The Nordic Option

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 17, 2007

Stockholm

Think Sweden and what comes to mind is probably not a youthful finance minister, with his long dark hair in a ponytail and a gold ring through his left ear, explaining that his ambition is to make it “more profitable to work” than to sit around on welfare.

But Anders Borg, 39, poster boy of the “New Moderates” who have put the long-governing Social Democrats out of office, does just that, and when the question of his coiffure comes up, the retort is swift: “This is northern Europe, a modern society. Your public deficit or surplus is more important than your hairstyle.”

Right. Sweden, of course, has a surplus that the deficit-ridden United States can only envy, as well as a knack for staying out of wars that borders on the obscene. It’s that reasonable, semi-socialist, Volvo-driving, super-taxed Nordic place that gave the world Ikea’s cheap furniture and Bergman’s dissection of marriage.

Or is it? The ponytailed finance minister — a world first? — is just one sign that something funky is up in the Swedish woods. A government that includes the country’s first black, avowedly gay and bisexual ministers (that’s three distinct people) has set about a radical reform of the generous welfare state that defined the Swedish condition.

In doing so, it has adopted a few core principles. It should be more profitable to work than not to work. Welfare should mean caring for people who cannot care for themselves. Unemployment insurance should be adjustment insurance rather than an open-ended sinecure. Employers should be encouraged to hire through lower taxes.

Hardly rocket science, you might say, but all of this has proved radical enough to make “systemskifte,” or “system shift,” the buzzword in Sweden. The term might be applied to much of northern Europe, where in recent years the welfare state has been upended even as its essence has been preserved.

Europe, at peace and undivided, has not been foremost on the American mind of late. Old images of “Eurosclerosis” — the vacationing worker (or non-worker) stripped of initiative by an overbearing nanny state — have tended to endure. But in countries including Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and to some degree Germany, welfare has ceded to what Borg calls “work-fair.”

The transformation has brought streamlined state sectors; more flexible labor markets; a focus on social fairness through improved education and health care rather than through attempts at income redistribution via high taxes; a restored work ethic (“Make Work Pay” is a Swedish government slogan); and a rediscovery of entrepreneurship and choice.

“Our principle is you should show solidarity with people who have problems for a space in their lives, but they should not be supported permanently by the welfare state,” Tobias Billstrom, the migration minister, says.

Billstrom is all of 33 and sports multicolored buttons on his shirt. He’s a backer of the reforms because Sweden doesn’t want the immigrants pouring into the country to think collecting subsidies and working on the black market are the Swedish way.

Sweden has learned that a rigid labor market is a devastating form of exclusion (France, take note). Its aging population, like others in Europe, needs immigrants to find jobs and so pay the taxes that will fund pensions into the future.

By slashing unemployment benefits, making it easier and cheaper to hire, offering tax credits to employers taking on people who have been jobless for a long time, and providing tax incentives to lure domestic jobs out the black market, Sweden has cut unemployment to 4.4 percent, or about half the French rate.

Growth in 2007 of 3.2 percent will be among the highest in Europe and handily top the U.S rate. Surpluses keep accumulating. All nine million Swedes have health insurance, while 47 million Americans, or the equivalent of five Swedens, do not. And the school system delivers high standards.

Of course, Sweden doesn’t have the world to run, and a top personal income tax rate of 56 percent would make Americans pale. Still, Sweden’s new Nordic model merits attention.

“My idea,” Borg says, “is to combine the entrepreneurial spirit of America with the welfare of Sweden. That’s my ideal world: the creative impulse and restructured welfare. The lowest quarter of our population is well educated. The United States could learn from that.”

It could indeed. Northern Europe has looked to America for some of its reforms. America, Iraq-obsessed, has not looked to a changing Europe. A stagnating middle class, losing jobs and health insurance, holds the key to victory for Democratic candidates next year if they can suggest strong programs for better education and universal health care.

A stop in funky Stockholm is in order for Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama.

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The Ottoman Swede

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 13, 2007

STOCKHOLM

As members of Congress mull what to do next in Iraq, they might glance at a League of Nations report of July 16, 1925, on the new Middle Eastern state then being carved by the British from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

The report said that despite “the good intentions of the statesmen of Iraq, whose political experience is necessarily small, it is to be feared that serious difficulties may arise out of the differences which in some cases exist in regard to political ideas between the Shiites of the South and the Sunnites of the North, the racial differences between Arabs and Kurds, and the necessity of keeping the turbulent tribes under control.”

And it warned: “These difficulties might be fatal to the very existence of the State if it were left without support and guidance.”

So much for things changing. They don’t, or only slowly, when attempts are made to carve sustainable nation states from multiethnic empires.

This 82-year-old document was handed to me by Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, a man of dry humor and quick tongue who can claim to be the world’s authority on messes in post-Ottoman areas. “From Bihac to Basra,” he said, referring to towns in western Bosnia and Southern Iraq, “these things take time and benchmarks don’t count for much.”

Bildt recently returned from Baghdad where Sweden has much to discuss given that 20,000 Iraqi refugees are expected to arrive here this year, a number that dwarfs the trickle of fleeing Iraqis into the United States. This imbalance is shameful, but that’s another story. Iraqis have no special desire to trade desert for pine forest, but Sweden has the merit of letting them in.

In the Iraqi capital, Bildt heard divergent political visions from Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, and Tariq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president. The notion of give-and-take, of compromise reached rather than domination imposed, is a Middle Eastern novelty.

Give-and-take has not been a big Balkan thing either, and it was in the Balkans, as a special European Union envoy, that Bildt cut his teeth on post-Ottoman mayhem. He sees “massive parallels” between Yugoslavia’s violent dismemberment once dictatorship ended and Iraq’s turbulent deliverance from tyranny.

Both states were invented in the post-World War I years in areas long under complete or partial Ottoman dominion. Both were beautiful inventions, bridges between divergent cultures and religions and ethnic groups, mosaics beneath a national flag. Both had the drawback of tending toward their own self-destruction in the absence of a strongman to resolve contradiction through force.

