and security administration in 1995. Cadres from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Hamas, and other terrorist groupings entered the camps and soon orchestrated some 100 suicide bombings during the second intifada. The Israeli government decided to deploy the idf to disrupt the terrorist infrastructure.

In order to minimize civilian casualties in the maze of houses and buildings that made up the crowded refugee center, the idf opted not to use fix-wing aircraft in airstrikes against bands of Palestinian insurgents. The Israelis also worried about giving the “Palestinians the public relations coup of mass civilian casualties” if aircraft bombing formed part of the operation.15

Without an iaf air attack, the insurgent defenders enjoyed two advantages: First, they were spared a devastating aerial bombardment; and second, they knew the intricacies of their urban environment, which would remain largely intact in the absence of Israeli bombing. Flushing out the Palestinian fighters meant going in after them in close quarters. The Palestinians prepared for the idf offensive by laying mines in the roads and booby traps inside buildings. The no-bombs decision also prolonged the siege from an estimated 72 hours to 12 days and increased idf casualties as Israeli troops fought painstakingly, house-by-house, through the 13,000-person camp.

After initial setbacks, the idf threw in giant Caterpillar bulldozers that cleared routes for armored vehicles, pushed aside booby traps, opened fields of fire for advancing idf forces, and demolished houses suspected of harboring terrorists. The Caterpillar d–9, weighing fifty tons and rising twenty feet high, proved particularly effective in safely detonating explosive devices hidden within buildings. Although charges of widespread Israeli massacres turned out to be bogus after United Nations and Amnesty International investigations, the use of the armor-protected bulldozers became a lightning rod for international criticism of idf tactics. As a consequence, the U.S. military ruled out deploying bulldozers during its November 2004 attack on Fallujah. This decision demonstrated that by this late date some U.S. forces were now paying selective attention to Israeli operations. In the course of the Fallujah assault, U.S. forces resorted to artillery attacks and heavy airstrikes on militant positions, leveling whole city blocks. Later, this bombing-induced tabula rasa strategy came in for recriminations and reevaluation as U.S. forces embraced more discriminating approaches.

Inside-out penetration spared Israeli lives and forced the insurgents out into the streets and open areas of Nablus.

Fighting in Nablus also witnessed the novel use of a familiar tactic. Again, to minimize its casualties inside the teeming city, the idf avoided undue exposure in streets, alleys, or courtyards during its infestation by blasting through walls to move horizontally and exploding holes in floors or ceilings to pass vertically within structures. Rather than conforming to old-style frontal assault from block-to-block takeovers, the elite Israeli Paratroops Brigade penetrated the Kasbah district where some 1,000 insurgents awaited them behind elaborate barricades, improvised explosives, and mines buried in streets and alleys. Better prepared than the idf reservists who fought in Jenin, the paratroopers waged a cagey fight in the sprawling labyrinth. Undoubtedly, the inside-out penetration spared Israeli lives and forced the insurgents out into the streets and open areas, where they faced the idf’s greater firepower. Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi wrote in his battle plan that the defenders faced Israeli troops “swarming simultaneously from every direction.” The idf practice of “walking through walls” rested on extensive research and training. One authority described the method as movement “within the city across hundred-meter-long ‘over-ground-tunnels’ carved through a dense and contiguous urban fabric.”16

The idf did not invent the technique of breaching walls, which has been employed since at least World War ii (and before; sappers have been demolishing defenses since the invention of gunpowder), but it did systematize and employ it on a large scale. Exterior damage was less in Nablus than in the Jenin- or Fallujah-style destruction, and structures were still habitable, although many had holes punched through the walls.

Operation Defensive Shield did not totally eliminate suicide bombs. But the idf reasserted control over the West Bank, which inhibited Palestinian militants from conducting an effective terror campaign. Along with border and civilian police and intelligence agents, it hampered the terrorist underground, using routine and impromptu checkpoints to intercept most suicide bombers bound for Israeli targets.

The sheer volume of idf operations, numbering as many as 700 annually and mounted by squad-sized units, required downward delegation of planning, execution, command, and control. As General Yossi Heymann commented, the antiterrorist effort concentrated on keeping the terrorists on the run and scared.17 The operation tempo dictated “short cycles” between decision makers and the actual operators of countermeasures against terrorism.18 Because of the possibility of unforeseen and adverse circumstances, special forces must anticipate and practice contingency plans. One former idf officer depicted this as the “jazz band” model: Musicians know well the main tune before they improvise on it from operation to operation.19 In Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, U.S. forces now also engage in a surge of search, arrest, and detain operations to throw the insurgents off balance.

Future glimpses

A review of israel’s long conflict with terrorism should serve to remind us that what first happens to the Jewish state often later afflicts the United States. Because Israel’s past has more than once served as a harbinger of our own history, this last summer’s Hezbollah-Israeli fighting should alert us to what we must anticipate. July and August witnessed volleys of short-range unguided missiles, anti-tank weapons used with deadly effect against armored vehicles, and well-trained and disciplined guerrillas indoctrinated, equipped, and resupplied by a militantly nationalistic and nuclear-arming Iran with vaulting ambitions to dominate the Persian Gulf, outflank the Arabs, and head the pan-Muslim world. Given that the Middle East’s past is often prologue, the United States should anticipate a repetition of Hezbollah tactics elsewhere.

As they contemplate reductions of U.S. ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, American strategists must envision the next phase in the “Global War on Terror.” In anticipating what methods and operations might become useful, the U.S. military establishment would do well to scrutinize the operations and tactics employed by their counterparts in the idf, as terrorist techniques and adaptations have often been tried out first against Israel.

In the next phase of the anti-terrorist struggle, it seems improbable that in the near term the United States will replicate the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom and America’s subsequent nation-building endeavors proved enormously expensive in blood and treasure. Over 3,000 U.S. troops have so far died in the Iraq conflict, and 22,000 have been wounded, many of them severely. In excess of $350 billion has been expended in direct military and rebuilding efforts. Over 150,000 Iraqi fatalities have resulted from the U.S.-led intervention and sectarian killings, although these casualty figures pale in comparison with Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, especially among the Kurdish and Shiite populations. Moreover, the costs of the Iraq War and the initial international furor have restricted American military options against threats from Iran and North Korea. These factors make it unlikely that the United States will soon again embark on another Iraq-type campaign. Yet the gwot shows no sign of winding down. Indeed, the rash of terrorist incidents since 9/11 in Bali, Turkey, Morocco, Israel, Madrid, London, and Mumbai indicate that America’s “Long War” is far from finished. Meanwhile, fragile states such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan, among others, remain at risk of being turned into the next Taliban haven by Islamic extremists.

The Israeli approach to combating terrorism over the long haul affords an example of a counterterrorism strategy. Given Israel’s limited resources and strategic defensive crouch, it has relied over the years on raids, sometimes fairly long-distance strikes, as prevention, preemption, deterrence, and punishment for terrorism perpetrated on its territory or against its citizens abroad. While pursuing diplomacy and nonlethal measures, the United States might find that it also must dispatch commando raids, capture terrorists for intelligence, assassinate diabolical masterminds, and target insurgent strongholds with airpower, missiles, or Special Operations Forces from bases around the globe rather than undertaking enormous pacification programs and nation-building endeavors in inhospitable lands. Military offensive operations must not be surrendered; they must be applied so as to marshal our resources for a protracted conflict.
1 See, for example, one of the most recent in this genre, John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

2 Yeshayahu Ben-Porat, Eitan Haber, and Zeev Schiff, Entebbe Rescue (Delacorte Press, 1977), 321–36.

3 Ariel Sharon, Warrior (Simon and Schuster, 1989), 251–62. .

4 In addition to active and retired military officials, Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, underlined the importance of reliable intelligence. Interview, Israel (March 19, 2006).

5 For a brief but relatively comprehensive review of Israeli targeted killings, see Steven R. David, “Fatal Choices: Israel’s Policy of Targeted Killing,” in Efraim Inbar, ed., Democracies and Small Wars (Frank Cass, 2003), 138–58.

6 Samuel M. Katz, Soldier Spies: Israeli Military Intelligence (Presidio Press, 1992), 128.

7 For a recent and authoritative account, see Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response (Random House, 2005).

8 David, “Fatal Choices,” 141.

9 For a penetrating analysis of the dilemmas posed by targeted killings, see Boaz Ganor, The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: A Guide for Decision Makers (Transaction, 2005), 128–40.

10 Samantha M. Shapiro, “Announced Assassinations,” New York Times Magazine (December 9, 2001).

11 George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 648.

12 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2004), 372–96.

13 W. Andrew Terrill, “Low Intensity Conflict in Southern Lebanon: Lessons and Dynamics of the Israeli-Shi’ite War,” Conflict Quarterly 7:3 (Summer 1987).

14 Terrill, “Low Intensity Conflict in Southern Lebanon.” .

15 Matt Reese, “The Battle of Jenin,” Time (May 13, 2002). .

16 Eyal Weizman, “Lethal Theory,” Roundtable: Research Architecture (2006).

17 Interview with General Yossi Heymann, Israel (March 21, 2006).

18 Interview with Golan Benavi, Israel (March 23, 2006).

19 Interviews with Col. (Res.) Loir Lotan and Hegai Peleg, Israel (March 23, 2006).

Thomas H. Henriksen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His current research focuses on American foreign policy in the post-cold war world, international political affairs, and national defense. He specializes in the study of U.S. diplomatic and military courses of action toward terrorist havens, such as Afghanistan, and the so-called rogue states, including North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. He also concentrates on armed and covert interventions abroad.

Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Phone: 650–723–1754

Posted by lmurx at 3:12 PM 0 comments

Growing Old the Hard Way: China, Russia, India

Growing Old the Hard Way: China, Russia, India

By Nicholas Eberstadt

Living longer but poorer

Over the past decade and a half, the phenomenon of population aging in the “traditional” or already affluent oecd societies has become a topic of sustained policy analysis and concern.1 The reasons for this growing attention — and apprehension — are clear enough.

By such metrics as median age or proportion of total population above the age of 65, virtually every developed society today is more elderly than practically any human society ever surveyed before the year 1950 — and every single currently developed society is slated to experience considerable further population aging in the decades immediately ahead. In all of the affluent oecd societies, the proportion of what is customarily called the “retirement age population” (65 years of age or older) will steadily swell, with the most rapid expansion occurring among those aged 80 or more. Simultaneously, the ratio of people of “working age” (the cohort, by arbitrary though not entirely unreasonable custom, designated at 15–64 years) to those of retirement age will relentlessly shrink — and within the working age grouping, more youthful adults will account for a steadily dwindling share of overall manpower.

Whether these impending revolutionary transformations of national population structure actually constitute a crisis for the economies and societies in the industrialized world is — let us emphasize — still a matter of dispute. To be sure: This literal upending of the familiar population pyramid (characteristic of all humanity until just yesterday) will surely have direct consequences for economic institutions and structures in the world’s more affluent societies — and could have major reverberations on their macroeconomic performance. Left unaddressed, the mounting pressures that population aging would pose on pension outlays, health care expenditures, fiscal discipline, savings levels, manpower availability, and workforce attainment could only have adverse domestic implications for productivity and economic growth in today’s affluent oecd societies (to say nothing of their impact on the global outlook for innovation, entrepreneurship, and competitiveness).

But a host of possible policy interventions and orderly changes in existing institutional arrangements offer the now-rich countries the possibility (to borrow a phrase from the oecd) of “maintaining prosperity in an aging society” — and in fact of steadily enhancing prosperity for graying populations. Today’s rich countries may succeed in meeting the coming challenges (and grasping the potential opportunities) inherent in population aging — or then again, they may fail to do so. The point is that an aging crisis is theirs to avert — and they have considerable scope for so doing.

In contrast to the intense interest currently accorded the issue of population aging in developed countries, the topic of aging in low-income regions has as yet attracted relatively little examination. This neglect is somewhat surprising, for over the coming decades a parallel, dramatic “graying” of much of the Third World also lies in store. The burdens of pronounced population aging, furthermore, are unlikely to be born as easily by countries still poor as by countries already rich. Simply stated, societies and governments have fewer options for dealing with the problems imposed by population aging when income levels are low — and the options available are distinctly less attractive than they would be if income levels were higher.

Over the next generation, it seems entirely likely — indeed, all but inevitable — that a large fraction of humanity, peopling countries within the grouping often termed emerging market economies, will find themselves coping with the phenomenon of population aging on income levels far lower than those yet witnessed in any society with comparable degrees of graying. For such countries, the social and economic consequences of aging could be harsh — and the options for mitigating the adverse effects of population aging may be fairly limited. In some of these countries, population aging could potentially emerge as a factor appreciably constraining long-term growth and development.

As we will detail in the next few pages, rapid and pronounced population aging represents a highly uneven, largely unappreciated, and as yet almost entirely undiscounted long-term risk for the world’s emerging markets.

Dynamics and dimensions

Venturing predictions about the world outlook 20 years hence is a hazardous enterprise. Nevertheless, we can state quite confidently that a tremendous wave of population aging is virtually certain to sweep through the developing regions between now and 2025. How can we talk so boldly — and so categorically — about events that have not yet unfolded? Over the course of two decades, a country’s economic or political circumstances can change tremendously. By contrast, given the stubborn realities of population change — demographic evolution tends to be gradual, contingent on previous developments, and tightly bound by existing social tendencies — there is inherently less leeway among plausible alternative demographic scenarios 20 years hence.

Barring a cataclysm of Biblical proportions, about five-sixths of the roughly 5.3 billion people alive in the less developed regions of the world today are likely still to be around in 2025 — and something like two-thirds of the approximately 6.7 billion population projected for those areas as of 2025 will comprise people alive now, already inhabiting those regions today.2

Between 2005 and 2025, current projections anticipate the population of the less developed regions to increase by about one-fourth. The most rapidly growing cohort within that population, however, will be the 65-plus group: Once again barring only catastrophe, the Third World’s senior citizens will roughly double in numbers over those years, to about 570 million person, or about 8.5 percent of the total for 2025.

While the less developed regions in 2025 would meet the United Nations’ definition of an “aging population” (i.e., with persons 65 and older accounting for over 7 percent of total population), their overall population profile would nevertheless be roughly as youthful as that of Europe from the late 1950s or Japan in the mid-1970s. But the extent and tempo of population aging will vary tremendously within the less developed regions: Some territories are slated to experience practically no population aging at all over the coming two decades, while others will become positively aged.

The demography of aging explains this differentiation. As a purely arithmetic matter (and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively), the scope and scale of population aging in any regularly convened human society is determined primarily by changes in its fertility levels, not by changes in mortality.3 It is low birth rates, rather than long life expectancies, that drive population aging — and in much of the Third World, fertility levels are already very low. Today, in fact, the majority of humanity probably already lives in countries with “sub-replacement fertility” regimes (that is to say, childbearing patterns which, if continued, would result in indefinite population decline, absent immigration).4

Since the world’s more developed regions account for less than a fifth (19 percent) of the current global population, this means that the great majority of the planet’s sub-replacement populations today are found in low-income regions. And since fertility levels in low-income areas continue to drop — even in spots where sub-replacement is already the norm — the momentum for rapid population aging continues to build.

Not in sub-Saharan Africa, to be sure: There, median age is likely to remain just barely over 20 years some two decades from now. And certainly not in those parts of the Arab/Islamic expanse where total fertility rate levels still apparently exceed five births per woman per lifetime (for example, Yemen, Oman, Afghanistan). But in much of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe,5 and Latin America, sub-replacement fertility is now the norm: which is to say that the areas of the developing world presently set on a trajectory for rapid population aging are precisely the areas that encompass today’s most promising emerging market economies.

Emerging markets

To place the low-income regions’ population aging phenomenon in international economic perspective, we can begin by comparing the current correspondences between graying and income levels in today’s major emerging market economies with the old-age-to-income trajectories charted out by the major Western economies over the course of their postwar development (see Figure 1). As may be seen, the picture for the “emerging markets” is highly varied. On the one hand, some developing economies appear to be much more “youthful” today than Western Europe, the United States, or Japan at comparable levels of per capita income: Proportionately, for example, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico presently support barely half as many senior citizens as Western Europe did at those levels of per capita output. (The proximate explanation for this contradistinction is that Brazil, Mexico and Turkey all had much higher birth rates than the Western countries when approaching the $5,000 gdp per capita threshold.)

figure 1
Percentage of the Population Aged 65+ vs. GDP per Capita:
Developed Countries 1950–2000 vs. Emerging Economies 2000

Sources: Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision and World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision, http: //esa.un.org/unpp (April 19, 2005); Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millenial Perspective (Development Centre Studies, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: Paris 2001), 276, 304, 337, 144, 101, 184, and 194.