Freedom is a funny thing. Life without it is misery. But a glance at the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or now Iraq is a sufficient reminder that distinct peoples forcefully gathered into a dictatorial state will react in the first instance to liberty by trying to get free of each other rather than trying to imagine a liberal democracy.

As Miroslav Hroch, the Czech political theorist, has observed, ethnic or religious nationalism easily become the “substitutes for factors of integration in a disintegrating nation.” That’s where we are in Iraq. In plotting a social revolution, the ushering to power of a subjugated Shiite majority through the overthrow of a minority Sunni dictatorship, the Bush administration did not ponder or plan for these realities.

That’s unfortunate, indeed unforgivable, but it’s done.

Bildt, Balkan-hardened, takes the long view. “If you take the Ottoman areas, they were Muslim but tolerant with an array of different cultures and their replacement with different versions of the 19th-century nation state has proved very difficult, be it in the Balkans, in Cyprus or the Middle East.”

He cannot imagine a quick American exit. “Iraqi leaders will want some sort of exit perspective, but a long-term one,” he says. As long as Iran and Saudi Arabia see Iraq as a Shia-Sunni battlefield, peace will be elusive.

The Balkan analogy is interesting. Yugoslavia’s breakup saw four years of war, then another war in Kosovo four years later. Only regional pressure — the bait of European Union membership — and a large European and American military presence have brought calm. The question of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia remains explosive.

This fragile stability is where the 16-year arc from the eruption of the Balkan wars in 1991 has led. Given that regional realities make an Iraqi breakup unthinkable, the architecture of the Yugoslavia-in-miniature in Bosnia is probably the most helpful guide for Baghdad: a fig-leaf national government presiding over a loose federation.

If the United States meets the responsibilities its invasion engaged and the region can be coaxed to help rather than hinder, we may attain such fragile stability 16 years from Saddam’s fall: that would be 2019, just over a century after the Ottoman collapse.

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A U.S. General’s Disquiet

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 10, 2007

I first met Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli in Baghdad in early 2005. He was about to go home after a year’s assignment as the head of the First Cavalry Division, and he was dreading his return.

The dread related to the loss of 160 men and women from his division. A sign outside his headquarters read: “Complacency kills — don’t become a statistic.” Chiarelli knew he’d carry the cruel statistics back to Fort Hood, Tex., and face the bereaved.

“The hardest thing is going home and facing those parents and wives and loved ones,” he said, looking me in the eye with tears in his. Chiarelli, now the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is a thoughtful, decent officer who has absorbed his share of the military’s post-9/11 hurt.

The first two decades of his career were spent training to defeat the Soviet Ninth Combined Arms Army in Europe. This was symmetrical war, tough but clear. It had nothing of the elusive asymmetry of borderless modern warfare, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.

Like the U.S. armed forces as a whole, Chiarelli has learned and adapted through two Iraq tours. Now he has gathered his thoughts in a forthcoming article for Military Review that makes devastating reading. The picture he paints is of a military and nation still at some remove from reality.

“Much of our government and interagency seem to be in a state of denial about the requirements needed to adapt to modern warfare,” Chiarelli says, adding that even today some believe “that all we have to do to win our modern wars is kill and capture enough of the enemy.”

Nonsense, Chiarelli argues in a piece written with Maj. Stephen Smith. Shadowy modern wars are less about overwhelming force than mastering instantaneous communication to win hearts and minds, adapting rapidly, flattening ponderous military hierarchies, understanding nation-building, and bringing to bear U.S. abilities in fields as diverse as engineering and agronomy.

“If we are unable to do a better job than our enemies of influencing the world’s perception, then even the most brilliant campaign plan will be unlikely to succeed,” he writes. Unreadiness for the real-time reactions of an interconnected globe has often allowed a video-camera-wielding enemy “to run circles around us, especially in the information environment.”

Further damage has been caused by some military leaders and service members who “have not internalized the moral and ethical codes that define who we are as an armed force and nation.”

Failure to meet this moral “imperative” hurts “our credibility as a fighting force, our mission and indeed our standing in the world.” Chiarelli adds that, “Too often, we are reluctant to admit mistakes.”

At a deeper level, beyond the damage of an Abu Ghraib, this general says the United States must address what is needed to conduct long campaigns for its security in places like Afghanistan.

“The U.S. as a nation — and indeed most of the U.S. government — has not gone to war since 9/11,” he observes. While the military is fighting, “the American people and most of the other institutions of national power have largely gone about their business.”

Rarely, if ever, has daily death in combat been accompanied on such a scale by the maxing out of credit cards at the mall. President Bush likes to call himself a “war president.” More accurately he has been the war-and-shop, conflict-and-home-equity-credit president.

Now those two worlds, eerily remote from each other, have come together in simultaneous Iraq and credit crises. While Bush considers lowering troop levels, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke considers lowering interest rates. The overseas and home fronts, the dropping and the shopping, are not unrelated after all.

Chiarelli has long suffered the disconnect. He saw his soldiers killed in flimsy Humvees because American industry was not geared up in World War II fashion to produce replacements. He has seen the military pushed to provide agricultural, governance and legal experts when they might come from the Departments of Agriculture, State and Justice.

“Our current problems raise the legitimate question of whether the U.S., or any democracy, can successfully prosecute an extended war without a true national commitment,” he writes.

Unless you believe the United States can simply withdraw from the world, a popular but naïve view, that essential strategic question needs addressing beyond the Iraq tactics before Congress this week. An answer is the minimum the now overstretched shopping nation owes the long overstretched fighting nation it seldom notices.

Foreclosure is grim. But what the war bereaved want and cannot find is closure.

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The Least Bad Choice

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 6, 2007

The way the United States leaves places matters. Having armed mujahedeen fighters to undo the Soviet empire in Afghanistan, America lost interest in a backwater. Payback came in the form of Afghan-trained holy warriors bent on the destruction of the West. That was careless.

It is important to be less careless in Baghdad. As reports on Iraq reach Congress this month, it’s worth considering that blow-back from an oil-rich country at the heart of the battle for the Middle East could be even more severe than the violent legacy of funding Islam to fight communism in Kabul.

Nothing can undo the American blunders in Iraq that turned the liberated into the lacerated. Hubris is bad, careless hubris worse. The fraying Bush administration still can’t work out who took the decision to disband the Iraqi Army in 2003; that’s grotesque. Nobody in the administration should sleep easy over its ethical responsibility for calamitous mistakes.

But what we did matters less today than how we leave Iraq. It’s far easier to score backward-looking political points against Bush than serve the forward-looking interests of 27 million Iraqis. Still, the latter is more important than the former.

As Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has written: “It seems likely that the U.S. will ultimately be judged far more by how it leaves Iraq, and what it leaves behind, than how it entered Iraq.” America’s future ability to use its hard and soft power “depends on what the U.S. does now.”

Exit timing and U.S. election maneuvering stand at the center of this month’s Iraq drama, with testimony due next week from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, and several reports coming in. One, from the Government Accountability Office, has already given the Bush-Petraeus surge a failing grade: a feckless Iraqi government, unshared oil money, untamed militias and undiminished violence.

Not fair, Petraeus and Bush will argue, using the new catchphrase “bottom-up progress” to highlight headway in Sunni-dominated provinces like Anbar through cash-cemented alliances with local sheiks who have been persuaded to turn again to Al Qaeda.

Bush will also make a virtue of necessity on U.S. troop levels. The post-escalation presence of 160,000 can’t be maintained past next spring unless tours of duty are extended beyond 15 months. So some drawdown will start next year, with improved Iraqi conditions claimed to obscure domestic political realities.

Both views of Iraq are right: the situation is awful and, four years on, cleverer U.S. commanders are winning a few. The enduring horror counsels a swift exit. The positive shifts bolster a catchphrase Cordesman found doing the rounds in Baghdad: “strategic patience.”

I side with the latter, provided the patience is indeed strategic and not just a means to kick the mess into the post-Bush world. That strategy should involve the following elements.

First, continue bolstering Sunni power and allegiance through aggressive use of aid and local security deals. A rough balance of power between the main Iraqi communities — Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish — is in the interests of Iraqi stability.

Second, while accepting that Iraq’s central government will at best be a respectable fig leaf and that strong provincial authorities are essential, pressure the weak Shia-dominated coalition to share oil money, power and space. Stronger American-backed Sunnis and fewer U.S. troops may help focus Shia minds.

Third, establish, with United Nations help, a regional framework for talks between the neighboring powers. Use this to reach out to Iran. Tehran wants America to fail in Iraq but not to the extent that Shia gains are reversed. That provides some leverage.

Fourth, recognize that all Middle Eastern problems — Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq — are tied and that the U.S. needs a coherent diplomatic strategy for containing jihadist fanaticism through ideological persuasion. An uncritical embrace of Israel does not help. And whatever happened to Karen Hughes, our invisible public diplomacy czar?

Fifth, protect the countless Iraqis who have helped America and are vulnerable. The U.S. urged Iraqis to rise up in 1991 only to abandon them to slaughter. Never again should be our policy.

The above may just avert the worst: a regional war in which a disintegrating country’s neighbors are drawn into carnage that makes current bloodshed pale.

Some see Iraq as the ultimate demonstration of the demise of American power. Fast withdrawal is in that view’s logic. But if you believe, as I do, that global stability still hinges on the credibility of that power, “strategic patience” is the least bad of the terrible options Bush’s now amnesia-clouded incompetence has bequeathed.

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The Breaking Point

By ROGER COHEN

Published: September 3, 2007

It’s that month again, and when the New York skies are clear, as they have been and were then, you gaze at the proud prow of Manhattan and still feel the absence, and perhaps you see once more those papers from the crumpled towers fluttering out across the East River to strange landings in Brooklyn.

My daughter’s fourth birthday was that morning, and we looked at the billowing smoke from the water’s edge in Brooklyn Heights and she cried. I took the subway to work, one of the last to run, and a woman beside me was sobbing. When, that night, I emerged into Times Square, nobody. I walked for miles through a ghost city.

That was a breaking point, dividing our lives into before and after, and the world into pre- and post-, and we’ve all had to succumb to the awful 9/11 shorthand that compresses the loss of almost 3,000 lives into a couple of digits, and the wider loss of America-as-sanctuary into a date.

This compression of horror has been a sorting device, necessary to push away the falling bodies and that emetic acrid-sweet odor that lingered below Houston, and to put some order into what has followed — Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, the Department of Homeland Security — and these of course are only other forms of inadequate shorthand.

The United States was not previously a homeland, it was just our land, and that unhappy neologism with its Orwellian echoes, its sense of exclusion rather than inclusion, its faint fatherland-like echoes, seems to capture the closing and the menace and the terror-terror refrain with which we have all learned to live.

That refrain, for Americans, but not only them, has a pursed-lipped face called Bush-Cheney, and the braggadocio-smirk of the bring-it-on duo has come to form yet another shorthand for a certain grimness, one as relentless as the U.S. national debt clock.

For many around the world, sympathy has turned to alienation over six years, and that’s something else Americans have had to learn to live with, the feeling that we owe an explanation of the inexplicable, a step-by-step guide of how we got from there to here, an accounting of who we really are and, you know, it’s not us doing the fingerprinting and we still like rock ’n’ roll.

You can’t talk about the Belgian idea, or even the Indian idea, but the American idea is inseparable from this country’s global resonance, and it’s in the tarnishing of that idea — the partial replacement of a liberating notion by a threatening one — that a sea change has occurred.

As Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush, put it to me: “Historically, the world has always given us the benefit of the doubt because it believed we meant well. It no longer does.”

He added: “It is easy to lose trust, but it takes a lot of work to gain it. Can the sense of confidence in us be restored? Sure. But not easily.”