Note: gdp per capita in 1990 International Geary-Kamis Dollars. Europe data for 12 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland,.France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, U.K.

Some other emerging market economies appear to be at age–income coordinates almost identical to those traced by Western countries during their economic ascent: India and Thailand, for example, are each separately at points earlier delineated by Japan on its postwar aging/growth path.

But some other emerging market economies already have distinctly higher old age burdens than Western countries bore at similar stages of development. As of the year 2000, China’s 65+ cohort accounted for about the same share of population as Japan’s in 1970 — but per capita output was three times higher for Japan in 1970 than for China in 2000. By the same token, at the point when Western Europe and the United States had the same ratios of elderly to total population as registered by Russia in 2000, their per capita income levels were, respectively, three and six times higher than Russia’s.

Turning from the relatively recent past to the immediate future, Table 1 indicates the prospective dimensions of the coming wave of population aging for nine of the largest emerging market economies.

table 1
Population Aging in Developed Economies Today vs. Emerging Market Economies Tomorrow

Sources: Global Competitiveness Report 2004/2005, Annex Tables 1.01–1.03; World Development Indicators 2004; U.S. Census Bureau International Database.

By un criteria, all nine will count as aging societies by 2025 — but not surprisingly, the degree of population aging differs greatly from one country to the next. India, Indonesia, and Mexico, for example, will still likely have more youthful age profiles in 2025 than the United States of 2003. By 2025, on the other hand, Turkey and Brazil will be roughly as gray as the United States today, but not yet so gray as contemporary Japan or today’s Western Europe. By 2025, China and Thailand will likely have population profiles almost as elderly as today’s eu–15. Russia and Poland, for their parts, will likely have populations more aged in 2025 than Japan’s today: That is to say, they will be grayer than any population yet seen in human history.

Although most of these emerging market economies will have age profiles similar to — or in some cases, even more extreme than — today’s developed economies, their income levels are far lower than those of the affluent oecd societies today — and in almost every case will almost certainly remain below today’s oecd levels two decades from now.

Over a 22-year interim (i.e., 2003 to 2025), Poland could reach today’s eu–15 Purchasing Power Parity (ppp)-adjusted per capita output levels if it grew at a steady 4 percent per capita per annum — an ambitious though hardly impossible hope. To hit current Japanese ppp-adjusted income levels, however, per capita Russian growth would have to be maintained at 5 percent a year for nearly a quarter-century. Attaining current eu ppp-adjusted income levels by 2025 would require annualized per capita growth rates of 8 percent for China and over 10 percent for India. One need not be a Russo-pessimist, a Sino-pessimist, or an Indo-pessimist to suggest such tempos may be out of reach.6

A closer examination of the Chinese, Russian, and Indian aging problems can lay out the constraints over the coming decades for each of these economies in greater detail.

China: A tightening “triple bind”

China’s impending aging wave is illustrated by Figure 2, which compares the country’s actual population structure in 2000 with its projected profile for 2025. China has evidently experienced subreplacement fertility levels since the early 1990s.7 Consequently, as may be seen from these projections, every age group under 35 years of age is anticipated to be smaller in China in 2025 than it was in 2000 — while all of the older groups are expected to be larger. China’s coercive population control program may have succeeded in limiting numbers for the country’s rising contingents of young people, but its elderly population will be exploding in the years ahead — waxing at an annual pace of something like 3.5 percent per year. Between 2005 and 2025, about two-thirds of China’s aggregate population growth will occur in the 65+ grouping — and that cohort will likely double in size, to roughly 200 million people. By 2025, under current un and Census Bureau projections, China would account for less than a fifth of the world’s population but almost a fourth of the world’s senior citizens.

figure 2
Estimated and Projected Population Structure of China: 2000 vs. 2025

Source: United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects 2004 Revision. Available online at http://esa.un.org/unpp/index.asp?panel=2.

China, of course, is a vast land with plenty of regional variation: As regards aging and economic development, the country’s provinces are characterized both by notable differences in provincial demographic profiles and truly tremendous disparities in levels of per capita output. (In 2001, local per capita gdp was reportedly 13 times as high in bustling Shanghai as in isolated Guizhou.) While there is a broad overall correlation between graying and income levels in China’s provinces today, the correspondence is not a tight one — and over the next two decades, some of China’s most dramatic aging trends are set to unfold in some of the areas that are poorest today.

We can see this when we compare the U.S. Census Bureau projections of Chinese provincial age structures for 2025 with official Chinese data on per capita levels of gdp by province as of 2001. Currently (2005), Japan reports the world’s highest proportion of persons 65 and older, at about 19.5 percent of total population. By 2025, however, the 65-plus cohort is projected to account for 21 percent of total population in one part of China — and that place is not relatively prosperous Beijing or booming Shanghai. Rather, it is Heilongjiang, in China’s Manchurian rustbelt — where per capita provincial output (at current exchange rates) was just over $1,100 in 2001.

Currently, Japan also reports the world’s highest median age, at about 42.5 years. Yet as of 2025, nine of China’s 31 provinces and major municipalities are projected to have higher median ages than contemporary Japan: among them, Liaoning (where the exchange-rate-based gdp per capita was around $1,450 in 2001); Jilin (around $925); and Chongqing (under $690). (Heilongjiang’s projected median age in 2025, we might note, would be over 51 years.) No purchasing-power-parity adjustments of these exchange-rate-based figures can alter the basic message they impart: In just 20 years, large parts of China will have to support very aged populations on very low average income levels.

How will China’s elderly population be sustained financially two decades hence? All uncertainties about the future notwithstanding, we can fairly confidently surmise that these prospective pensioners will not be supported through the country’s existing state pension arrangements. For all the justifiable anxiety about the current actuarial health of national pension systems in various oecd countries, the financial disarray of China’s official pension apparatus is in a league of its own. For this patchwork, covering perhaps a sixth of the total Chinese workforce, the net present value of unfunded liabilities is estimated to exceed current gdp — perhaps substantially. China’s pension system is clearly unsustainable — but despite the better part of a decade of high-level policy deliberations in Beijing on the national pension problem (the issue has been addressed by directives from the highest levels of government since 1997), no alternative formula has been officially offered.8 Nor is promulgation of legislation for a new and unified social security system obviously on the policy horizon for China today.9

Thus China’s national pension system as of 2025 promises today to be more or less the same system that has always provided for the country’s elderly and infirm: namely, the family unit. But herein lies a problem: The “success” of the Chinese government’s continuing antinatal population drive will necessarily translate in coming decades into a plummeting ratio of working-age children to elderly parents. Whereas the average Chinese woman who celebrated her sixtieth birthday in the early 1990s had borne five children during her lifetime, her counterpart in 2025 will have had fewer than two.

No less important: Over the next 20 years, China’s rising cohorts of prospective retirees face a growing “son deficit.” In Chinese cultural tradition, it is sons, rather than daughters, upon whom first duty for support of aged parents customarily falls (a daughter is obliged to care for her husband’s parents as well as her own). In the early 1990s, about 7 percent of China’s 60-year-old women had never borne a son. Today that proportion is about 10 percent. By 2025, the figure will shoot up to roughly 30 percent. Some of the male children in question, furthermore, will not live to adulthood to be able to help support their parents. Taking both fertility and survival trends thus into account, it seems likely that a third or more of Chinese women approaching retirement age two decades from now will have no living sons. For tens of millions of aged Chinese just 20 years from now, seeking financial and material help from one’s children will amount to competing for resources with one’s son-in-law’s parents (given the presumed continuation of China’s long-standing cultural norm of near-universal marriage for women). Suffice it to say that such a “niche” is not promising from the perspective of social ecology.

With official government pension guarantees a distinctly more limited and problematic set of options than official policy might wish, and with the traditional social security system known as “the Chinese family” a rather more fragile construct than at any time in the recent past, the grim reality may be that a great many elderly Chinese men and women in the coming decades will have to come to the conclusion that they must sustain themselves by continuing to work. Paradoxically, despite China’s tremendous material progress over the half-century beginning in 1975, the nation’s elderly will face a continuing need — quite possibly a growing need — to support themselves in old age through their own labor.

But China’s elderly population is not ideally placed as competitors in their country’s labor markets — either today or tomorrow. And here we enter into the second constraint of China’s tightening “triple bind.” China’s elderly workers occupy a decidedly unfavorable position in the country’s labor force today. At the start of the new century, in comparison with China’s overall workforce, workers 65 or older are six times as likely to be illiterate or semiliterate, almost 50 percent more likely to have only primary education, and only a tenth as likely to have a high school or college diploma. They are also much more likely to toil in the agricultural sector: In 2000, 87 percent of China’s elderly workers were in farming, as opposed to 66 percent for the workforce as a whole.10 Thus consigned to the low-income sector of the economy, to labor there with low levels of human capital, China’s older labor force provides almost a textbook definition for the working poor.

Despite China’s educational advances, its older population will still be disadvantaged in 2025. We know this because we have data today on the educational attainment of the people who will make up China’s elderly cohorts 20 years from now As of 2025, something like two-fifths of China’s senior citizens will have a primary school education — or less. That circumstance contrasts starkly with prospects for today’s developed countries: In both Japan and the United States, for example, nearly five-sixths of the 65-plus population will have at least a high school diploma in 2025.

In 2025, moreover, the fate of China’s low-skill older workers will still primarily be to toil in the field. Despite rapid structural transformation in the Chinese economy, agriculture promises to remain a major source of employment two decades from now — and older workers are likely to remain over-represented in China’s primary sector.

The point to bear in mind about farming in China is that the occupation entails regular strenuous activity: It is not only low-paying but physically demanding. This point can be drawn more broadly, for even in occupations Western readers do not commonly associate with physical exertion, stamina and muscle-power are routinely required for job performance in China. This is so, quite simply, because China still lacks the capital investment per worker to provide “labor saving” alternatives to human strength in the production process. With mechanization so much more limited in China than in Western economies, the machines powering much of Chinese economic activity today are human bodies — and this circumstance is unlikely to change appreciably over the next 20 years.

Perversely, because China’s older workers suffer from lower levels of education and training than the general labor force, they are precisely the cohort most directly obliged to rely upon physical effort to earn a living. This will hold true tomorrow as well as today. And that brings us to the third strand of the “triple bind” that defines China’s looming aging problem: In the years ahead, China’s senior citizens are not only likely to face real and perhaps mounting pressures to support themselves through paid labor, and not only likely to find that their employment opportunities are principally in low-paying, physically demanding jobs; they are also likely to be less healthy and more fragile than counterparts in other countries where the physical demands of employment are much less forbidding for the elderly and nonelderly alike.

Upon reflection, the proposition that the health of senior citizens in China is more tenuous than that of older populations in Western countries should not surprise: Over their life histories, after all, older people in China have on average been exposed to more in the way of health and nutritional risk, and have less scope for protecting and/or recovering from illness and injury, than older people in affluent societies. In all, China’s availability and quality of food, housing, education and health services (and many other factors influencing health status) do not compare favorably with oecd levels. Consequently, China’s senior citizens live shorter lives than old people in oecd countries — and their remaining years are more heavily compromised by serious health problems.

Estimates of “disability-free life expectancy” in China and Japan at age 65 make the point.11 (These particular data come from circa 1990, but the patterns they revealed still obtain.) For men and women alike, overall life expectancy at age 65 was over 50 percent longer in Japan than in China — but whereas Chinese men could reportedly expect to be encumbered by disability for nearly a third of their remaining years, the fraction was just half as high among Japanese men. Chinese women, likewise, could reportedly expect to spend a third of their final years affected by disabilities — whereas the corresponding fraction for Japanese women was one-fifth. These data, incidentally, may considerably understate the extent of health impairment in later life for China’s elderly. For one thing, they only refer to disability — not to the broader matter of potentially serious health problems. Secondly, the data on disability come from self-assessments — and as is well known, subjective expectations regarding health tend to be lower for populations with lower income and educational levels.

China’s outlook for population aging, in sum, can in some respects be likened to a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy already underway. On the current trajectory, the graying of China threatens many tens of millions of future senior citizens with a penurious and uncertain livelihood in an increasingly successful emerging market. The incidence of individual misfortune implied by current trends looks to be sufficiently broad to suggest that impoverished aging may emerge as a major social problem for China in the years ahead. The impending fault lines for impoverished aging, furthermore, promise to magnify yet further the social inequalities with which China is already struggling.

How the country will deal with the social and political tensions generated by impoverished aging remains to be seen. Since 1997, Beijing’s policymakers have recognized the question but have been deferring the response to it. Quite predictably, feasible policy options have narrowed over these years of indecision — and the remaining alternatives are steadily becoming more expensive.

Russia: Graying with “unhealthy aging”

In some respects, Russia’s outlook for population aging can be regarded as an ordinarily “European” tale. Between 2000 and 2025, total population is expected to decline, while the number of Russians 65 and above is slated to grow substantially. Consequently, Russia’s “population support ratio” or psr — a metric that relates the working age population (15–64 years) to the retirement age population (65+) — falls by Census Bureau projections over this quarter-century from 5.5: 1 to 3.3:1.

The implied burden of potential pensioners on the potential Russian workforce of 2025 is high by contemporary standards, to be sure — but such ratios look unexceptional for the Europe that awaits in 2025. By Census Bureau projections, the psr for all of Europe would be about 3.0: 1 in 2025, indicating the Russia would have a slightly higher working age population to retirement age population than the rest of the continent. For 2025, in fact, Russia’s proportion of population 65 and older promises to be a bit higher than America’s and a bit lower than Western Europe’s.

It would be tempting to describe Russia’s prospective aging profile as that of a typical developed society — and thus to expect Russia’s aging problem to be similar to those of oecd Europe. The weight of the aging burden that Russian society will have to bear in coming years, however, cannot be measured adequately by population pyramids or “population support ratios” alone. Russia’s particular vulnerabilities in population aging pivot not so much on the size of the nation’s prospective elderly population as on the exceptional fragility of the workforce that will be expected to support it.

Pronounced long-term deterioration of public health for an industrialized society during peacetime is a highly anomalous, indeed counterintuitive proposition for the modern sensibility: Nevertheless, over the four decades between 1961–62 and 2003, life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by nearly five years for males. It also declined for females, although just slightly, making for an overall drop in life expectancy of nearly three years over the past four decades. Between the mid-1960s and the start of the twenty-first century, the country’s age-standardized death rates climbed by over 15 percent for women and by a shocking 40 percent for men. This upswing in mortality was especially concentrated among the group of “working age,” where the upsurges in death rates were breathtaking. (Between 1970–71 and 2003, for example, every female cohort between the ages of 25 and 59 suffered at least a 40 percent increase in death rates; for men between the ages of 30 and 64, the corresponding figures uniformly exceeded 50 percent, and some cases exceeded 80 percent.12)

To get a sense of just how bad health and mortality conditions are for Russian adults nowadays, we can compare survival rates for Swiss men with their Russian counterparts for 1999, thanks to information compiled by the Human Mortality Database13 (see Figure 3). In Switzerland, a 20-year-old man had a five-out-of-six chance of making it to 65 years of age; in Russia, he stood less than even odds. (In 1999, by the way, Russian adult survival schedules were somewhat better than they are today.)

figure 3
Male Survival Schedule, Ages 20–65: Russia vs. Switzerland, 1999

Source: www.mortality.org, accessed January 14, 2005.

If Russia’s adult mortality levels are so “unnaturally” high today, won’t more “natural” levels more or less automatically reassert themselves in the coming decades? The dismaying answer is: not necessarily, for in Russia’s demography the “abnormal” seems to have become the new norm. Unlike other parts of the industrialized world, Russia’s health trends are characterized by a heavy measure of what we might call negative momentum: that is to say, an unfavorable accumulation of immunological insults and health risks in today’s adult population by comparison with their parents’ generation. To the extent that death rates provide evidence about general health conditions, modern Russia’s mortality data strongly suggest that each new cohort is more fragile than its predecessor.

In other industrialized Western societies in the postwar era, younger generations have routinely come to enjoy better survival rates than their predecessors: In contemporary Japan, for example, men born in 1950 have, over their adult life course thus far, experienced age-specific death rates 30 percent to 80 percent lower than those recorded for the cohort born 20 years before them.

By contrast: In Russia today (to invert the popular “boomer” mantra) “30 is the new 40.” That is to say, there has been no improvement in survival schedules among the two generations of Russian men born between the late 1920s and 1970. Quite the contrary: Over the life course, each rising cohort of Russian men seems to be charting out a slightly more dismal mortality trajectory than the one traced by its immediate predecessors. (The same sorts of patterns, incidentally, are evident among Russian females.)