The American idea, in other words, is dimmed, but endures. On a clear day and holiday weekend, that now lopsided prow of Manhattan still stirs something noble, a sense of “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” who stepped ashore and made their can-do American way.

Last year, 702,663 people became citizens; there are 877,039 naturalization cases pending. Countries are still divided into those people want to leave and those people want to get into. That division is also a measure of where oppression reigns and freedom resides.

I gazed past the Statue of Liberty to the tip of Manhattan the other day with my 89-year-old uncle, Bert, who first saw the city in 1947, two years after the end of a war in which, as a young South African officer, he had fought his way with the Allied army up through Italy. The Queen Mary had brought him, six to a cabin, from the English port of Southampton to New York.

“You know, when I got to London from Johannesburg, I thought it was the middle of the world,” he said. “But I can’t tell you what it felt like to step into the canyons of New York. I had this overwhelming feeling of promise and of being at the center of the New World, the coming world.”

It is this sense of promise that the United States must restore to provide the leadership without which the big issues facing the world do not get resolved. Sometimes I imagine that a piece of the terrible white confetti of 9/11 has blown all the way around the globe to arrive, like a message in a bottle, and that I open it and read: “September is not the cruelest month.”

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A Return to the Mother of Conflicts

By ROGER COHEN

Published: August 30, 2007

WASHINGTON

The sources of global frustration with the Bush administration have been many and varied, but its refusal over several years to get serious about the Israel-Palestine conflict has ranked high. To dream some path led from Baghdad to Jerusalem was always upside-down foolishness.

So President George W. Bush’s discovery last month that “Iraq is not the only pivotal matter in the Middle East” was encouraging, as was his tacit relegation of the “road map” to nowhere. The Bush endgame, like Clinton’s, is going to see a push for a resolution of the mother of all conflicts.

R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, told me a “supreme effort to help Israelis and Palestinians define a framework for Palestinian statehood” is to be made. “We don’t rule out Palestinian statehood, certainly not, within the term of this presidency,” he said.

The convocation of a conference in the United States in November ups the ante and demonstrates that the incremental has been supplanted by a thrust for the finish line.

Is this just a hopeless lunge for the history books from a lame-duck administration undone by Iraq? Bush, swagger stripped, is weak. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, may be even weaker. The Palestinians are split, the region radicalized by Iran rising and Iraq fissuring.

But low expectations are a diplomat’s ally. It may seem foolish to speak of exhaustion in a conflict with such proven regenerative capacity. Yet that is what a senior U.S. official found recently in the region, alongside a conviction that “it’s time to change the Israeli-Arab equation.”

In fact, that equation has already changed. The Palestinian national movement and global jihadism are distinct, but to the extent the former has been permeated by the latter it has redoubled the determination of Palestinian pragmatists like President Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, to deliver.

Regular Abbas-Olmert meetings of late are one sign of this. The Israelis like Fayyad, a manager and doer. Radicalizing currents are such that people see “this opportunity may not materialize again,” Burns argued.

Another shift involves Iran’s growing influence — in Shia-dominated Iraq, in Lebanon through Hezbollah and in Gaza through Hamas. The Shia crescent makes Sunni states jumpy. Israel is Iran’s enemy. The enemy of an enemy can be a friend.

“Most, if not all the Sunni countries, see Iran as disturbing, unhelpful and violent,” Burns told me. “It’s a hard question whether they now see Iran as more dangerous than Israel. But most of these states understand that Israel is not a threat to them while Iran might be.”

To coax Gulf countries to reach out to Israel — a Saudi presence with Israel at the November conference is a core U.S. strategic aim — the United States is readying a multibillion-dollar military aid package for them. It needs Congressional approval that will not come easily.

The package “says to the Iranians and Syrians that the United States is the major power in the Middle East and will continue to be and is not going away,” Burns said. It is designed to strengthen Sunni allies and bolster their conventional deterrence against Iran.

Unlike Clinton in 2000, who tried to coax Yasir Arafat to compromise and hoped Middle Eastern states would follow, Bush is trying to capitalize on Sunni unease to get the region to reinforce the Abbas-Fayyad peace push.

The other side of this approach is confrontation with Tehran. Burns argues there is no other strategic choice if Iran continues to enrich uranium and embrace terrorists.

The price, however, will be Iranian use of surrogates to attempt to sink in blood any Israeli-Palestinian progress. Why not quietly expand existing contacts with Iran in Baghdad to cover all issues?

A decisive political contest has begun. The United States must deliver by November or its conference will be a farce that only feeds the sophisticated Iranian propaganda machine.

Delivering means Saudis at the same table as Israelis: de facto, if not de jure, recognition. It means enough hammering on Israel’s “occupation” — Bush’s word — to enable Abbas-Fayyad to get the West Bank economy moving.

It means sufficient progress on territorial compromise and the principles governing the thorniest issues — Jerusalem and refugees — for Palestinians in Gaza to wonder if they are missing the statehood express.

The Bush administration, in its uncritical war-on-terror embrace of Israel, contributed to Palestinian hopelessness on which Hamas thrived. It can undo that damage only by ushering in hope.

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The MacArthur Lunch

By ROGER COHEN

Published: August 27, 2007

United Nations

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, is a twinkle-eyed hawk. The defeat of Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan, the unfinished business of the 1991 Persian Gulf war and his own liberating odyssey from an Afghan childhood to the University of Chicago convinced him the world needs the transformational power of the United States.

Since 9/11, he has fared better than most of the Bush brigade. As a Beirut-educated, Farsi-speaking Sunni Muslim, he actually has a clue about the Islamic world. He was prepared to sip tea rather than set edicts.

In his shepherding of Hamid Karzai to power in Kabul, his forging of Sunni cooperation now bearing fruit in Iraq’s Anbar Province, and in his recent prodding of the U.N. to a fuller Iraqi role, “Zal,” as he’s known, has suggested shrewdness explains the twinkle.