This negative momentum makes the objective of major, sustained improvements in public health especially problematic. Partly for this reason, demographers generally have low expectations for health progress in Russia over the years immediately ahead. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, imagines the male life expectancy in Russia will steadily lag below India’s, Pakistan’s, and even Bangladesh’s through 2025.14

Russia’s lingering health and mortality crisis promises to be an anchor against rapid economic development, frustrating the effort to move Russia onto a path of swift and sustained material advance. It is difficult to see how Russia can expect, in some imagined future, to achieve an Irish standard of living if its labor force still faces an Indian schedule of survival — or worse. Widespread debilitation and premature mortality among working age cohorts depresses economic potential directly and immediately — but also has adverse and far-reaching effects on longer-term productivity. The expectation of a seriously foreshortened working life alters the cost-benefit calculus for higher education and technical training, lowering investment in human capital. And since Russian working-age adults “present” as far older than Western counterparts of the same calendar birth-year,15 the scope for “economically active aging” — for enhancing the labor force participation rates and economic contributions of persons in middle age and beyond — will be far more constrained for Russia than for oecd Europe.

Population aging in the context of unhealthy aging poses additional special economic and social challenges to Russia. Given the country’s steep and forbidding age-specific health gradient today and the limited prospects for health improvements over the coming two decades, the prospective aging of Russia’s working age population — the median age of the population within the 15–64 grouping will be about 42 years in 2025, three-and-a-half years higher than today — means that the health and mortality outlook for Russian manpower could actually be less favorable than today — perhaps even appreciably so. Second, the specter of a swelling population of elderly pensioners16 dependent for support on an unhealthy and diminishing population of low-income workers suggests some particularly unattractive trade-offs between welfare and growth. Should Russian resources be allocated to capital accumulation or to consumption for the unproductive elderly? Given Russia’s population structure, the question cannot be finessed. As of the year 2002, Russia had only 1.7 workers for every pensioner17 — and that ratio will only fall in the years ahead. Though the government officially embarked upon pension reform in 2002, that process looks to be a long and complicated one — and what the eventual arrangements will presage on the one hand for the availability of investable funds, and on the other for living conditions of Russia’s steadily growing ranks of the elderly and the infirm, is as yet an open question.

India: A tale of “two countries”

India’s population profile will age over the coming 20 years, but the country will nevertheless remain relatively youthful. Although projections indicate that India’s 65+ cohort is slated to double in size between 2005 and 2025, those elders account for less than 8 percent of overall population 20 years hence; the country’s median age then is only just over 30; and the psr is almost 9:1 — a level last witnessed in today’s more developed countries before the Second World War.

But in many ways vast India is a sort of arithmetic expression that averages the sum of its many diverse components: so, too, with population aging. Closer examination reveals that with population aging there are in reality two Indias, with very different aging prospects and challenges: one that stays remarkably youthful over the next 20 years; the other already embarked on a very rapid graying.

As already noted, the pace and scale of aging tomorrow is always largely determined by local levels of fertility today. India’s total fertility rate has dropped by more than two-fifths over the past three decades — from about 5.4 births per woman per lifetime in the early 1970s to approximately 3.1 today — but the pace of change has varied strikingly from one region and setting to the next.

It will surprise some readers to learn that sub-replacement fertility today prevails in many of India’s huge urban centers — New Delhi, Mumbai (Bombay), Kolkata (Calcutta), and Chennai (Madras) among them.18 But even more surprising, throughout much of rural India — especially rural South India — fertility levels today are also near or already below replacement.

Dr. P.N. Mari Bhat of Delhi University’s Institute for Economic Growth has laid out the implications of these discrepant patterns for future aging in the supra-statal regions he labels “north India” and “south India.”19 Currently (2005), fertility levels for the roughly half-billion population of this “north” are almost twice as high as for the nearly quarter-billion people of this “south.” (India’s remaining 350 million people live in states and union territories not included in Mari Bhat’s “north/south” analysis.)

By 2025, “north” India’s population would still be very young. Its projected median age would be just 26 — and the 65+ group would account for less than 6 percent of total population. On the other hand, “south” India’s population structure in 2025 would bear unmistakable signs of population aging. There, median age would be about 34 (a level comparable to Europe’s in the late 1980s), and 9 percent of the population would be 65 or older (about the same share as Japan’s in 1980).

Mari Bhat does not break down his 2025 projections to the state level, but Professor Tim Dyson of the London School of Economics has done so for India for 2026.20 His projections differ from Mari Bhat’s in some particulars (most importantly, in positing a slightly faster pace of fertility decline over the next generation), but his calculations similarly depict a growing “aging gap” between north India and south India — with aging by 2026 already having progressed considerably in a number of southern states. In each of India’s four southernmost states, median age would be over 35 — and over 37 in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu. (For reference, think of Western Europe around 1990.) In these projections, Kerala and Tamil Nadu’s proportion of persons 65 and older both exceeded 10 percent by 2025. (Think here of Japan in the mid-1980s.)

A generation before Western Europe’s median age reached 35, however, the region’s gdp per capita was in the range of $6,000–$8,000 (at 2000 prices and exchange rates); a generation before Japan’s share of 65+ to total population hit the 10 percent mark, the country’s per capita gdp (at constant 2000 exchange rates and prices) was likewise around $7,000.21 In 2001 — that is to say, 25 years before the two states in question are projected to comport to those same demographic specifics — exchange-rate-based gdp per capita was less than $450 a year in both Kerala and Tamil Nadu. By any international or historical benchmark, indeed, many areas of India are facing the onset of rapid population aging on current levels of per capita output that are astonishingly low.

At the moment, India has nothing like society-wide old-age pension coverage: To the contrary, only about 11 percent of India’s workforce participates in any sort of guaranteed retirement income systems. (An “emergency” needs-based monthly stipend is publicly available for persons over 60 in India, but this mechanism offers less than $2 a month to its beneficiaries and is not guaranteed to be available to all who apply for it and meet its hardship qualifications.) Although Indian policymakers and academics have been discussing alternative potential paths to universal old age income protection with a reasonable measure of intellectual seriousness in recent years, no plans for national coverage are even remotely on the national policy agenda.22 Lacking a tangible comprehensive national retirement pension policy, India’s implicit strategy for meeting its coming aging challenge is, at least for now, to “grow its way through it.” Like many unspoken and thus unexamined game plans, this one looks highly problematic. Even if India, like the Japan of an earlier day, were poised to grow at a 5.5 percent per capita rate per annum over the coming generation, significant parts of India would be approaching the advent of an “aged society” on income levels almost an order of magnitude lower than those of Japan in the mid-1980s.

A sustained 5.5 percent per capita growth rate for India over the next generation, furthermore, is hardly a matter that can be taken for granted at the moment. In the period since her 1991 economic crisis, India has averaged a highly respectable 4.0 percent annual rate of per capita growth and has become a presence in the global it economy through its enclaves in places like Bangalore. But Bangalore — like the rest of the Indian south — is part of what may soon be known as “old India”: While its labor force is relatively skilled, it is also older, and absolute supplies of available manpower will soon peak and begin to shrink. Other parts of India, by contrast, will have abundant and growing supplies of labor — but a disproportionate share of that manpower will be either entirely unschooled or only barely literate.

Figures 4 and 5 highlight this paradox. They compare projected age/sex/education pyramids in 2026 for the Indian states of Kerala and Bihar (work by Anne Goujon of the Vienna Institute for Demography and Kirsty McNay of Oxford23). The extreme contrast is intentional — Kerala is India’s most educated state, while Bihar is its least schooled — but the story from the graphics is clear enough. In the Kerala of 2026, almost everyone of working age (15–64) will have some schooling, and the majority of the economically active manpower will have a high school diploma or better — but the largest population cohort would have been people in their 40s, with every successive cohort a little bit smaller. In the Bihar of 2026, on the other hand, each new birth cohort entering the labor pool would be larger than the one before — but fewer than one-third of the economically active population (15 to 65 years) would have even completed grade school, and well over two-fifths of the economically active age population would be illiterate, with no schooling whatsoever. (These projections, one may feel compelled to note, posit a continuation on into the future of the progress achieved over the 1990s in expanding access to education in India.)

figure 4
Age and Education Pyramid for Kerala, India: 2001 and 2026

Source: Anne Goujon and Kirsty McNay, “Projecting the educational composition of the population of India: selected state-level perspectives.” Applied Population and Policy 2003:1(1) 25–35, Figure 1.

figure 5
Age and Education Pyramid for Bihar, India: 2001 and 2026

Source: Anne Goujon, and Kirsty McNay, “Projecting the educational composition of the population of India: selected state-level perspectives,” Applied Population and Policy 1:1 (2003), Figure 1.

To appreciate how very educationally disadvantaged India stands to be a generation hence, we may compare the Goujon–McNay projections with earlier work by Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee on historical patterns of worldwide educational attainment.24 By the Goujon–McNay projections, in 2026 nearly one third (32 percent) of Indians 25 years of age or older would be illiterate, with no formal schooling. By contrast, as of 1960 — that is to say, nearly three generations earlier — the illiteracy rate for the 25+ group in 23 oecd countries would have been about 6 percent. Even more telling, perhaps, are comparisons with educational levels from other developing regions. To go by the Goujon–McNay projections and the Barro–Lee estimates, India’s rate of adult 25+ illiteracy in 2026 would be roughly comparable to the levels in Latin America and the Caribbean or East Asia around 1970 (35 percent and 31 percent, respectively) — that is to say, two generations earlier. Indeed, striking as this may sound, India’s future adult illiteracy rates would not be that much lower than the current (2000) levels prevailing in sub-Saharan Africa (43 percent).

Educated and aging, or untutored and fertile — this looks to be the contradiction for India’s development in the years immediately ahead. Human resources are the foundation for economic growth in the coming century — but if poor health is the Achilles Heel of Russia’s human resources base, seriously inadequate educational opportunity for all too much of the population looks to be the Achilles Heel for India.

What is to be done? Can anything be?

In any plausible future, population aging in low-income Eurasia is unlikely to be pretty. Absent only unthinkable catastrophe, the trajectory for a rapid graying is already essentially set for China, Russia, and much of India. Even with rapid and uninterrupted economic growth, by 2025 these aging or aged societies will be far poorer than was the West when Western societies had to face comparable degrees of population aging. There is no “fix” to this basic dilemma — at least, not in the next two decades.

That being said, it is also clear that informed and deliberate public action can still mitigate some of the adverse consequences that rapid graying would otherwise entail.

At first glance, the obvious policy avenue for coping with rapid population aging in Russia, China, and India might appear to be strengthening — and broadening the coverage of — the national pension arrangements in the countries in question. Certainly there is plenty of room for improvement here: Of the three countries, only Russia has a national pension system with anything approaching universal worker coverage (and the soundness of the evolving Russian system still remains to be seen). Moreover, given the enormous economic disparities within all three of these countries, even a relatively small measure of redistribution within the workings of a nationwide pension system could provide an important measure of protection for the most vulnerable of the elderly (a group that will be disproportionately rural, agrarian, and female).

In actuality, however, the potentialities of pension reform may offer less opportunity in each of these countries than would first seem to meet the eye. Post-communist Russia’s polity, for example, betrays scant interest (on the part of either policymakers or voters) in protecting the health and well-being of economically productive citizens, much less social dependents. By the same token, the idea of extending pension coverage to the countryside and the slums is not unpopular in India: It simply remains beyond the realm of serious policy discussion. As for China — where political decision making is, shall we say, more “streamlined” — policy interest in extending the nation’s pension coverage to poorer rural regions is indeed evident, but action has been precluded by the immense obstacle of the vast existing unfunded pension liabilities for comparatively well-off urban and state employees. However separate those two questions may appear intellectually, in practical terms they are inseparably linked, and the government’s inability to deal with the latter means it cannot make progress on the former either.

Perhaps counterintuitively, then, the best hope for controlling the toll of the aging tsunami in low-income Eurasia may lie outside pension policy — more specifically, in embracing politically feasible strategies for poverty-reducing growth. And here it is not hard to identify directions worthy of vigorous pursuit.

In China, for example, the country’s banking and financial system fairly begs for overhaul — and a transition to a more transparent, efficient, and sustainable system for financial intermediation will be essential if China is to maintain economic growth in the lower savings rate era that surely lies ahead.

In Russia, public health interventions to reduce premature mortality not only could reduce the country’s tragic and unnecessary loss of life, but also could augment the size and the productivity of the working-age population that will be sustaining pensioners (and preparing for self-financed retirement).

As for India, with outward economic orientation and sound macroeconomic policies, high rates of return can be expected from investment in human resources — and the highest returns of all may be expected from extending primary education to those currently excluded from school. (Reaching the young is critical here: A century of efforts around the world has repeatedly demonstrated the limited efficacy of such programs.) India is already committed rhetorically to “Education for all” — but achieving universal primary education will require much more than words from the country’s political leadership — and there is no good reason that India should be the sole great modern democracy incapable of meeting this objective.

For China, the case for financial sector reform wins on its own merits — as does the case for public health policy in Russia and universal primary education in India. Yet such policies would have the subsidiary, but hardly trivial, effect of making the scale of the aging problem a little less unmanageable in each of these societies.

Waiting for the “demographic dividend”?

Not all emerging markets, of course, are poised to settle their aging populations upon income levels so low as to be without historical precedent. Such middle income economies as Mexico, Brazil, and Turkey — among others — promise to have relatively youthful populations in 2025. Given current productivity levels and reasonable future economic prospects, moreover, a number of these places promise to fall well within the Western age-income experience over their presumed ascent in the coming decades — or perhaps even to remain more youthful than the Western economies were at similar levels of per capita income.

Is there a special economic benefit to be had from relatively youthful development? By some thinking in the economics literature — a hardy strand reaching back nearly half a century — the answer would seem to depend not just upon graying, but upon the ratio of all dependents, young and old, to economically productive workers.

To this way of thinking — oversimplifying the argument, some might say brutally — the lower the “dependency ratio” of children and oldsters to working age people, the higher the rates of capital accumulation and growth. In the argumentation of some economists today, the special moment in the “demographic transition” when birth rates are low and elderly populations are not yet burgeoning provides a sort of “sweet spot” for very rapid economic growth. According to this viewpoint, societies that have recently transited from high to low birthrates — but have yet to experience significant graying — are positioned to reap a “demographic dividend.” In this telling, indeed, crucial shifts in demographic structure are integral to the modern era’s great development success stories, from East Asia’s remarkable economic ascent over the past generation-and-a-half to Ireland’s more recent transformation into Europe’s “Celtic tiger.”25

The tale of the demographic dividend is certainly compelling to hear, and it may be heartening for those low-income societies whose dependency ratios are now about to begin a long-term decline — but is the story right? Are dependency ratios critical to a population’s prospects for sustained and rapid material advance?

It is surely incontestable that per capita output will be higher, all else being equal, in the society where people of working age account for the greater share of total population. And theoretically, variations in dependency ratios may also plausibly be associated with changes in savings ratios — or more strictly speaking, with changes in a population’s disposition to save and the facility with which it can attempt to accumulate savings. But in an era of truly global capital markets, relatively low savings rates in any given locale would not necessarily look like a binding constraint on that area’s development. Postwar economic history would seem to indicate that dependency ratios are not a decisive influence on long-run economic performance in our increasingly globalized times. Consider the developmental records of two major global regions — East Asia on the one hand, and Latin America and the Caribbean on the other.

Over the 40 years between 1960 and 2000, dependency ratios for the low-income countries in East Asia and Latin America/Caribbean traced quite similar trajectories (although dependency ratios were always somewhat lower in East Asia). Despite the close correspondence between the indicators for the two regions over the course of the past four decades, economic results in the two areas have been anything but similar: Per capita output septupled for East Asia, whereas it rose by about 85 percent for Latin America and the Caribbean. In both regions, moreover, the dependency ratio commenced a steady decline around 1975. But while the pace of growth accelerated in East Asia in the quarter-century following this drop, Latin America suffered a growth slowdown. In the high dependency ratio era (1960–75), Latin America’s per capita output growth averaged almost 3 percent a year; in the years of steadily falling dependency ratios (1975–2003), annual per capita growth was under 1 percent.26 Clearly other factors — including government policy — are more important in determining prospects for material progress.

P.N. Mari Bhat’s cautious assessment of the possible influence of the demographic dividend on economic growth for India could be extended to other low-income areas as well:

[D]uring the next 10–20 years demographic conditions would be favorable for growth. . . . However, as Bloom and Williamson note, their effect is by no means inevitable. To realize the effect, it is necessary to support it with appropriate economic, social and political institutions and policies. Otherwise it would only lead to higher levels of unemployment.27

Countries with declining dependency ratios, in short, may enjoy some potential for economic advantage — under the right cultural, institutional, and policy conditions. But demographic dividends are nothing to bank on.

Global implications?

All other things being equal (which is to say, without proactive policy and institutional adjustments), the pronounced population aging that awaits the affluent oecd countries over the generation ahead would be expected to have a depressing effect on both local savings rates and local rates of economic growth. Much the same may also be said of the aging trends that are due to affect some of the major “emerging markets” in the next few decades. The conjunction of population aging in the world’s developed economies and important parts of the developing world naturally raises the question of potential global impact. Global capital markets may be efficient in allocating investment to promising countries, corporations, and projects — but the availability of capital will affect the cost of capital and thus the profitability or attractiveness of undertakings worldwide. By the same token economic slowdowns in one major region would be expected to have spillover impacts on growth in other regions in an environment of liberalized global trade. Will the aging of the Third World have unanticipated spillover effects for the world economy? The answer is not yet clear — but it is none too early to begin asking the question.

1 A select representation might include: Alan J. Auerbach, Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Robert Hageman, “The Dynamics of an Aging Population: The Case of Four oecd Countries,” NBER Working Papers 2797 (1989); David Cutler et al., “An Aging Society: Opportunity or Challenge?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1990), 1–56; Richard Disney, Can We Afford To Grow Older? A Perspective on the Economics of Aging (mit Press, 1996); oecd, Maintaining Prosperity in an Ageing Society (Paris: oecd, 1998); United Nations Population Division, Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations? (un Department of Economic and Social Affairs, March 2000); Peter S. Heller, Who Will Pay?: Coping with Aging Societies, Climate Change and Other Long-Term Fiscal Challenges, (imf, 2003); Landis MacKellar et al., The Economic Impacts of Population Ageing in Japan, (Elgar, 2004); James Proterba, “The Impact of Population Aging on Financial Markets,” NBER Working Papers 10851 (2004); International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook: The Global Demographic Transition (imf, September 2004).
More popularized presentations include Peter G. Peterson, Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America — and the World (Times Books, 1999); Robert Stowe England, Global Aging and Financial Markets: Hard Landings Ahead? (csis Press, 2002); Philip Longman, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birth Rates Threaten World Prosperity and What To Do About It, (Basic Books, 2004); and Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need To Know About America’s Economic Future (mit Press, 2004).

2 Demographers today generally use global population projections by the United Nations Population Division and the United States Census Bureau as their reference standards: unpd’s “World Population Prospects” are available electronically at http://www.unpopulation.org; uscb’s “International Data Base” can be accessed at http://www.census.gov/ipc/www. Either set of projections (unpd “medium variant” or uscb sole-variant) can be used to support the calculations above.

3 An illustrative example will emphasize the point. In a high-mortality society where female life expectancy stayed at 50 years and births per lifetime forever averaged six per woman, median age would eventually stabilize at about 16 years. On the other hand, if female life expectancy were 50 but births per lifetime averaged two instead of six, median age would stabilize close to 40! With an average of two children and a female life expectancy of only 50, in fact, the 65-plus group would ultimately account for over 15 percent of total population — a higher fraction than that estimated for the “more developed regions” at the dawn of the twenty-first century. (Estimates derived for “stable population” structures with female life expectancy of 50 under either West, North, East, or South “model” life tables — cf. Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny with Barbara Vaughan, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (Academic Press, 1983) and uscb International Data Base.)

4 Chris Wilson and Gilles Pison, “La majorité de l’humanité vit dans un pays où la fécondité est basse,” Population & Sociétés 405 (October 2004).

5 Technically, Eastern Europe is defined as “more developed” rather than “less developed” in the un’s global taxonomy. Because these “more developed” countries are nonetheless relatively low-income societies, we will include them for consideration here.

6 The task of reaching today’s oecd per capita income levels, incidentally, may be even more daunting than those numbers suggest, for China, Russia and India all enjoy extremely generous ppp adjustments in this table, each of which scales up the country’s actual exchange-rate-based per capita output level by a factor of four or more. By actual exchange-rate-based per capita gdp estimates, Russia’s is one-fifteenth of Western Europe’s, and China’s is less than a twentieth of Japan’s.

7 The unpd currently suggests that China’s total fertility rate was about 1.92 in 1990–95, a level roughly 16 percent below that required for long-term population replacement, and that China’s tfr has subsequently declined to a bit over 1.7 today. The U.S. Census Bureau’s reading is quite similar: For 2005, it projects a tfr of 1.72 for China. These estimates, of course, are prepared under uncertainties, the most important of these being the lack of complete annual vital registration data for China, and the unknown degree of under-reporting of infants and children in the country’s censuses and demographic surveys. For background, see Daniel Goodkind, “China’s missing children: The 2000 census underreporting surprise,” Population Studies 58:3 (2004), 281–295, and Guangyu Zhang and Zhonwei Zhao, “China’s Fertility Puzzle: Data Collection and Data Use in the Last Two Decades,” paper presented at Population Association of America 2005 Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (April 1, 2005).

8 For background, see World Bank, Old Age Security: Pension Reform in China (World Bank, 1997); Song Xiaowu, ed., Perfect the Pension System (Enterprise Management Publishing House, 2001) [in Chinese]; Jinxing Huang, “Economic Restructuring, Social Safety-Net and Old-Age Pension Reform in China,” American Asian Review 21:2 (2003), and Xin Wang, “China’s Pension Reform and Capital Market Development,” China & World Economy 12:3 (2004).

9 Professor Mark W. Frazier of Lawrence University may have pinpointed a critical factor in this continuing delay: “Until the fundamental question of what the state owes its citizens in terms of guaranteed basic pension benefits is resolved, the debate over the necessity of pension legislation to supplant the current patchwork of national and local regulatory controls is largely academic.” “What’s in a Law?: China’s Pension Reform and its Discontents,” in Neil J. Diamant, Stanley J. Lubman, and Kevin J. O’Brien, Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (Stanford University Press, 2005), 108–130, cite at 125.

10 Data drawn from China Ministry of Labor and Social Security, China Labour Statistical Yearbook 2003, Tables 1–43, 1–51, and China National Bureau of Statistics, Tabulation on the 2000 Population Census of the People’s Republic of China, Volume 2, Tables 4–4, 4–4c.

11 Yasuhiko Saito, Xiaochun Qiao and Sutthichai Jitapunkul, “Health Expectancy in Asian Countries,” in J.M. Robine et al., Determining Health Expectancies (Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 289–317.

12 How are we to explain modern Russia’s awful health tragedy? The fact is, demographers and public health specialists do not fully understand the reasons for these gruesome results. Diet, smoking, sedentary lifestyles, and health care (or the lack of it) all play their part. Russia’s romance with the vodka bottle is also deeply implicated here. Part of the mystery of the ongoing Russian health disaster, however, is that the problem looks to be worse than the sum of its parts: that is to say, death rates are significantly higher than one would predict on the basis of observed risk factors alone.

13 Available at http://www.mortality.org.

14 Those Census Bureau projections, furthermore, do not formally take into account the possibility that additional and perhaps severe new health setbacks may lie in store for the Russian Federation. Yet precisely such problems are, quite plainly, on the horizon today: Think of the country’s still-gathering hiv/aids and drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemics.

15 A single example: In 1999 — by no means the worst year for health in post-Communist Russia — the same death rates experienced by 40-year-old Russians were matched in Italy by women at age 55 and by men at age 60, respectively. (Estimates from the Human Mortality Database, www.mortality.org.)

16 Given Russia’s grim health problems, it may seem paradoxical that the population should be aging so rapidly. Remember, however, our earlier discussion: Population aging is driven much more by fertility patterns than mortality — and Russia’s fertility levels today are far below replacement.

17 For a penetrating overview and analysis of the Russian pension situation, see Leon Aron, “Privatizing Pensions,” aei Russian Outlook (Summer 2004).

18 See, for example, Christophe Z. Guilmoto and S. Irudaya Rajan, “District Level Estimates of Fertility from India’s 2001 Census,” Economic and Political Weekly (February 16, 2002), data from Table a–1. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Christophe Z. Guilmoto and S. Irudaya Rajan, eds., Fertility Transition in South India (Sage Publications, 2005).

19 P.N. Mari Bhat, “Demographic Scenario, 2025,” Study #S-15, Research Projects on India — 2025 conducted by Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi, July, 2003).

20 Tim Dyson, “India’s Population — The Future,” in Tim Dyson, Robert Cassen and Leela Visaria, eds., Twenty-First Century India: Population, Economy, Human Development, and the Environment (Oxford University Press, 2004), 74–107. Professor Dyson also generously shared with me some of the additional unpublished details from this same series of projections.

21 Derived from World Bank, World Development Indicators 2004 cd-rom. Estimates for Western Europe are for the 12 current countries of the European Monetary Union for 1960–65; estimates for Japan are for 1960.

22 For background, see First Report of Project oasis (Old Age Social and Income Security), India Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (February 1, 1999); World Bank, India: “The Challenge of Old Age Insurance Security,” Report 22034-in (April 5, 2001); B.C. Purohil, “Policymaking for diversity among the aged in India,” Journal of Aging and Social Policy 15:4 (2003); and Robert Palacios, “The Challenge of Pension Reform in India,” in Edgaro M. Favaro and Ashok K. Lahiri, Fiscal Policies and Sustainable Growth In India (Oxford University Press, 2004), 282–300.

23 Anne Goujon and Kirsty McNay, “Projecting the educational composition of the population of India: selected state-level perspectives,” Applied Population and Policy 1:1 (2003). The discussion below benefits from additional unpublished projections from that effort, kindly transmitted to me by Dr. Goujon. The discussion refers to the Goujon-McNay “Scenario One” projections.

24 Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, International Data on Educational Attainment: Updates and Implications, Harvard University Center for International Development Working Papers 42 (April 2000).

25 For example: Ansley J. Coale and E.M. Hoover, Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (Princeton University Press, 1958); Stephen Enke, “The economic aspects of slowing population growth,” Economic Journal 76 (1966); David Bloom and Jeffrey Williamson, “Demographic Transitions and Economic Miracles in Emerging Asia,” World Bank Economic Review 12 (1998), 419–456; David Bloom, David Canning, and Jose Sevilla, The Demographic Dividend: A New Perspective on the Economic Consequences of Population Change (Rand, 2003).

26 Comparisons derived from World Bank, World Development Indicators (2004) cd-rom.

27 Mari Bhat, “Demographic Scenario, 2025,” 9.
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Phone: 650–723–1754

Posted by lmurx at 3:06 PM 0 comments

What Does South Korea Want?



What Does South Korea Want?
By Jongryn Mo

Less U.S., more self-reliance.

The north korean nuclear crisis entered a new phase when Pyongyang detonated a nuclear device on October 9, 2006. The response of the international community to the North Korean test was swift and stern. The five other countries participating in the North Korean Six-Party talks condemned North Korea immediately after the test, and the un Security Council passed a resolution imposing new sanctions on the North five days later.

International reactions grew more diverse over time, however. The North Korean nuclear test added new urgency to a peaceful settlement of the crisis and spurred a flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at solving it through the Six-Party talks. Some would argue that this greater interest in diplomacy was responsible for the February 2007 accord in Beijing on the initial steps toward North Korea’s nuclear disarmament.

But whether or not the nuclear test will change the basic configuration of national interests and policies on the North Korea security threat remains to be seen. Even in the aftermath of the provocation, three members of the Six- Party talks, South Korea, China, and Russia, have expressed clear reservations about drastic change in North Korea policy and emphasized the importance of diplomacy and dialogue in resolving the nuclear crisis. South Korea, in particular, has been reluctant to revise its engagement policy toward the North. Nor do the recent Six-Party talk agreements mean that Washington and Tokyo have given up their hard-line policies toward Pyongyang. Distrust of the North Koreans runs deep in Washington, and American negotiators went out of their way during the February 2007 talks to emphasize the tentative nature of the Beijing agreement.

In particular, the disagreement between South Korea and the United States is likely to persist even as they work together for the successful completion of the Six-Party talks. The current discord between the two allies goes back to the early 2000s, when the new Bush administration adopted a hard-line approach toward the North, and Seoul chose to adhere to the policy of engagement with Pyongyang that began in 1997 with the election of Kim Dae Jung as president. When Roh Moo-hyun succeeded Kim in 2002 and continued with the pro-engagement approach, it became apparent that South Korean assertiveness was here to stay.

Given the importance of the engagement policy to the identity and legacy of the current South Korean government, it is highly unlikely that it will be aggressive in supporting the un sanctions and other U.S.-led hard-line initiatives. If the past nine years of South Korean policy are any indication, it will likely take a change of government in Seoul to see a fundamental transformation in South Korea’s policy toward the North. No wonder that the upcoming presidential election in December 2007 is attracting so much attention.1

Many believe that if the conservative Grand National Party (gnp) wins after a decade in opposition, it will return to the pre-1997 hard-line policy. Likewise, it is said that another victory by the ruling Uri party will lead to the continuation of the pro-engagement policy. But I argue that these expectations are merely assumptions. There is no guarantee that a new gnp government will adopt a stand that is drastically different from that of the current administration. Neither can we assume that the next Uri government will automatically inherit Roh’s security policy. Rather, it seems more likely that the next government’s security policy will be determined not only by the party that captures power, but also by the nature of the factions that gain control of party policies.

In my view, there are at least four schools of thought that may determine the security policy of the next government. This essay will first explore the differences and commonalities among the four schools, before discussing which school is more likely to ensure long-term security for the country. I will then examine the political approaches that proponents will have to undertake in order to shape South Korea’s post-Roh security policy.

Left and right

Since Kim Dae Jung became president in 1997 and adopted the policy of engagement toward Pyongyang known as the sunshine policy, the left and the right have repeatedly clashed over issues ranging from North Korea’s nuclear policy to the U.S.-Korean military alliance and regional security. 2 In South Korean politics, the left is represented by the past two governments of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo-hyun, while the right by the opposition Grand National Party. Although the left-right distinction is useful for describing the main cleavage in the South Korean foreign policy establishment, it obscures significant differences among various factions within each group. Therefore, new terms are needed in identifying major security orientations.

We can start differentiating groups by identifying key policy issues. The two main issues that divide policymakers and experts in South Korea are first, how best to exercise power toward the North, and second, where, between South Korea and the United States, to place responsibility for dealing with North Korea.

On exercising power toward the North, there are two positions — engagement and coercion. Those who want to engage North Korea are liberal because they believe that North Koreans are not inherently aggressive and that sustained engagement can modify Pyongyang’s behavior. Opponents of the engagement approach, doubtful that Pyongyang would be satisfied with the benefits of cooperation, present a classically realist argument. They believe that North Koreans are belligerent and that such hostility can only be deterred by the full display of power involving both rewards and punishments. Certainly, this debate between liberals and realists over how to view North Korea is hardly unique to South Korea. The debate is also a contentious one within the United States between doves and hawks. But the South Korean division on the second issue — which country should be responsible for exercising diplomatic leadership toward North Korea — is less universalistic and has largely been shaped by the country’s history.

Pan-Korean nationalists believe that Seoul should assume primary responsibility. Another group, known as the pro-Americans, believes that the responsibility should fall squarely on the shoulders of Washington, given the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. The pro-Americans have no qualms about South Korea’s taking a backseat when it comes to negotiating with or defending the South against the threat from the North. Yet another group, the multilateralists, takes a more nuanced position. While recognizing the importance of the U.S.-South Korea alliance, their emphasis is on maintaining an equal relationship. They are also more open to the idea of allowing China and other countries to participate in the diplomatic process to resolve the North Korean issue.

So, depending on one’s position on the two issues, there can be six possible perspectives on South Korean security policy (see Table i). Among them, I have identified liberal nationalism, liberal multilateralism, realist nationalism, and realist pro-Americanism as the four leading contenders.3

Table I

Primary policy features (and leading advocates) of various security policy orientations in South Korea

leadership/
approach
liberal
realist

Nationalist South Korea leads a policy of engagement against the North.
(Kim Dae Jung) South Korea leads international pressure on the North to disarm, and takes over responsibility for its own defense
(Park Chung Hee)

Pro-American South Korea relies on the United States to engage the North The United States is responsible for coercing and deterring North Korea
(Grand National Party)

Multi-Lateralist South Korea works with the United States and China as equal partners in engaging the North
(Roh Moo-hyun) South Korea works with the United States and China in coercing the North

If we attempt to fit the left and right into this framework, I would say that the classic leftist thinking in South Korea falls into the category of liberal nationalism. Liberal nationalists believe that the two Koreas should determine the destiny of the Korean peninsula, and that inter-Korean cooperation (minjok kongjo) is the primary means for achieving security on the peninsula. Seoul must negotiate directly with Pyongyang in order to modify North Korea’s behavior. Thus, it is not surprising that after the October 9 nuclear test, many liberal nationalists, led by former president Kim Dae Jung, asked Roh Moo-hyun to meet and negotiate directly with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

The rise of liberal nationalism has been gradual yet perceptible. It first began to make inroads into the foreign policy establishment under the Kim Dae Jung government. And although it was not immediately apparent at that time, Kim’s sunshine policy was a quintessential liberal nationalist policy. While it is true that Kim did not call into question the legitimacy and importance of the U.S.-South Korean military alliance, it is worth bearing in mind that he did not have to do so, as the sunshine policy was not incompatible with the policy of engagement then being pursued by the Clinton administration. The nationalistic element of Kim’s liberal nationalism would certainly have become much more discernible if the former president had had to work with a more conservative U.S. administration.