So, as the September storm clouds gather over America-in-Iraq, I was intrigued to find Zal looking back in anguish. President Bush now alludes to “the mistakes that have been made,” but is unspecific. There’s such an array, everyone has a favorite: a nonexistent casus belli, skimpy troop levels, the end of the Iraqi army, aberrant planning.

Khalilzad’s anguish centers on May 6, 2003. That’s the day he expected Bush to announce his return to Iraq to convene a grand assembly — something like an Afghan loya jirga — that would fast-forward a provisional Iraqi government.

Instead, the appointment of L. Paul Bremer III to head a Coalition Provisional Authority was announced. Khalilzad, incredulous, went elsewhere. In the place of an Afghan-American Muslim on a mission to empower Iraqis, we got the former ambassador to the Netherlands for a one-year proconsul gig.

“We had cleared both announcements, with Bremer to run things and me to convene the loya jirga, both as presidential envoys,” Khalilzad told me. “We were just playing with a few final words. Then the game plan suddenly changed: we would run the country ourselves.”

Alluding to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, Khalilzad continued: “Powell and Condi were incredulous. Powell called me and asked: ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘You’re secretary of state and you’re asking me what happened!’ ”

Powell confirmed his astonishment. “The plan was for Zal to go back,” he said. “He was the one guy who knew this place better than anyone. I thought this was part of the deal with Bremer. But with no discussion, no debate, things changed. I was stunned.”

The volte-face came at a Bush- Bremer lunch that day where Bremer made a unity of command argument to the Decider. “I put it very directly to the president: you can’t have two presidential envoys running around Iraq,” Bremer told me.

A MacArthur-Karzai debate had raged within the administration for months: should the United States run Iraq like Gen. Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan or seek a local Karzai-like leader and operate behind the scenes?

Bremer still believes the MacArthur route was imperative. An exile-dominated Iraqi government would have had no legitimacy or competence. Nor would it have changed the legal fact of the U.S. occupation.

“The way we did it gave Iraqis the best chance of a sustainable political process,” he argued.

Nonsense, Khalilzad believes. “I feel strongly that the U.S. ruling was wrong. We could have had an interim Iraqi government. I argued, based on Afghanistan, that with forces, diplomacy and money, nothing can happen anyway without your support.”

Powell agrees. “Everything was Bremer, the suit, the boots, the whole nine yards.” It was a mistake not to move “more rapidly to putting an Iraqi face on it.”

Khalilzad and Powell are right. The insurgency that took hold after Bremer’s arrival had a clear target: the guy in Timberlands. Given the extent of its post-cold-war power, the United States must wield it with subtlety. This was the sledgehammer approach.

And chosen over lunch. “Unfortunately, yes, the way that decision was taken was typical,” Powell said. “Done! No full deliberations. And you suddenly discover, gee, maybe that wasn’t so great, we should have thought about it a little longer.”

Do such mistakes redouble American responsibility in Iraq or demonstrate the hopelessness of the task? I say the former. The little miracle of Khalilzad’s free-thinking life is just one example of the positive transformations this country can fashion when resolve and coordination shape policy, not precipitous whim.

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Sarkozy’s New Order

By ROGER COHEN

Published: August 23, 2007

WASHINGTON

Nicolas Sarkozy, the neophyte French president who can’t keep still, has already been likened to Napoleon Bonaparte. Set aside visions of Sarko invading Egypt or retreating from Moscow and you get to the kernel of truth in this comparison: he wants to trash the old order.

The presidency of the French Fifth Republic, built for Charles de Gaulle in 1958, was always the most monarchical of democratic institutions. It was conceived to allow a national hero to deliver France from its Algerian nemesis and imbued with something of Louis XIV’s crisp view: “L’état, c’est moi,” or “I am the state.”

Sarkozy has long indicated his impatience with this regal presidency, once comparing his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, to an out-of-touch French monarch on the Revolution’s eve. In a relentless road show since taking office in May, he has trampled tradition, abandoned aloofness and targeted taboos.

The performance has been exhausting to watch — suggestive of an unscarred first-term Tony Blair on amphetamines. But it has produced results. Among them are new forms of parliamentary oversight of the presidency and a bipartisanship that has allowed opposition Socialists, like Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, into high office.

Above all, Sarkozy has redefined presidential style, doing the unthinkable by vacationing in Wolfeboro, N. H., alongside millionaires. Money has never been a thing to display in France. That was the vulgar Yankee way.

To grasp the enormity of all this, imagine President Bush abandoning Texan brush for a three-week sojourn in St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

As it happened, Bush showed up at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Me., to meet Sarkozy. The choreography was blown when Cécilia, the volatile first lady of France, failed to show (illness was professed, a tiff widely assumed). Still, the presence of Bush’s father signaled a desire to bury Iraqi bitterness and return to the good times of the former president’s “Europe whole and free.”

French-American relations are always complex. Seldom have two countries been more reluctant, or stubborn, allies. The universalizing ambitions of both nations, their thirst to embody and spread the ennobling values of mankind, lead to tensions at the best of times. When things go south, as they did with Iraq, you get freedom fries and other less trivial forms of vilification.

So a warming of relations is good news if you believe, as I do, that when the trans-Atlantic bond is broken, the world grows more unstable. Still, the ironies of the amiable Maine picnic were hard to swallow. On one end of the corn on the cob you had a French president who seems determined to make his office more accountable, more accessible, more open, and invoking American-style checks and balances to achieve that.

On the other, you had an American president who, in the name of the war on terror, has, with Dick Cheney, been bent on placing the authority of the White House as far as possible beyond the offsetting power of the legislative and judicial branches.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, found in Nixon the villain of his 1973 book “The Imperial Presidency,” but thought Bush had gone further still in pursuit of a Caesarist democracy.

Schlesinger discerned in Nixon “the all-purpose invocation of ‘national security,’ the insistence on executive secrecy, the withholding of information from Congress, the attempted intimidation of the press.”

Sound familiar? The Bush presidency has shown contempt for due process, placed “illegal enemy combatants” in unacceptable limbo, fired politically recalcitrant federal prosecutors, dreamed up a bizarre oversight-free definition of the vice presidency, resorted to warrantless surveillance and disdained Congress’ constitutional role.

The price of keeping America safe, Bush would argue. But the real price has been the tarnishing of the country and consequent erosion of its ability to coax other nations to its views and objectives. American isolation in Iraq has been devastating.

Which brings us back to universal ambitions. France under a president descended from the heights seems more at ease in the world, attuned to globalization and attractive because less remote. The U.S. under Bush has seen its magnetism dimmed as the commander in chief has built his fortress of executive privilege.

To the next U.S. president will fall the huge task of restoring America’s international standing. I wonder whether a dynastic succession back to the House of Clinton as if all we had were Tudors and Stuarts would be the best way of stripping the regal and so returning the country to itself and the world.

E-mail: rocohen@iht.com

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Easy Credit, Bubbles and Betrayals

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: August 19, 2007

NEW YORK

Rich and poor have tended to part company over the past decade as the buoyant tide of globalization raised more yachts than boats. So here is a touching tale of how the struggling and affluent are linked, all the way across the Atlantic.

Christine Leroy, teacher, divorced mother of two, was offered a mortgage she could not believe for a cute bungalow in Sacramento, California. The deal from EHB (Ever Hopeful Bank) came with no verification of income or assets; a piggyback second loan to cover the down payment; and interest only at a teaser rate for the first two years.

"But what do I do when the rate bumps up in a couple of years?" she asked.

"Ha!" beamed Errol Sunny, the ever-smiling EHB broker specializing in 2-28 loans (2 years of bliss, 28 of purgatory). "You'll refinance. And by then you'll have a ton of home equity the way prices are skyrocketing."

Well, Leroy figured, if she ever had a problem making a payment she could always max out a credit card or get a new card from that MEC (Mind-bogglingly Easy Credit) outfit that kept pestering her with mailings.

As for Sunny, what did he care? He knew EHB could offload this sub-prime loan to some Wall Street outfit, probably BFM (Bamboozling Financial Mechanics), that would package it with some slightly less toxic loans and maybe a few good ones into an attractive mortgage security.

Sunny remembered vividly his first lesson from Dick Sharp, the veteran EHB chairman. "What do you do with plutonium?" Sharp had asked. "Dilute it a little!" The same principle applied to toxic loans: diversified, they lost some toxicity.

That is what BFM specialized in: diversification of risk, whatever risk actually meant. Risk had been re-priced on the basis that it did not exist.

Sunny, who sometimes caught himself saying "sub-crime" when he meant "sub-prime," knew an underwriter at BFM, Nick Cocktale, who specialized in assembling mortgage bonds.

Cocktale would take thousands of loans and divide them into high-, medium- and low-risk tranches. The blend was so nice, nobody ever thought about the likes of Leroy. "It's like making a good Daiquiri," Cocktale explained. "Has to be smooth."

The funny thing was Cocktale sometimes worked with the very people from ratings firms who would end up giving triple "A" grades to the securitized sub-prime loans once they had been suitably camouflaged in the mortgage bond. These firms naturally collected billions of dollars for their labors.

But what did the hedge funds or mutual funds care if the ratings on these high-yielding securities seemed a little generous? Hell, if the securities has been given a "B" rating, which is what Pakistan gets, or even a "C" like Ecuador, they might have been barred from buying the stuff and other outfits would have cashed in.

That is not the American way!

As it was, hedge funds could use high leverage - borrowing cheap to aggregate the spread between the low cost of short-term money and the high return on the mortgage securities. When a bond's return is higher than the cost of your borrowing, you're in a nice business - until, of course, things unravel.

As it would happen, one bank that ended up acquiring a mortgage bond whose collateral - yes, they called it collateral! - included Leroy's Sacramento loan was French. The bank, BPI (Banque de Promesses Infinies, or Bank of Infinite Promises), had a niche fund that favored these securities.

Its manager, Jean-Pierre Leroy (Sorbonne and Wharton), was shocked to discover in recent days that he could not put a fair value on his fund because he could not sell bonds backed by U.S. mortgages. "We 'ave to freeze the fund," he muttered before departing for a long lunch.

On his return, going through the paperwork, he was amazed by the sloppy credit standards on loans like one to a certain Leroy in California. "Maybe a long-lost relative," he mused, already thinking about the Chateau Latour he had set aside for dinner.

Christine Leroy, meanwhile, was hard pressed to afford a meal. Her equity stood at zero as house prices plunged. When she suggested refinancing, brokers laughed. Sunny was not returning her calls.

At their last meeting, Sunny, now unsmiling, had said: "In future, Christine, you must remember the distinction between liquidity and credit availability. You confused your liquid assets with the extent of your access to liabilities."

He added that after foreclosure and repossession, EHB might be prepared to rent her the bungalow on generous terms.

Email: rocohen@iht.com

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Two Steps in One Go

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: August 15, 2007

NEW YORK

A brief document called "Two Steps in One Go" that attempts to fast-forward Palestinian statehood has landed on the desks that matter in the Middle East and is arousing considerable interest.

Written by Terje Roed-Larsen, a senior United Nations official immersed in the region for decades, the proposal envisages the creation of a Palestinian state with provisional borders followed by state-to-state negotiations on final-status issues using principles agreed before Palestine's establishment.

Israelis and Palestinians might agree, for example, on the principle that the borders of Palestine would be those of 1967 adjustable by territorial swaps involving 5 percent of the land. These swaps would be the object of subsequent state-to-state talks.

"Palestinians are fed up with gradualism and don't believe it works," Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian who heads the New York-based International Peace Academy, told me. "Israelis are saying they don't trust the Palestinians enough to go to final-status talks. So we need something between the gradual and the total."