The mainstream rightist position, on the other hand, is realist pro-Americanism. Realist pro-Americans not only distrust North Korea but also are skeptical about the utility of engagement. They scoff at what they perceive as unreciprocated engagement, and prefer either benign neglect or a mild regime of sanctions toward the North. But unlike their American counterparts, South Korean realists would not go as far as to support severe sanctions (such as blockades) or the use of force against Pyongyang.4 In line with their realist tendencies, realist pro-Americans accept a primary role for the United States in defending South Korea, as well as for taming the North’s nuclear ambitions. They also do not see anything wrong with allowing direct negotiations between the U.S. and the North, which was what happened during the first North Korean nuclear crisis of 1993–94. Given the current threat faced by South Korea, realist pro-Americanism types believe they have no choice but to rely on American military protection. Hence, they do not see any point in strengthening the country’s military capabilities. They also feel that there is little that Seoul can add to the arsenal of U.S. military power. Overall, then, it would not be far wrong to say that realist pro-Americans have adopted an almost pacifist attitude toward the country’s military capabilities.

This pacifist view seems to be shared by — indeed, it seems to be the guiding principle of — the Grand National Party and the conservative media. Both have fought hard to maintain the U.S.-South Korean military alliance, and have generally exhibited little enthusiasm for increasing the country’s defense expenditures. The proportion of gdp allocated to defense has been continuously declining since the early 1980s, from a high of 5.8 percent in 1980 to 2.4 percent in 2004. This defense cutback preceded the last two progressive administrations, beginning way back when the conservative parties were still in power.

The conservative media, too, have adopted the hues of pacifism. They have hardly taken issue with the gradual disarmament of South Korea and still argue against the recent controversy surrounding the transfer of wartime command of troops to the South Korean military on the grounds that doing so would increase Seoul’s defense burden.

A liberal multilateralist

Although liberal nationalism and realist pro-Americanism represent the two pillars of the South Korean foreign policy establishment, they are not the only influential ones. In fact, neither school characterizes the current policy of the Roh Moo-hyun government.

For many observers, there seems to be little difference between Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae Jung, with the former having inherited the latter’s sunshine policy. Moreover, like his predecessor, Roh also seems to believe that engagement is the only viable policy when it comes to dealing with an isolated and increasingly vulnerable North Korea.

But beyond the surface similarities, there are two important differences between Roh and Kim. First, Roh does not place as much importance on inter-Korean relations as Kim did, and it is clear that he is in no hurry to meet top North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. Kim Dae Jung had no qualms about making illegal payments to North Korea in order to consummate their 2002 inter-Korean summit meeting. In contrast, Roh has clearly indicated that a second summit would be held only after the North Korean nuclear issue has been resolved.5

Second, Roh is more aggressive when it comes to defining a new, independent role for South Korea within Northeast Asia.6 His government has sought to move the center stage of Korean diplomacy to Northeast Asia, and away from U.S.-Korean bilateral relations. Given the rise of China, the increasing rivalry between China and Japan, and an uneasy U.S.-China relationship, it is perhaps unsurprising that Roh has sought to redefine South Korea’s role in the Northeast Asian region. Instead of relying exclusively on the United States, Roh believes that South Korea should work with her neighbors to manage constructively the shifting balances of power, and to help ensure regional peace and prosperity.

So Roh’s policy is neither liberal nationalism nor realist pro-Americanism. Rather, it is liberal multilateralism. Roh is liberal in so far as he continues to support the engagement policy toward North Korea. But he is not a (pan-Korean) nationalist, as he seeks active reliance on international cooperation — rather than on inter-Korean cooperation — in resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis. Multilateralism also describes Roh insofar as he favors more independence from the U.S., believing that such a form of independence will allow Seoul to take on the role of a true balancer or mediator within Northeast Asia. Indeed, playing the role of balancer means that South Korea needs to effectively maintain an arm’s-length attitude with all major powers in the region.

This multilateralist approach adopted by Roh has basically resulted in a dual-track policy — a mixture of independence and cooperation — toward the United States. The independence comes in the form of Roh’s disagreement with the U.S. over North Korea, where his determination in maintaining an engagement policy has conflicted with Washington’s equally staunch determination to pursue a hard-line policy. While the Bush administration believes that coordinated pressure on North Korea is the only workable option, the Roh government is adamantly opposed to any form of coercion or punishment. In fact, it can be argued that this desire for more independence has been the impetus for his pushing for the transfer of Korea’s wartime command from Washington to Seoul.

While Roh has sought to be more independent of the United States over North Korea, he has also cooperated with and strengthened the U.S.-Korean alliance. Despite domestic opposition and misgivings, Roh dispatched a large number of Korean ground troops to Iraq in 2004. At Washington’s request, Seoul agreed in January 2006 that U.S. troops in South Korea could be deployed for operations outside of the Korean peninsula — a move that no doubt enhanced the strategic flexibility of the U.S. military. Yet another example of a closer U.S.-Korean cooperation came in the form of the November 2005 apec summit declaration, in which the two leaders agreed that the mechanism leading to the Six-Party talks could eventually develop into a multilateral security framework for the Northeast Asian region.

Roh’s dual-track strategy toward the U.S. is most clearly demonstrated by his commitment to the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (korus fta). The announcement of the beginning of korus fta negotiations in February 2006 came as a surprise to many, as few had expected Roh to initiate such a politically sensitive and divisive policy toward the end of his administration. The choice of the United States over China as the first major fta partner was also a clear indication that the Roh government still considers the U.S. to be South Korea’s most important partner. The korus fta is also of significance to the U.S., as South Korea will be the first Northeast Asian country to enter into an fta with the United States.

Liberal multilateralism isn’t working

Roh’s liberal multilateralism may sound reasonable in theory, but it has not worked out as planned. As North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests show, Roh Moo-hyun’s liberal policy has done little to change North Korean behavior. Nor has his multilateralism improved South Korea’s international relations. Seoul’s relations with Washington have also deteriorated to such a point that U.S. officials have openly hinted at the possibility of withdrawing American troops from the South. Relations with Tokyo have also worsened over historical issues and territorial disputes. Even China has not exactly been a close partner. In a move away from the common stand adopted by both China and South Korea, Beijing has employed tougher rhetoric and actions in response to the North Korean missile and nuclear tests. Beijing was also taken aback by Seoul’s decision to pursue a free trade agreement with the United States. In fact, it is hard to think of any country with which the Roh government has a good relationship. This has led to worries by analysts that South Korea has become increasingly isolated and marginalized in its international diplomacy over North Korea. 7

The main problem with Roh’s liberal multilateralism is that it requires him to carry out a perfect balancing act at all levels — between liberal nationalists and realist pro-Americans within Korea, between North Korea and the United States, and between China and the United States. The theory is untenable if Roh makes even the slightest mistake. And when mistakes occur, his carefully crafted policy of strategic compromise can result either in political opportunism or in policy inconsistency.

Another problem is that while Roh’s liberal multilateralist approach may be appropriate for dealing with Korea’s long-term strategic challenges, it does not address the immediate North Korea problem. In the short run, the United States is Seoul’s only partner in dealing with the North Korean threat. Although it is true that China, given its phenomenal growth, has compelled Seoul to find ways to deepen and expand relations with Beijing, the pressure from China so far has not been strong enough to expand the China-South Korean relationship to the military and security areas. Seoul does not yet have to avoid taking a clear stance that appears to favor either the United States or China.

Domestic support for Roh’s liberal multilateralism is also weakening. Instead of satisfying both the liberal nationalists and realist pro-Americans as he had intended, he has ended up alienating both groups. Liberal nationalists are unhappy with Roh for several reasons. First, they accuse him of having neglected inter-Korean relations. Second, they are upset with his concessions to the U.S. military on such issues as the relocation of U.S. bases. Finally, the korus fta is seen as a complete reversal of Roh’s Northeast Asian-centered foreign policy.

While realist pro-Americans support in principle Roh’s korus fta, they are deeply suspicious of his commitment to the agreement. Some even believe he would intentionally derail the fta negotiations at an opportune moment, so as to inflame anti-Americanism for his political advantage. The realist pro-Americans’ distrust of Roh certainly runs deep, and it is easy to see why. Roh waged an anti-American campaign for the 2002 presidential election that eventually swept him to power, and many believe that he has, by and large, continued with his anti-American stance during his presidency. And though he has offered a few concessions to Washington, realist pro-Americans feel that these gestures will hardly offset the damage inflicted on U.S.-Korean relations as a result of his North Korean policy. Realist pro-Americans also complain that the United States would not have asked for the relocation and expanded role of U.S. troops in Korea if the Roh government had been more cooperative on dealing with North Korea.

The moral high ground

If roh moo-hyun’s security policy has failed both to deliver a suitable level of security for South Korea and to win domestic popular support, South Koreans should rightfully turn to an alternative course of action after Roh steps down in February 2008. But what that course of action will be is still uncertain, as a lot depends on how South Korean conservatives position themselves. If the conservatives stick to their realist pro-American position, they will have little chance of making an impact on the country’s security options.

Under the current structure of policy discourse, with three competing ideologies — liberal nationalism, liberal multilateralism, and realist pro-Americanism — liberal multilateralism may be thought to be the most politically viable, with its centrist position between two “extremes.” Besides, in a winner-take-all plurality electoral system, political parties have, during presidential elections, been induced to move to the center, and this centrist approach is already gaining currency in Korean party politics ahead of the December presidential election. This can be seen in the issue of wartime command transfer, where the gnp has chosen not to attack the Roh government’s position because it is aware that opposing a nationalistic policy is politically dangerous.

Another reason for pessimism is that the current conservative realist pro-American thinking clearly fails to strike a chord with increasingly independent-minded and idealistic Korean voters. These voters want their government to offer a vision for national defense in which they can take pride. But not only has this proven elusive, it has also been undermined by realist pro-American arguments that effectively beseech them to depend on the United States for the country’s defense.

In this situation, the only alternative for South Korean conservatives is to return to a realist nationalist approach.8 Essentially, this means advocating a strong independent military capacity and a more equal U.S.-Korean alliance. Such a stance will make South Korea independently strong against the North, and provide Seoul with a new, more region-based U.S. alliance ready to take up the challenges of regional security. Seen in that light, realist nationalism will satisfy both South Korea’s short- and long-term security needs.

Of course realist nationalism will come at a price, but the economic cost will not be as formidable as it seems. The Roh government has already promised to spend an additional $621 billion over the next 15 years to achieve a state of self-reliant defense. During that entire period, South Korea’s defense burden will not exceed 3.0 percent of its gdp.9 Even if more money is needed for self-reliant defense, Seoul can still keep its defense spending below 4.0 percent of its gdp — or the same level of defense spending currently allocated by both the United States and China.

While there is no running away from allocating for defense expenditure, it should be pointed out that adopting the realist pro-American approach is not exactly cost-free, either. The economic price simply comes later. Realist pro-Americanism has created a pacifist culture among the Korean elites and public, but such an outlook is clearly unsustainable in the long run. Sooner or later, South Korea will have to make the tough choice between maintaining its security and sustaining its economic growth, especially when the North Korean threat recedes and the security priorities of the United States change.10 When that day comes, Seoul will have to assume the giant’s share of the country’s defense. Hence, to ameliorate the impact of an inflated defense expenditure in the near future, South Korean conservatives should take the lead in adopting the moral high ground on national defense. They should demand greater defense spending and a more equal U.S.-Korean alliance structure.

Of course, one may question the domestic political viability of realist nationalism. After all, realist nationalists have been losing ground in South Korean politics since the late 1980s. Besides, political elites who have entered politics since democratization began in 1987 have an almost natural aversion to realist nationalism, which they discredit as an outdated relic of authoritarianism. Realist nationalism’s cause has been further eroded since the end of the Cold War, which rendered North Korea politically isolated and economically marginalized. Consequently, a majority of South Koreans no longer views the North as a serious threat, and sees no reason why the country should boost its defense expenditures.

But one can counter that this decline in public support for realist nationalism is due precisely to a lack of imagination on the part of the South Korean conservatives. Instead of meeting the challenges of leftist nationalism head-on, they have taken the easy way out by opting for a free ride for the country’s defense. The conservative message to the public has been “our program costs less,” a message that hardly inspires confidence for the many assertive young voters who have grown up knowing only peace and prosperity.

Domestic political conditions may also be altered by changes in tactics, and one such may lie in the clear political advantage of the nationalistic component inherent to realist nationalism. Realist nationalists can assume the moral high ground by claiming sovereignty over North Korea and opposing any foreign intervention in North Korea that might threaten South Korea’s fundamental interests. Although realist nationalists support the U.S.-Korean military alliance in the prevailing security environment, they believe that South Korea should seek to strengthen its own independent defense capabilities in order either to increase the country’s leverage over the U.S. or to better prepare itself for a possible breakup of the alliance.

Realist nationalists are also idealistic, willing to make sacrifices to defend their country and stand up to North Korean leaders. Armed with such idealism and the willingness to pay for the country’s freedom, the conservatives can appear more credible and are able to strengthen their arguments in defense of universal values both in North Korea and within the region.

While they may come across as more nationalistic than realist pro-Americans, realist nationalists are practical enough to differentiate themselves from the liberal policy orientations of the Roh government. Hence, realist nationalism can be presented as a clear alternative to the liberalism of the past two administrations. After ten years of engagement that has failed to produce tangible results, realist nationalists can rightfully argue that it is time to adopt a new hard-line approach toward North Korea.

Realist nationalism will lead to better international relations for South Korea, as well. Since a realist nationalist government will not hesitate to assume primary responsibility for countering the North Korean threat, relations with Washington are likely to be improved. Realist nationalists will also be more open to increasing the strategic flexibility of American forces in Korea, as well as to bear a higher burden for keeping the troops in Korea. That is because they understand that while Seoul may be able to defend itself against Pyongyang, the country’s long-term security in the region cannot be achieved without the continued presence and flexibility of American troops.

As for China, Beijing will not be worse off under a realist nationalist South Korean government. The Roh government has aptly demonstrated that liberal multilateralists are not necessarily more pro-China than realist nationalists. Indeed, liberal nationalism may be more pro-China in propping up the North Korean regime than realist nationalism, but there is also the possibility that it may become anti-China if Beijing decides to modify its policy toward North Korea.

The realist nationalist moment

It is not without a tinge of irony that one notes that it took a leftist government to force the South Koreans to come to terms with their security problem. One way or another, South Korea must now grapple with the challenge of self-reliant defense.

How the South Korean conservatives deal with this challenge will determine the future of South Korean security in the decades ahead. If they choose to continue with their realist pro-Americanism, they are likely to be defeated by nationalistic offensives launched by the progressives. The consequences of this failure will be far-reaching, as it will plunge South Korea into continued insecurity and diplomatic isolation.

In searching for a winning ideology, South Korean conservatives should place principles at the forefront of their new campaign. They should understand that it is morally unsound to anchor their whole defense strategy on free riding on defense. Rather, they should revive their nationalism, which has historically been their moral foundation, and mount their own offensive by advocating even stronger self-reliant defense capabilities than their political opponents. They can further enhance their moral high ground by embracing human rights and democracy in North Korea and the Northeast Asian region.

The South Korean conservatives must be quick to seize on the realist nationalist momentum, since time may not be on their side. Before the campaign for the next presidential election begins in earnest, they must unite to present a coherent realist agenda to South Korean voters
1 Nicholas Eberstadt analyzed the importance of the 2002 presidential election in the context of the U.S.-Korean alliance. As he predicted, the alliance could not withstand the leftist shift of Korean politics. Nicholas Eberstadt, “Our Other Korean Problem,” National Interest 69 (Fall 2002).

2 For a comprehensive analysis of South Korean politics based on the left-right dichotomy, see Chaibong Hahm, “The Two South Koreas: A House Divided,” Washington Quarterly 28:3 (Summer 2005).

3 We can discern a variant of liberal pro-Americanism among some supporters of Roh Moo-hyun. Bae Ki-chan, who is a foreign policy advisor to Roh at the Blue House, argues that South Korea should enlist the United States as its partner for the reconciliation and reunification with the North. But he does not explain why the United States would go along with this South Korean design. Realistically, it is difficult to imagine that the United States will go out of its way to lead the engagement process that the South Korean liberals favor. Realist multilateralism is not realistic at the moment, since it would require strong security and military cooperation among South Korea, the United States, and China in tackling the North. Bae Ki-chan, Korea Standing Again on a Crossroads of Survival (Wisdom House, 2005).