His timing is good in a region that looks bad. Iran's rise has not yet led worried Sunni Arab governments to embrace Israel publicly, but it has caused a radical reassessment in which the Palestinian-Israeli conflict often looks like an irksome real-estate dispute while Tehran looks like the real threat. Some gulf states and Israel are talking quietly.

Of the four interlocking Middle Eastern issues - the Iraq war, Iran resurgent, the Syrian-Lebanese tangle and Israel-Palestine - Roed-Larsen believes that "right now the latter is the easiest, because the others have no blueprint."

That is a startling view, but I think he is right. This does not mean, of course, that the 59-year conflict has slithered from its self-perpetuating gyre. What it does mean is that this is not the time to focus on ensuring cement moves unimpeded between Hebron and Nablus. It is time to push for the finish line.

Among those who have seen Roed-Larsen's two-page document are Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president; Haim Ramon, an Israeli deputy prime minister; Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister; King Abdullah of Jordan; Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State; and Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, with whom Roed-Larsen met this week.

The proposal, presented in a private capacity, suggests that "the United States would play the leading role as the facilitator" and coordinate with "the international quartet and the Arab quartet." The former includes the European Union, Russia and the United Nations as well as the United States; the latter comprises Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

In practice, the idea is that the parties could make significant headway using these ideas before the Israeli-Palestinian peace conference the Bush Administration plans to hold in November.

Saudi Arabia has indicated it might attend the conference, but only on condition that it deals with "the substance of peace." Roed-Larsen's proposal seems to address this concern. To bring Saudis and Israelis to the same public table would be a breakthrough.

Roed-Larsen said, "The Bush administration is incredibly interested in achieving agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state before it leaves office." That would mean some time in 2008.

The possibility seems remote. The Israeli government is weak. The Palestinian movement is divided between the Islamic militants of Hamas in Gaza and Abbas' secular Fatah in the West Bank. Iraqi mayhem and Iranian ascendancy are prodding the region toward radicalism.

Iran and Syria know how much moral ammunition they would lose with any Israeli-Palestinian settlement and may well have the means, through various surrogates, to blast any possible deal out the water.

But the fall of Gaza to Hamas has focused Israeli minds on the urgency of progress. Abbas is furious at the hijacking of the Palestinian national cause by jihadist radicals; he wants answers. Any Middle Eastern victory for President George W. Bush will not occur in Iraq. Tony Blair did not take on the role of peacemaker to sun himself by the Dead Sea.

"All the principles should go as far as possible and then you do the nitty-gritty after statehood," Roed-Larsen said. Such principles could include the notion of Jerusalem as a two-state capital and a just settlement for Palestinian refugees.

In practice, these two sharpest of thorns would have to be blunted together: the Palestinians get their capital in some part of East Jerusalem against a compromise on the right of return. But that gets resolved, simultaneously, state to state.

An opportunity exists; Roed-Larsen's suggested process is valuable. For peace to follow, the political courage in Washington, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Cairo and Riyadh will have to trump the zealotry in Tehran and Damascus.

E-mail: rocohen@iht.com

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From India, a Cautionary Tale

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: August 12, 2007

NEW YORK

If this week did not mark the 60th anniversary of the bloody British withdrawal from India, it would be easy to dismiss the latest attempt to involve the Uited Nations more deeply in Iraq as risible.

Scorn is seldom in short supply on Iraq. Why, the get-out-now brigade will ask, should a UN already battered by Baghdad and led by an unproven secretary general have any chance of easing the mayhem when the mightiest power on earth has labored in vain for four years?

Is the U.S. maneuver that led to the unanimous approval last week of a resolution giving the United Nations a central role in promoting regional and Iraqi national reconciliation not just the latest Bush administration attempt to kick failure far enough down the road for it to become somebody else's problem?

The argument is easy to make, as facile as all the cheap electoral point-scoring that makes up what passes for political debate on Iraq in an America counting the days to next year's presidential vote.

The untidy thing is that the fate of 26 million Iraqis and the fortunes of the Republican and Democratic parties do not mesh. The former is a lifelong affair, the latter often a matter of sound bites.

America has incurred a debt to Iraq, and the liability is weightier than the paper on the sub-prime mortgage market. Those in a hurry for neat resolutions in Mesopotamia might cast their minds back 60 years to the summer of 1947 when, on Aug. 15, after almost a century of direct rule, the British quit India, having drawn some hasty lines on a map.

The lines produced Pakistan. The rapid exit - independence and partition had only been approved a couple of months earlier by Parliament - produced a savage outbreak of killing and rape among millions of Hindus and Muslims attempting to disentangle entwined existences. India and Pakistan went to war over still-contested Kashmir.

I know, India is not Iraq, the world of 1947 is not that of 2007, and America's Iraqi foray amounts to a brief interlude compared to Britain's passage to India. But playing with fire still tends to produce explosions. Any U.S. withdrawal, or significant troop reduction, must be meticulously prepared.

Iraq right now involves a proxy war in which Iran wants to consolidate Shiite ascendancy, Saudi Arabia wants to ensure Sunnis have a share of power, and Turkey wants to prevent the Kurds from laying their hands on oil-rich Kirkuk, so establishing the economic basis for an independent Kurdistan.

A proxy war over the most explosive issue in the Middle East today - Persia ascendant - could easily become a direct war, absent America's offsetting influence, however costly that influence is. Which is where the UN comes in.

The resolution calls on the UN to "advise, support and assist" Iraq in "facilitating regional dialogue."

This, along with promoting political reconciliation at a time of national fissuring, will be the core task falling to the new UN envoy to Iraq, who will probably be Staffan de Mistura, a Swede with extensive Iraqi experience.

"The key factor will be getting very active regional diplomacy going, institutionalizing negotiations with neighbors, which we want to involve weekly or bi-weekly meetings," Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the UN told me. "It's hard for us to get a meeting with Iran, but this is something the UN can do."

Khalilzad, who has served as ambassador in both Afghanistan and Iraq since the 9/11 attack, identified the three critical regional powers as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and said "they all fear that an outright U.S. withdrawal could suck them into an outright war in Iraq."