4 South Korean geographical proximity to the North would always make Seoul more risk-averse than Washington in using coercion.

5 South Korean conservatives have long feared that Roh will turn to the summit meeting with Kim Jong-Il in an attempt to revive the chances of the ruling Uri party in the 2007 election. From this perspective, the pursuit of a second summit by Roh would be purely a domestic political act, not a change in his policy preferences.

6 Chung-in Moon, “Confidence-Building and Peace-Building in Asia,” paper presented at the East Asia Research Forum, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea (September 23–25, 2005).

7 See Bruce Klingner, “South Korea’s Growing Isolation,” Asia Times (August 5, 2006). .

8 Realist nationalism was the dominant ideology of the South Korean government during the Cold War. Former president Park Chung Hee was a classic realist nationalist. Even under the structure of the U.S.-Korean security alliance, he worked assiduously to develop self-defense capabilities for his military. The fabled Heavy and Chemical Industries Drive of the 1970s, in which Korea’s current industries were initiated, was as much motivated by security imperatives as by economic ones, as it was felt that a strong heavy industry was necessary for an indigenous arms industry. When realist nationalists held power, South Korea kept up its defense spending.

9 Yong-sup Han, “Analyzing South Korea’s Defense Reform 2020,” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 18 (2006).

10 Selig S. Harrison,. “South Korea-U.S. Alliance Under the Roh Government,” Policy Forum Online 2006, 06–28a, Nautilus Institute. See also Doug Bandow, “Seoul Searching: Ending the U.S.-Korean Alliance,” National Interest 81 (Fall 2005).

Jongryn Mo is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University

Posted by lmurx at 3:01 PM 0 comments

Dealing with A Nuclear Iran



Dealing with A Nuclear Iran

By Kori Schake

Some timely changes will help us cope with the unknown.

L ost in the debate about how to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold is the fact that we lack the ability to prevent it. The Iranians have the indigenous technical ability, and possibly the nuclear material, to build nuclear weapons right now. They can do it if they want to, and we know so little about their program they could likely achieve it without detection. The question is why they’re so intent on detection.

There are several potential explanations of Iranian government behavior, but the U.S. is unlikely ever to have adequate understanding of the opaque workings of Iran to determine its true motivations. This gap in our knowledge is only one of many. Yet our government is going to need to make policy decisions on how to deal with Iranian intransigence and duplicity without the luxury of better information. Building a successful strategy requires acknowledging areas of uncertainty and hedging against misjudgment. But we should not allow imperfect information to paralyze action that better secures our interests.

The current course we are on seems likely to result in the U.S. accentuating the political value Iran would gain from going nuclear, while reducing our own leverage to affect Iran’s choices or increase the cost to them short of a military attack. It is very much in America’s interests to frame our concerns differently. Iran’s reaction to even the mild sanctions approved by the un Security Council in December will raise the stakes and force a confrontation should Iran actually expand enrichment, as they are preparing to do. Rather than trapping ourselves in a policy that will leave us little choice but destroying the Iranian program on terms unfavorable to us or appearing impotent to prevent it, we should adopt a three-pronged approach of:

* increasing un sanctions and U.S. military pressure on Iran while opening negotiations on cessation of enrichment and a range of other issues, such as government repression and stabilizing Iraq;
* calling into question the existence and usability of any weapons that have not been tested, thereby shifting the burden of proof from our claims that fuel enrichment will give Iran nuclear weapons to Iranian action that will be indisputable, namely, a test nuclear explosion;
* clearly and publicly articulating our determination to destroy any Iranian nuclear weapons we believe are being readied for use.

What we do know

Iran acceded to the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. Information revealed in 2002 by an exiled Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, of the existence of a uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and heavy water plant at Arak demonstrated that Iran had been deceiving the International Atomic Energy Agency since at least 1984, by the iaea’s own estimate. Information gained in the 2004 investigation of the A.Q. Khan network revealed additional undeclared nuclear activities: acquisition of p2 centrifuge designs and components from Pakistan. At no time during those 18 years of iaea supervision was there detection of activity prohibited by the npt, which should suggest both the limits of iaea knowledge (the treaty entails inspections only at declared civilian nuclear facilities) and the complacency of those who consider iaea inspections sufficient to ensure states do not acquire nuclear weapons.

In the iaea’s defense — and it has performed creditably in the Iranian case — when they were permitted to inspect Natanz and Arak in 2003, inspectors reported Iran had failed to comply with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s behavior in the ensuing three years is a discouraging litany:

* Iran commits to suspend all enrichment activity and signs a protocol allowing unscheduled inspections of its nuclear facilities;
* After six months the iaea reports Iran has not cooperated with inspections;
* Iran threatens to resume production and testing of centrifuges in retaliation for iaea complaints;
* Iran resumes uranium conversion in September 2005; President Ahmadinejad claims Iran is prepared to transfer nuclear knowledge to other Muslim nations;
* Iran rejects Russia’s December 2005 offer to reprocess nuclear material;
* Iran resumes research on the nuclear fuel cycle at Natanz in January 2006, precipitating an end to eu negotiations and iaea support for referring Iran to the un Security Council for “many failures and breaches of its obligations”;
* Iran threatens to cease cooperating with the iaea if referred to the Security Council;
* In March 2006, the Security Council calls on Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment within 30 days; Iran does not comply;
* On April 11, President Ahmadinejad announces Iran has successfully enriched uranium;
* The U.S. sweetens the eu offer to Iran by committing to join the negotiations provided Iran suspends uranium enrichment; for five weeks, Iran fails to respond;
* g-8 leaders call for Iran to reply to the eu-U.S. offer;
* Iran stalls until late August, then replies it will negotiate, but will not suspend enrichment as a precondition to negotiations;
* The un Security Council passes resolution 1737, approving sanctions against Iran for noncompliance with the iaea;
* Iran dismisses the sanctions as meaningless and prepares to begin large-scale reprocessing in March, readying cascades of 3,000 centrifuges.

The pattern of Iranian behavior during the negotiations does not support the hopeful proposition that the Iranian government is foremost seeking a way back into the mainstream of international activity. To the contrary, President Ahmadinejad gives every indication of reveling in the crisis and pressing for tactical advantage. In January, he announced with satisfaction, “we are rapidly becoming a superpower.” Iran appeared convinced before sanctions were imposed that the international community would not take concerted action. While parts of the Iranian government appear to be distancing themselves somewhat from President Ahmadinejad since sanctions were imposed, the government has proceeded with an escalation from two experimental cascades of 164 centrifuges engaged in enrichment to over 3,000 centrifuges, an overt rejection of un and iaea demands. Ahmadinejad is not in a position to make those decisions without support of at least Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — in other words, he must have his government’s backing.

Iran’s behavior in the negotiations has achieved what many thought impossible: convergence of the European and American views. Europeans are now convinced that Iran is working assiduously to develop nuclear weapons and cannot be trusted. French government officials have even gone so far as to complain that the U.S. needs to “act American” and be more overtly threatening to pressure Iran into accepting the advantageous deals European governments have been offering. European concern, however, is unlikely to translate into preemptive attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. Moreover, Iran may have learned unhelpful lessons from the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict last summer: Even though there was obvious evidence of Iranian support to Hezbollah (the long-range rockets being fired at Israel were of Iranian manufacture, as was the c-802 cruise missile fired at an Israeli corvette), European states advocated negotiations with Iran to bring about an immediate cease-fire. Iran may well believe it has even more political leverage in Palestine and Lebanon after the fighting last summer; applying that lesson to the nuclear issue, Iran could expect that as tensions rise, European calls for engagement and diminution of U.S. threats would defuse a crisis.


What we don’t know

There have been several points at which Iran could have chosen a different course with real benefits. Perhaps the most telling opportunity was a Russian offer to provide reprocessing. Iran could almost certainly have covertly manipulated such a scheme into access to weapons-grade material, given the Russian government’s laissez-faire attitude about Iranian nuclear programs, the corrupt autonomy of rusatom, and the military-industrial links between the countries. If acquiring nuclear weapons were the sole objective, Iran could have achieved it without all the international attention. But it has chosen a much more flamboyant path. Why?

The Iranian government is unconstrained in the way democratic governments are by institutional requirements to outline security objectives, strategy, and spending plans. It is reasonable to assume, however, that Iran’s key security objectives include the desire to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region, to deter U.S. military power from use against Iran, to provide additional leverage against regional foes (such as Israel), and to export its brand of revolutionary Shi’ite Islam. These objectives would all be advanced by a visible nuclear weapons program. But Iran has been getting quite a lot of lucky breaks in recent years, including the U.S. removing governments hostile to Tehran in Afghanistan and Iraq; the price of oil reaching $70 per barrel; the weakness of governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, all of which are vulnerable to pressure from Iran or such proxies as Hezbollah and Hamas; the friction in U.S. relations with most Arab states over Iraq, democratization, and support for Israeli attacks in Lebanon; the ostracism of Israel by Europe and Middle Eastern states for its attacks on Hezbollah; and portents of Sunni-Shi’ite conflict in Iraq raising the profile of restive Shi’ite minorities. Why not enjoy the benefits of its strengthened position without incurring the costs of overtly pressing forward with a nuclear program? Why hide a nuclear program for 18 years, then bring it out into the open when, by some accounts, Iran has the least need of it?

It could be that Iran perceives the U.S. to be so politically compromised and militarily tied down in Iraq that now is the best time to accelerate its nuclear program. Iran could be banking on European fecklessness and Russian and Chinese apathy to permit a fait accompli before the U.S. has reconstituted its strength and willingness to fight. But this leaves the Israeli calculus unchanged, and Israel is the country most likely to find an Iranian nuclear program intolerable. Whatever other mistakes the U.S. made in Iraq, it did demonstrate a willingness to attack a state believed to possess weapons of mass destruction and a nuclear program. Iran’s leap across the nuclear threshold now does not guarantee it impunity. If maximizing its presumed security objectives were the Iranian government’s plan, taunting the U.S., Israel, and Europe with an overt nuclear program would seem to put at risk at least some of the gains Iran is already achieving at very little cost.

The Iranian government’s behavior could be a calculated effort to buy time for uranium enrichment to reach sufficiency for weapons. Frustrated Iranian nationalism could then explain the choice to produce the enriched material domestically and to proclaim its origin loudly. As we do not know how long Iranian enrichment has been underway, or whether Iran purchased weapons-grade material that would reduce the indigenous production requirement, it would be difficult to gauge how much time that would require. The government may be thinking that with Russian and Chinese reluctance to allow a un blessing for a military attack, with Europeans unwilling to use force themselves, and with the U.S. tied down in Iraq and sure to be excoriated internationally should it preempt without certain proof, time is on Iran’s side. The government might even hope for a Pakistan-style outcome: riding out a brief period of international condemnation that international dependence (in Iran’s case, on oil) could allow Iran to quickly overcome.

A modification of the buying-time strategy is the “Japanese option” of demonstrating the technical proficiency for a rapid npt breakout but forgoing the actuality in order to avoid international ostracism. A Japanese option holds the potential to advance Iran’s security objectives without incurring the worse consequences an overt program might bring. Iran could have a program-in-being without actual weaponization, simply to create the impression it has nuclear weapons. This approach would hold the attention of Israel (its most likely regional foe), the U.S. (its most likely strategic foe), and other Arab (particularly Sunni) states. The key for this approach would be mastering the technology, which could explain Iran’s insistence on enrichment, which is considered the principal technological threshold to successful weapons development. It would also explain Iran’s refusing iaea inspections, especially if Tehran is hoping to benefit early by overstating its technical capacity — gaining nuclear status before it has the actual weapons.

It could be that Ahmadinejad is an immature political actor unaccustomed to international scrutiny and has blundered into the crisis. Khamenei’s decision in July to create advisory councils reporting directly to him on foreign affairs and wto preparedness could be seen as a rebuke to Ahmadinejad’s recklessness, as could the Militant Clerics Association’s complaints to Khamenei about Ahmadinejad. This seems the least plausible of the explanations, simply because the Iranian president has little authority in national security issues: It is extremely unlikely he could initiate resumption of enrichment activity without involvement of Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard. Moreover, until un sanctions were voted, other leading figures in the Iranian government did nothing to try to tone down Ahmadinejad or chief negotiator Ali Lirijani’s positions. In the months since sanctions were approved, the government has seemed less unified, with several leaders distancing themselves from President Ahmadinejad and criticizing his policies for risking international isolation. This suggests Iranians had a high degree of confidence their serial mendacity would not incur multilateral action; it also suggests a high value accorded to European, Russian, and Chinese opprobrium. The government of Iran may revel in U.S. opposition, but action against Iran that Europe and other powerful states support is viewed in a more worrisome light.

Another possible explanation for Iranian behavior is that as a result of extended international isolation and delusions of grandeur, the Iranian government is misperceiving the strength of its position and international reaction to its actions. Having carefully controlled the domestic debate to exclude information about its deception of the iaea and ensure it is defined by possession of nuclear technology, the Iranian government has latitude to strike principled poses about Iran’s supposed rights under the npt while probing how much the anxious Europeans and weary Americans are willing to pay for cessation of the nuclear program. This would explain the threats issued to supporters of referring Iran’s nuclear program to the Security Council (including India, oddly enough) as well as the unwillingness to accept any of several good offers made by the eu and Russia, and even now the U.S., in the past three years. Iran also has a history of underestimating and misreading the West, particularly since the Islamic Revolution: the hostage crisis that reinforced the worst stereotypes of the Revolution, the counterinvasion of Iraq that was enormously costly in lives and moral standing, the tanker war, and the 1988 operational engagement with U.S. forces (Operation praying mantis). With oil at $70 a barrel, U.S. sanctions under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ilsa) have had a negligible effect on Iranian gdp (estimated at only $11.50 per Iranian in 1997), and international sanctions ring hollow.1 Iranian leaders may believe their oil so valuable the West will have to give them a pass on the nuclear program eventually, and see no penalty for engaging in extended negotiations that create the perception of international status. That Ahmadinejad visited Venezuela and offered $1 billion to a joint fund to reduce American imperialism suggests he may even see an opportunity for building an international profile in conjunction with other charismatic anti-American leaders.

It is even possible that the Iranian government’s choices about pursuing its nuclear program have very little to do with security or the international community, but instead are a product of domestic jockeying for position among an institutionally dominant supreme leader with waning revolutionary legitimacy seeking to tap into the Iran-Iraq war veterans’ constituency as the next wave of political power, a president popular for his common-sense relaxation of religious dicta and promises to end corruption and boost the economy but unable to deliver economically, and elites (of which Rafsanjani is representative) trying to maintain their commercial and political advantages as Iraq democratizes. This would explain the Ahmadinejad letter to President Bush, which could be an effort to consolidate domestic power by gaining credit for resuming contact with a country popular with the Iranian public and an important portal for economic modernization. It would also explain the Iranian demurral on negotiations with the U.S., if the delay in response is occurring due to a debate in policy councils about how to gain or apportion credit for the achievement or because no one in the Iranian government is in a position to deliver the deal.

The likeliest explanation is all of the above: The Iranian government wants to publicly cross the nuclear threshold by self-sufficiency to threaten its enemies and assuage its bruised national pride, is stalling and probing international reaction to understand what it will cost to achieve that goal, and is also navigating the competing domestic power centers and dealing with an immature political leader and distorted perceptions of international views. However, we don’t actually know, and we are unlikely to develop a sophisticated understanding within the time frame in which we will need to make policy choices about the Iranian nuclear program. Therefore, we need a strategy that doesn’t depend on knowing what Iranian motivations actually are or foreclose our ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of any of these eventualities.

Other things we don’t know

Our ignorance is, in fact, much broader. We do not know with any reliability the nature of Iranian command and control, either for the development programs or for the weapons’ operational employment. We do not know the location or even the existence of the full array of laboratories and manufacturing plants. We do not know the extent of the program: Is it attempting to develop a dozen weapons, hundreds, or thousands? We do not know what Iranian doctrine envisions for their use. We do not know whether simple deterrence to ensure state survival is the political aim of their possession, or whether the Iranian government has grander, more aggressive ambitions. We do not know whether possessing the weapons will reassure Iran and make its behavior more stable and predictable, as has been the case with other possessor states (such as India and Pakistan), or more likely to provoke crises to test the political currency of the arsenal (as was the case with the Soviet Union). We do not know whether Iran will proliferate the knowledge and weapons to other states or terrorist organizations.

Perhaps the most important thing we do not know about the Iranian nuclear program is when it will produce nuclear weapons. Intelligence estimates vary widely. The most recent assessment, representing the consensus of the U.S. intelligence agencies (and, unsurprisingly, leaked to the Washington Post in an article published August 2, 2005) contains the longest lead-time of all: about ten years.

This is likely a politicized judgment rather than a solid foundation on which to build policy. There are three reasons to doubt its validity. First, the U.S. intelligence community is still reeling from the magnitude and consequences of its errors about Iraqi weapons programs and may well be overcompensating and remaining vague in order not to be wrong again or to be expected to provide intelligence that affects policy choices. Second, the time frame hinges critically on Iran’s ability to manufacture uranium hexafluoride, “the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon,” and just after the assessment was released, Iran broke the iaea seals on its centrifuges and commenced enrichment activity. Without the materials constraint, which the Iranians are brooking international disapproval to address, the National Intelligence Estimate reduces the time by half. Third, U.S. intelligence agencies have had a rolling estimate of five years since 1995, which is another way of saying they simply don’t know enough about the Iranian nuclear programs to make a judgment.2

Perhaps the most straightforward assessment remains that of the 1998 Commission on Ballistic Missile Threats, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld:
The Commission judges that the only issue as to whether or not Iran may soon have or already has a nuclear weapon is the amount of fissile material available to it. Because of significant gaps in our knowledge, the U.S. is unlikely to know whether Iran possesses nuclear weapons until after the fact.3

The most alarming assessment comes from Mohamed ElBaradai, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who concluded in an article for Newsweek (“Diplomacy and Force,” January 12, 2006), “if they have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization program along the way, they are really not very far — a few months — from a weapon.”

What is clear from this range of assessments is how little we actually know about the status of the Iranian program. As our ignorance is unlikely to result from lack of effort, it is unlikely to be overcome. However, despite the dearth of actual information about Iranian activities and the wide variance in judgment about the timeline, the assessments are reinforcing in the key area: Enriched uranium is the only critical impediment.

If Iran requires nothing other than the nuclear material, that suggests attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities may delay but would not prevent reconstitution of the program. Thus, the best outcomes a military attack could provide would be: (1) preventing the use of existing weapons; (2) revelation of the extent of the program (as damage assessment, government statements, and news stories sift through debris and yield new information); (3) delay, as new Iranian scientists and engineers are trained and facilities rebuilt; and (4) increased intelligence opportunities for tracking the program as it is reconstituted. Military strikes would not remove the Iranian nuclear threat, prevent retaliation by Iran, or ameliorate the hugely damaging political effects on other U.S. interests such as the war against terrorism — which is not to say that a military attack could not achieve nontrivial and advantageous outcomes.

Policy options

We are currently in an unenviable position for containing or reversing Iran’s nuclear programs. We claim their programs are developing weapons and must be halted at the enrichment stage, but our proof requires public understanding of the scientific argument that enrichment is the critical threshold. The variability of intelligence assessments about the stage of the Iranian program also increases the difficulty of making our case. Moreover, after Iraq, the credibility of Western, and especially American, intelligence is very much in question. All of which leaves us with a complicated technical case to make based on dubious sources of information. Skepticism will be especially prevalent in the Middle East, where competing narratives will have greater sway.

These fundamental weaknesses make our case unwinnable. Enrichment may be the right substantive place to draw the line on the Iranian nuclear program, but it is indefensible ground as a matter of public policy. If the U.S. were to use military force against Iran because of enrichment, we would be seen as provoking the ensuing war. Neither European nor regional allies would support us. Iranians would surely unite behind their government. And we would be defending our choices at the un over a chorus of castigation. It is not even difficult to imagine the U.S. being accused of using nuclear weapons against Iranian facilities because of the nuclear material any conventional attack would release.

Rather than threaten military force to prevent Iranian enrichment, we should continue on the course of un activism while making several policy changes that expand our range of options. As containing the Iranian nuclear program is a negotiation on several fronts, we should trade our latitude to preempt the Iranian nuclear programs for Security Council commitment to sanctions with greater bite. The mild sanctions agreed by the un in December do appear to have surprised Iranians and serve to make Iranians question whether their government’s claim of peaceful energy development merits closer examination. A U.S. Treasury ban on the use of dollars in transactions with Bank Saderat and Bank Sepah appears to have been very effective — and, incidentally, demonstrates an interesting capacity for working directly with banks, which fear exclusion from the American financial order, rather than through European governments. European governments are slowly putting legal means in place to constrain Iranian economic activity, and while they are unlikely to completely cut off the $18 billion in loan guarantees given to European businesses in Iran, it will get more difficult and more embarrassing for Iranians to do business, especially the 30 companies the U.S. has identified as being involved in terrorism or wmd programs.4 Should Iran move ahead with a cascade of 3,000 centrifuges, as it gives every indication of doing, it will justify tougher sanctions, alienate European publics, and raise the cost to Russia and China for continuing to shield it from penalty. Escalating pressure on Iranian financial transactions rather than commodity sales would be likeliest to retain Russian and Chinese endorsement.

We could assist our own case significantly by agreeing to negotiations without preconditions. The Bush administration’s offer last summer to join negotiations if Iran discontinued enrichment was shrewd repositioning. If we are not talking to the Iranians, it will be much more difficult to build support for any eventual military action. Refusing negotiation makes us appear petulant and reduces our ability to make our case globally and to talk past the Iranian government to the Iranian people. We have an interest in demonstrating that every reasonable effort to compromise met only intransigence.

Opponents of negotiations argue that opening them would give away valuable leverage, reward Iranian misbehavior, and send a signal of weakness. They are mistaken on at least two of those points. If negotiations with the U.S. were such valuable leverage, the Iranians would likely have taken last summer’s deal. Moreover, the leverage argument assumes that negotiating with the Iranians is of more value to them than to us, which is at least questionable. If the Iranians are bent on nuclear weapons development, they will be unaffected by negotiations, whereas we will solidify domestic and international backing and have a direct channel of communication that could reduce miscalculation and expand our opportunities to separate the Iranian government from its people. Even if negotiations do not constrain the Iranian nuclear program, they will strengthen our standing and could help open up Iranian society. Engaging with the Iranian government is an idea more anathema to American policymakers than it is to Iranian dissidents; they have confidence we can conduct diplomacy, as we did with the Soviet Union, without legitimizing the regime. In refusing to negotiate we help a dictatorial government control information; through negotiations, we further our aims and reduce their ability to mischaracterize our actions. If the Iranians are not bent on nuclear-weapons development, negotiations will give us a better understanding of tradeoffs that would constrain them.

The Iranians will surely claim, and may even believe, that the abandonment of the U.S. demand for an end to enrichment demonstrates our weakness and validates their repudiation of the un — which is why now is such an auspicious time to undertake the change in policy. The additional carrier battle group now in the Gulf and the crackdown on Iranian activities inside Iraq provided a show of strength that weighs nicely against the softened position on negotiations. Tightening un sanctions against Iran as we move toward negotiations would likewise attenuate claims we are giving in to Iranian threats. We have reason to be confident of our strength, and making a concession to open negotiations would actually increase it. As part of a broader shift in approach that provides a sturdier basis for international support as tensions heighten, relaxing our preconditions seems justifiable even if Iran misunderstands its motivation.

We should not, however, provide reassurances to the Iranian government that we will not overthrow it.5 To do so would give credence to the Iranian argument that legitimate fears drive its nuclear program, with the burden of proof on us to show we do not intend to be a threat. Moreover, even if we did compromise our principle of opposition to undemocratic governments that support terrorism and are working on nuclear weapons, it would be unlikely to be believed. Experience with Iran disbelieving that the eu would carry out the commercial inducements offered in nuclear negotiations suggests it would be a futile undertaking.

Rather than threaten to disrupt the Iranian program at the reprocessing stage, we should shift the terms of the debate — to the testing of a nuclear weapon. By ourselves arguing that Iranian enrichment is the equivalent of Iran’s going nuclear, we give Iran status as a nuclear power without its having to produce weapons. While the critical scientific threshold in mastering nuclear technology is indeed the fuel cycle, there are significant scientific and engineering challenges — as well as time — still ahead. By emphasizing enrichment so strongly, we give Iran a false sense of achievement that very much serves its purposes, but not ours.

Our policy should be to deny Iran the prestige its government seems to want from becoming a nuclear power unless it also incurs the costs of overt violation of the npt. Peaceful nuclear power may include mastery of the fuel cycle — but it does not produce nuclear weapons tests. We would not have to make a complicated technical case about the nuclear threshold; if they tested, the Iranians would be making our case. An Iranian nuclear test would be visible to a much wider audience, would not rest solely on U.S. intelligence information, and would be independently verifiable. In establishing an Iranian nuclear test as the standard for treating Iran as a possessor state, we force Iran to choose whether it wants the status of being in the nuclear club enough to undertake a test that removes all doubt about its aspirations. A coordinated change in the standard, reinforced by the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese (all of whom, wanting to avoid war over Iran’s nuclear program, would see benefit in shifting the line), would remove from Iran its most salient argument in continuing its enrichment: that it is not a weapons program. We would not need to recant our justified suspicions of Iran’s nuclear programs, just recalibrate the point of no return.

International seismic monitoring generally provides accurate information about nuclear events, even when the tests are underground. The U.S. should try to persuade Iran’s neighbors to place seismic sensors along their borders with Iran for iaea monitoring, and we should visibly collect the same information from offshore and airborne platforms. Sensors are not a foolproof means of detection, as debate on ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty brought out. Low-yield nuclear weapons and signature masking may prevent detection of a test, but the sensor relays ringing Iran would be only one of several means of gathering information. Besides, Iran would actually need the test to be known to achieve the political objective of crossing the nuclear threshold. iaea inspectors would give Iran’s neighbors a stake in the enforcement regime, but passively, and therefore likely more attractively. Of course, if any of Iran’s neighbors are pulled toward developing nuclear weapons of their own by Iran’s nuclear program, they would be far less likely to participate (given that doing so would reveal their own nuclear tests); that, too, would be valuable information.

Playing stronger defense will diminish Iran’s ability to gain political currency from claims about its nuclear program. Since there will be a higher risk associated with possible clandestine weapons development as we move our focus from enrichment to testing, we should encourage emplacement of ground-based missile defense systems like the ones being discussed for Poland and the Czech Republic, to be linked with radars possibly placed in the uk or Azerbaijan. An extensive ring of missile defenses will also have the benefit of stoking Iranian concerns about encirclement, proving the point that their moves toward nuclear weapons are making them less secure.

As part of undercutting the political value of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, we should be emphasizing the unreliability of untested weapons designs and materials. Statements that call into question whether a state could ever depend on weapons it hasn’t tested may provoke an Iranian test, but that would leave us in a better position than facing a clandestine Iranian program we can prove by intelligence means but cannot persuade other governments to take action against or publics to be concerned about.

Iran’s vision of crossing the nuclear threshold appears to be an “end of history” event: namely, Iran acquires nuclear weapons and is returned to its rightful place as regional hegemon and bête noir to U.S. power. We should adjust our public statements to deny the Iranians that political payoff. The president’s repeated refrain that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable only reinforces the political value to Iran of acquisition — the Iranian leadership seems very much to want an outcome we say is unacceptable but turn out to be powerless to prevent. The U.S. should instead publicly emphasize the costs to Iran in terms of a forgone cooperative relationship with us, diminished attractiveness to foreign investment that could modernize their oil industry and provide jobs, the diversion of resources to the nuclear program that could more profitably be directed toward medical and other fields, and exacerbated tensions with neighbors. Such an approach would deny Iran the benefit of international attention and status from imposing an outcome we oppose. It would also lay out the costs to the Iranian people, increasing the prospect of domestic debate and pressure on the government internally.

We should also be emphasizing repercussions. An Iran that behaves as this Iranian government does is likely to provoke attack. Israel is obviously the most capable adversary, but it is by no means the only one, especially if Iran sets off a spiral of proliferation. Iran’s acquisition is likely to precipitate serial proliferation in neighboring states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and possibly even, one day, Iraq. It will exacerbate tension between Sunni and Shi’ite, and Arab and Persian communities. Saudi Arabia is likely to ramp up funding to the Pakistani program in return for weapons. We should be raising the question, both in governmental discussions and with the Iranian people, whether this is really a Middle East in which they will be more secure and more respected. Iranian claims of the need for nuclear weapons to defend against a U.S. threat should be publicly countered with the question of why the U.S. has not already attacked if intent on the conquest of Iran.

While Gulf Cooperation Council states profess to be unconcerned by a nuclear-armed Iran, and exceedingly worried about U.S. military action disrupting shipping traffic and oil prices, they are stakeholders and should be prodded to be more responsibly involved in dissuading Iran. The Islamic solidarity this Iranian government so often lays claim to needs to be countered by other Islamic states, especially those whose security and economies would be detrimentally affected. Growing Sunni-Shi’ite friction should make Iranian claims of “an Islamic bomb” patently unbelievable and give the Jordanian, Egyptian, Saudi, and other Sunni-led governments reason to contest the characterization. One valuable conversation for gcc states to have with Iran is that Iranian nuclear weapons would make a long-term U.S. military presence in the region more likely, as the United States seeks to reassure allied governments against attack by Iran. This could serve to stoke Iran’s fears of encirclement and would be delivered more credibly by Iran’s neighbors than by the U.S.

Allowing a nuclear-armed Iran to provoke the U.S. into making defense commitments beyond our interests would only compound the political value to Iran of its nuclear possession. Nor should we accept the argument that only nuclear weapons are sufficient as a deterrent. The U.S. has sufficient conventional force to protect its friends in the region. In the case of the gcc and other Middle Eastern states, the U.S. should continue to interdict efforts to buy weapons and prevent development of indigenous nuclear programs. Demonstrating that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons did not advance its interests would be preferable to acquiescing in several Middle Eastern nuclear powers.

Even if one gives no credence to Ahmadinejad’s September 2005 statement that Iran was prepared to share nuclear technology with other Muslim nations, Iran’s links to the A.Q. Khan network and agreement with North Korea to provide missile testing data merit serious concern about proliferation. Moreover, Iran’s record of providing weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah suggests that it might cascade either weapons, weapons-grade material for dirty bombs, or technical knowledge. Iran has close military-industrial links to Russia, China, and North Korea (evident in the evolution of similar missile variants) and exports military equipment to more than 30 countries.6 If our policy could be structured to create a threshold event like testing to demonstrate Iranian nuclear capability, that would facilitate tracking and boarding of ships involved in suspect commerce with Iran through the Proliferation Security Initiative. While the Russians and Chinese, as major suppliers, would never permit restrictions on military equipment sales to Iran that enable the delivery of nuclear weapons, they might be persuaded to embargo Iranian sales of such equipment on nonproliferation grounds.

Our challenge is to draw Iranian society into the debate about Iran’s security by providing information and asking questions the government does not want to address. Therefore, we should expand the range of negotiations from just the nuclear program to include issues of governance, human rights, and civil society. Our state-to-state negotiations would encourage newspaper editorials, radio and tv broadcasts, academic lecture tours, model un debates — all the small-scale engagement that reduces the government’s ability to control information, reinforces civil society in Iran, encourages people to think for themselves and hold their government accountable for addressing their concerns, and builds low-level linkages between Iran and the U.S. Such an approach will not only inform the nuclear debate; it has advantages for helping create a more democratic Iran, our ultimate objective.

Despite the high price of oil in the past few years, economic impairment may be our most powerful tool short of force. The cia Factbook describes the Iranian economy as “marked by a bloated, inefficient state sector, over reliance on the oil sector, and statist policies that create major distortions throughout.” Public debt is 25 percent of gdp, and inflation is running at 16 percent. By focusing all our attention on the Iranian nuclear program, we are allowing the Iranian government to divert attention from its inability to provide economic opportunities. Part of our argument should be that Iran is a country that ought to be rich and inventive and engaged in the international economy, but its government prevents those things.

Ending ilsa sanctions is sometimes mooted as a unilateral action. Sanctions have had little effect on the Iranian economy, but serve a valuable political purpose of disapproval. Lifting sanctions to bribe the Iranian government out of doing something it initiated has the moral hazard so often displayed in policy choices about North Korea. As currently designed, however, ilsa sanctions prevent Iranian expatriates from sending money into the country. Revising the law to capitalize on expatriate funding of activities that diversify information, build civil society, and reduce the Iranian government’s ability to control political activity would empower private citizens who share our commitment to changing the Iranian government. The U.S. has had some success discouraging international financial institutions, public and private, from making capital available to Iran. This should be continued as a way of isolating Iran from the economic opportunity it so badly needs to reduce the 20 percent unemployment rate the government admits to among those under the age of 29.7

Some military options

Our strategy needs to incorporate military options, if only for the in extremis circumstance of Iran launching a nuclear attack. While the U.S. can rely on determined European diplomatic gambits to continue, it would likely place too great a strain on transatlantic relations to press for European participation in any military attack on Iran — even if Iran was preparing to launch a nuclear attack. The eu’s inability to develop a defense policy is illustrative of the degree to which force has been removed from the lexicon of European statesmanship. Resuscitating a role for military force inherent in strategy is a longer-term task for our relations with Europe, and dealing with a nuclear-armed Iran will be hard enough without fixing European strategic thinking also.

The only country the U.S. could likely rely on for support in military operations is Israel. There are shortfalls in Israel’s military capability to destroy the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on its own. It is anyway in Israel’s interest to have the U.S. help solve the problem, given the dynamics of the region, just as it is in the interest of the U.S. not to let Israel take on the military responsibility by itself.

The administration’s effort to ratchet up pressure on Iran is being met with concern about our ability to use force successfully, as if Iraq were the only model for using military force. In fact, Iraq is the least likely model, as it was so ambitious in terms of our expectations for building stable democracy. Military attacks on Iran to interdict its nuclear program or destroy weapons being readied for use would likely be more limited uses of force and designed to capitalize on the traditional advantages of American military power.

A simplistic exchange model would have the U.S. threatening a nuclear attack in retaliation for any nuclear use by Iran. This approach not only is implausible, but better options are available to the United States. As the guarantor of the international order and the country with an overwhelming dominance in conventional military forces, no nation benefits as much as the U.S. from the norm against nuclear use. Nuclear use in warfare would substantially drive up the cost to the U.S. of preserving order, whereas the prohibition that has existed since 1945 channels conflict into the sector of warfare in which the U.S. has the greatest operational advantages: clashes between identifiable combatants organized into military units and targeting adversary military units. To deter Iran, the U.S. doesn’t need to threaten nuclear retaliation.

The Iranian government seems to fear strategic encirclement, an enduring U.S. presence in the region, the U.S. drive for democracy in the Middle East, strong U.S. relations with moderate Sunni states, and perhaps regime change. It would likely fear losing the weapons it is brandishing. It would likely fear a demonstration of its inability to protect itself from U.S. attacks. It would likely fear political circumstances that eroded its control. With conventional forces and diplomacy, the U.S. has the ability to produce those effects.

Iran’s crossing the nuclear threshold has two distinct aspects that merit handling separately: the first is acquiring nuclear weapons; the second is using those weapons. An Iran preparing to use nuclear weapons is the less difficult case. Given Iran’s pious promises it was not developing nuclear weapons — even going so far as to issue a fatwa at the iaea meeting stating that development of nuclear weapons was contrary to Islam — and given its overt threat against the existence of Israel, the United States would be justified in launching on warning of an Iranian nuclear use. While nuclear facilities are difficult to spot because they are often clandestine and underground, significant operational activity surrounds preparations for missile launches. We would have a high probability of knowing Iran was preparing for nuclear-armed missile attacks.

As part of deterring any Iranian use, we should be clearly conveying to the government that any indications of readiness for use will provoke us to destroy the missiles and warheads they are preparing. The message should be simple and public: You may have the weapons, but they will be of no value, because we will destroy them if you ever attempt to use them.

Destroying all of the Iranian nuclear program — not just weapons being readied for use — is a much more demanding task. The lack of information about the extent and location of nuclear facilities means we would be unlikely to destroy the entire program. We do know enough to get started, however, and activity intended to protect additional facilities after attacks began would likely provide additional helpful intelligence. Such a campaign — and it would be a campaign, not a single strike — would likely be of extended duration, requiring politically costly support from regional allies and incurring substantial civilian casualties. Operationally, we would need persistent surveillance and a dramatically improved battle damage assessment system than was operating during Operation Iraqi Freedom.8 Given the high probability of retaliation with residual Iranian nuclear forces, we will want more than one approach so that the combined probabilities of destruction are as high as possible.

Another threat merits consideration to deter Iranian use: regime elimination. While threatening to destroy Iran is a morally questionable approach to punishing an authoritarian government, threatening to hunt down the few political leaders and military operators who authorize and carry out a nuclear strike is not. They bear culpability in a way the population at large does not, and removing them from power is one way to reinforce the distinction between the Iranian people and a repressive Iranian government.

As a practical matter, this could be undertaken by missile strikes from outside the country or special forces teams operating in country. Ships and aircraft operating in and over international waters would not necessitate politically difficult overflight rights or risk captured American service members. Such a strike would require careful intelligence of leader locations, and would certainly incur substantial civilian casualties (which the Iranian leadership would have every incentive to maximize). And yet, heads of state are legitimate targets in wartime, and this action would be in response to imminent use of nuclear weapons with the intention of killing hundreds of thousands of people.

It could well be argued that if the U.S. removed the Iranian regime, we would then have responsibility for making Iran a functional state, replicating the enormity of the challenge the coalition is experiencing in Iraq. Removal of the regime could spark sectarian violence, political retribution, secession attempts, and other serious challenges. However, it merits remembering that the crisis would have been caused by Iran preparing a nuclear attack, with Israel or the U.S. itself as the target. Those circumstances could justify a strike against the leadership that left the sorting-out of Iran’s new leadership to Iranians. It also merits mention that although we have made significant and sorrowful mistakes in Iraq, we have also learned some lessons that would make an attack on Iran less likely to stagger under as many damaging choices.

A third type of military option would be a demonstration strike, not intended to destroy the nuclear infrastructure but to show Iran’s vulnerability to attack and leave the shadow of future, further attacks. Targets with unmistakable connection to the nuclear program, such as the headquarters of the nuclear energy ministry, would be worth considering. A small-scale demonstration attack coupled with threats of continued strikes until iaea compliance was achieved could be considered a managed coercion of Iran’s disarmament obligations. It would also be considered an act of war.

Iran’s retaliation

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in considering a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities is the likelihood of retaliation by Iran with its substantial missile inventory. Iran currently has over 500 Shehab missiles, with ranges of 300 to 1,300 kilometers. Even the shortest-range Shehab-1 and -2 could target U.S. bases in Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq, while the Shehab-3 (of which Iran is estimated to have between 25 and 100) places Israel in range.9 The U.S. would certainly want to move missile defenses into place and ensure Israel was fully informed of the plans and their timing to minimize retaliatory casualties. However, 500 is not an insurmountable number, and the U.S. has numerous means of conventional defense and retaliation in its arsenal. Iran could by no means plan on a single round of attacks, and engaging in missile salvos at U.S. bases, forces, or friendly governments would widen the conflict on terms favorable to America’s conventional military strengths.

A second potential Iranian retaliation would be fomenting further violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and attempting to destabilize pro-American governments in Pakistan. There are three reasonably strong arguments against Iran taking this approach, however. First, Iran would be incurring the enmity not just of the U.S., but also of neighbors at a time when Iran’s military ability to protect itself was being substantially reduced. A denuded Iran may pause before tangling with a nuclear-armed Pakistan that also has the ability to fight back conventionally or asymmetrically. Stoking sectarian violence in Iraq will have political consequences of long duration for Iran, which currently has the potential for a Shi’ite ally as the Iraqi political landscape solidifies. Such outcomes are not in American interests either, I hasten to add. Countries whose help we have been cajoling in the war against terrorism and whose hearts and minds we are attempting to win will resent having to deal with a belligerent Iran, especially over an issue on which they were not principal adversaries before our military strikes. But the examples highlight that Iran, too, has second-order effects to its choices, and setting aflame neighboring countries creates its own problems for Iran.

The second argument against Iran retaliating by funding and inciting violence in countries important to the U.S. is that the logic that discouraged Iranian support for terrorism in the past eight years or so will still prevail. As long as Iran is seeking international acceptance, foreign investment, and “normalization” in the international community, support for terrorism — even if justified as retaliation for a preemptive strike — will be delegitimizing.

The third argument is that Iran itself is not immune to ethnic and sectarian divisions that could be exploited. Kurdish, Arab, and Azeri Iranians might be less amenable to Persian nationalism or Islamic solidarity than the government believes; likewise for Sunnis denied the religious practice of their choice. As revolutionary fervor wanes and the Ahmadinejad government continues struggling to deliver on its domestic promises, Iran could also be susceptible to the turmoil it might seek to produce elsewhere.

Iran could also disrupt the flow of oil by closing the Straits of Hormuz or attacking Gulf platforms or shipping. As Edward Luttwak points out, “all of the offshore oil- and gas-production platforms in the gulf, all the traffic of oil and gas tankers originating from the jetties of the Arabian peninsula and Iraq, are within easy reach of the Iranian coast.” However, this, too, seems improbable beyond a short duration, since oil accounts for 80 percent of the Iranian economy. Attacks on gcc oil facilities are a greater likelihood, since they would increase the value of Iranian oil, but if gcc states were not involved in or supporting the strikes against Iran, such attacks would have long-term detrimental consequences for Iran’s relations with the gcc states.

We should not be deterred by Iranian threats, but if military attacks were seriously considered, we would need to prepare for increased Iranian meddling in Iraq, more expensive oil for at least several months, greater and more overt Iranian support for terrorist organizations, attacks on friendly governments especially in the Middle East, the possibility of infiltration attacks in the United States, and the diplomatic gambit of the U.S. being referred to the un Security Council.

From crisis to opportunity

The military options are all freighted with substantial and obvious political drawbacks that argue strongly for attacking Iran only if we believe their weapons are about to be used. This launch on warning approach diminishes the political value to Iran of possessing nuclear weapons by imposing a high cost on a genuine threat to use them. Iran will be sanctioned for its enrichment and left with unuseable weapons. When coupled with an active diplomatic campaign that cedes the unsustainable parts of our current approach, shifts focus to testing as the basis for concerted action, and uses negotiations with Iran to reach into Iranian society to stoke domestic debate about the nuclear program and other law and governance issues, the U.S. can turn a crisis over the nuclear issue into an opportunity for leveraging positive political change in Iran.

1 Institute for International Economics, Case Studies in Sanctions and Terrorism, Case 84–1, U.S. v. Iran, 44. <

2 See, for example, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (February 16, 2005).

3 Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States (July 15, 1998), section i.4b.

4 Steven Weisman, “Europe Resists U.S. Push to Curb Iran Ties,” New York Times (January 30, 2007). .

5 Suggested in Judith Yaphe and Charles Lutes, Reassessing the Implications of a Nuclear-Armed Iran (National Defense University, 2005).

6 International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2006, 172, 169. .

7 Islamic Republic of Iran, Management and Planning Organization, Labor Force Indicators (March 21, 2005 — March 20, 2006), Table 1.

8 Edward Luttwak underestimates the difficulty of attacking Iranian nuclear facilities in “Three Reasons Not to Attack Iran — Yet,” Commentary (May 2006).

9 Sammy Salama and Karen Ruster, “A Preemptive Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Facilities: Possible Consequences” (Center for Nonproliferation Studies), 5.

Kori Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is also the Bradley Professor of International Security Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Her areas of research interest are national security strategy, the effective use of military force, and European politics.

Copyright © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University

Posted by lmurx at 2:57 PM 1 comments

Seven Questions: Between God and Atatürk

Seven Questions: Between God and Atatürk



Posted May 2007
Turkey’s moderate Islamist ruling party recently provoked massive protests and even the veiled threat of military intervention over its bid to add the presidency to its pillars of power. The clash has exposed deep rifts in a country that prides itself on being a shining example of a Muslim democracy. FP asked Andrew Mango, a prominent scholar of Turkey and an acclaimed biographer of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, what’s really at stake in Turkey today.

MUSTAFA OZER/AFP/Getty Images
Still the one: Millions of Turks still revere Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—as well as his vision of a staunchly secular Turkish state.

FOREIGN POLICY: What is your take on the situation in Turkey in general?

Andrew Mango: The main point is that society remains strongly divided on cultural much more than political lines. The majority of Turks who live in provinces are not particularly worried by the religious people. On the whole they practice their religion. They go to mosque at least once a week. They feel they can integrate their religion, also, in their political system, without going to extremes. But there is a very large minority, the traditional ruling class of Turkey, who do not wish to allow religion any role at all in the public domain. Now, although the people of both camps have very much in common, they lead a slightly different lifestyle.

FP: So if the divide is cultural, why is the position of the presidency causing the conflict to spill into the political sphere?

AM: Because for the first time it looked as if all the main political functions would be occupied by members of the same party. Until now, Turkish presidents have been practicing Muslims, but were not members of the religious camp in the way that the current rulers of Turkey are. Whereas now, if the president proposed by the ruling party, the Justice and Development party, were elected, the prime minister, president, and speaker of the Assembly would all come from the same camp.

It is basically the monopolization of political power by one particular party, representing one particular camp, that is worrying most Turks. If the president were one of them [the Islamists], there’d be no brake on their exercise of power. Although largely a symbolic figure, the president can still send laws for reconsideration by parliament, can block appointments. The current president, whose term is about to expire, has made maximum use of those powers in Turkey. And it’s this disappearance of a brake on the will of the parliamentary majority, which represents the religious vote, that is worrying Turkish secularists.

FP: A recent statement from the Army, stating that ”It must not be forgotten that the Turkish armed forces are a party to this debate and are the absolute defenders of secularism,” seems to be a pretty clear threat to intervene if [current foreign minister and ruling party presidential nominee] Abdullah Gul gets the presidency. Are they right to worry? Do they have a legitimate concern?

AM: Well, it is very much a subjective judgment. Turkish secularists are in the minority, but they are a very large minority indeed. We’re talking about anything from 30 to 40 percent of the population. So there are millions of them. They see the armed forces as guardians of their way of life. Now, obviously, the military cannot intervene within the bounds of constitutional legality. But it seems, not for the first time, that a clear statement by the military of their opposition, the implicit threat of their intervention, is sufficient to force the government to reconsider its position.

After all, it was the threat posed by the military that is bound to have influenced the Constitutional Court when it invalidated the first round of voting for the president in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. If the military had not intervened, then Abdullah Gul would have been elected president. It is the military’s clear statement of displeasure at this process which has blocked his election. And this has certainly given a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure to the very large minority of Turkish secularists.

FP: In the West, it is usually assumed that modernization, secularism, and democracy naturally go together. Is that the case in Turkey?

AM: Turkey is rather different in this way. It differs from a lot of Western countries in that the religious tend to come from poorer segments of the population. And obviously because the secularized minority realizes that it is a minority, it wants the powers of the majority to be somehow or other circumscribed. It wants limits to be set. All Turkish military interventions have been designed to set limits to the power of a parliamentary majority, to stop what was called the dictatorship of the parliamentary majority, because they felt that this was a threat to their way of life. To the extent to which a democratic constitution sets constitutional limits on the powers of a majority, then the secularized minority is happy to abide by democratic values. Otherwise, it prefers to rely on the guarantee provided by the armed forces and to have a limited form of democracy that safeguards its way of life.

FP: Turkey has long been cited as a counterexample to doubts about the compatibility between Islam and democracy. Do recent events undermine its power as an example?

AM: No, I don’t think so. What’s happening in Turkey is reminiscent of what happened in France in the beginning to the 20th century. France and some European countries were similarly divided between clericalists and anticlericalists. After all, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that French Catholics began celebrating Bastille Day and the French Republic. For a long time they were very doubtful about the French Revolution and the French Republic. Now French society is united in its support of the principles of the revolution. I think that Turkey is undergoing rather more rapidly the same process that France underwent a century ago.

FP: What about in the sphere of foreign policy?

AM: No profound effects. But, after all, the secularist protest against the Islamists was also a nationalist protest. If you look at pictures of these huge demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara, there are hundreds of thousands of people carrying Turkish flags 2½ miles long through the streets in procession. One of their slogans was, “Neither European Union nor United States. Turkey first.” In a strange way, the Islamists were originally the more xenophobic party, the party that considered the European Union to be a Christian club. They have now become the more foreign-friendly party. And the secularists are much more suspicious of foreigners because they think that the foreigners are perfectly ready to sacrifice the way of life of the Turkish establishment in order to have a friendly Turkey.

FP: How do you see events playing out in the near future?

AM: I don’t see a military coup and I certainly don’t see civil disorder in Turkey. Unfortunately, I see the possibility of a weaker government—a more uncertain government and a government more prickly in its foreign relations. And a government less able to follow a firm economic policy that requires belt-tightening, fiscal discipline, and all that. Obviously efforts will be made to overcome this danger, but I think this danger has increased. Turkey has done very well under a firm government, a single-party government with an absolute majority in parliament. This particularly favorable position is likely to be lost as a result of this clash between secularists and antisecularists.

Andrew Mango is a scholar based at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the author of numerous books on Turkey.