That fear will provide the UN with leverage. The ambassador has received assurances from President George W. Bush that the U.S. will provide full support for the UN as it expands its role. "We are talking about a UN backed by the U.S., not replacing our presence," he said.

Skepticism, tinged with fear, is rife at the UN. The memory is still vivid of the 2003 slaying in Baghdad of many of its best and brightest, led by Sérgio Vieira de Mello of Brazil. But a U.S. drawdown, ultimately inevitable, must be based on intertwined regional and national rapprochement. The UN, if it gets leadership, is better positioned to foster that than a discredited Bush administration.

I knew de Mello in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. He liked his Black Label. He was also a man of courage with a deep sense of responsibility and the long arcs of history.

E-mail: rocohen@iht.com

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Is There Wisdom in Crowds?

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: August 8, 2007

NEW YORK

'It's the wisdom of the masses that makes up our front page," says Kevin Rose. He is the founder of a Web news site called Digg that rates stories, videos and other content on the basis of how many people like them. Editors need not apply; Digg is proud to have none.

Of course, the "wisdom of the masses" produced a few 20th-century bummers, not least in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and China. Collective wisdom is often an oxymoron.

But the Internet has made the views of crowds more accessible - "crowdsourcing" is the geek jargon - while rendering them less dangerous. The cacophony can be overwhelming and undiscerning. Give me a serious food critic any day over the agglomerated diners' gibberish of the Zagat guides.

I am no doubt in a minority on that. Zagat has proved a global winner, as has American Idol. We live in an age when people love to know what everyone else thinks and the means exist to convey those thoughts instantaneously online.

Rose, whose background is in computer science rather than journalism, started Digg in 2004. It now has 18 million unique visitors a month. The idea behind the site is that it "surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users."

By clicking to indicate you like or "digg" an item, you propel it toward page one. An algorithm edits. Citizen journalists rule. Rose, 30, tells me he wants "to give power back to the community."

The results are interesting. Among the "world" stories doing well of late - front pages exist for whatever category of news you choose - is an item about a New Zealand pizza chain using President George W. Bush's image for an advertisement.

Other strong performers include a chart comparing U.S. gas consumption to the rest of the world, how Paris Hilton lost her inheritance, and a piece about 2,500 French citizens forming the words "We will never forget" on Omaha beach last month.

"Funny," says a commentary on the latter, "whenever a French person does something anti-American, we hear about it." But when 2,500 French do something pro-American, it's only news on Digg.

A life spent in newspapering does not endear me to outfits that consign editors to the Paleolithic age. Digg needs content to be dug by its community; it provides none itself. Rather, it relies for "stuff" on my colleagues. Journalists once wrote stories. They now provide fodder for cannibalization.

Still, this is the future - communities jabbering rather than edicts falling. Barriers have crumbled, between states and between producer and consumer. That, on balance, is good for the world, if not necessarily for newspaper companies.

The collective wisdom of Digg produces an intriguing distillation. But it only begs the question: What makes stuff - a story, a book, whatever - a hit rather than a flop?

Until recently, Brent Stinski was a student at Cambridge University doing a doctoral thesis on the psychology of art and entertainment. In prosaic terms, he was looking into why Harry Potter boomed but "Superman Returns" was a bust.

That is an elusive quandary. Most entertainment products, be they books or movies, don't work. About 10 percent of what film companies or publishers or recording studios put out accounts for 90 percent of revenue. The big hit salvages myriad failures.

I once covered the publishing industry - or rather, the publishing lottery. Any price for a book could be justified if a suitably inflated hypothetical sales number was used for a prospective profit-and-loss statement.

Now, Stinski wants to do something about that using collective online wisdom in a slightly different way from Rose. His new Web site, called Media Predict, amounts to a virtual stock market for manuscripts, television pilots, rock bands and the like.

Traders with the equivalent of $5,000 in fantasy cash buy shares in the material they believe in. Whatever rises on this prediction market ought in theory to be the things entertainment moguls should buy and back.

"There's a crying need to link major media companies with the user-generated movement," Stinski says. "Going with your gut is inefficient for media and not very satisfying for viewers." Already, Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is working with Media Predict to select a manuscript for publication.

I feel queasy about the wisdom of the masses. But Digg and Media Predict give me pause. I may indeed have been hard on the French. More worrying, I have published three books and was grossly overpaid for all of them.

E-mail: rocohen@iht.com

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Sarkozy Surfs the U.S.A.

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: August 5, 2007

NEW YORK

Of all the tradition-trampling surprises of the Sarkozy administration - the proper term because its model is American - none has been bolder than the French president's decision to forsake the charms of the Côte d'Azur and vacation in the United States.

In a little more than two months, Nicolas Sarkozy and his governing cohorts have called for a "rehabilitation of money," urged the French to work rather than think, cited rap music lyrics as showing the "taste of the young for success," abolished the traditional Bastille Day presidential address, and mocked the 35-hour week.

François Mitterrand, who hewed to the regal interpretation of the Fifth Republic's highest office, once opined that "a president must know how to be bored." Advice lost on Sarkozy, for whom action is the essence of politics. He has been such a whirl of activity that diplomats at the Quai d'Orsay have taken to observing that he has "a nuclear reactor in his belly."

Even, it seems, while on vacation. Here is the French president, a few days into his lakeside holiday in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, jogging down a forest trail, chatting to journalists, swimming, cavorting, strutting his stuff.

Mon Dieu! So much for "la France profonde," the deep or essential France with which former presidents felt they must commune in their summer breaks.

When De Gaulle headed for his beloved Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing went fishing in the Auvergne, and Mitterrand sojourned at Latché or with his mistress in Gordes, and Jacques Chirac stayed at the summer presidential residence in the Fort of Brégançon, they were making statements about their power: its roots, its latitude and its eternal essence.

Goodbye to all that. The world has moved on. Brands replaced mysticism. France got globalized. Sarkozy is not about to pretend otherwise. His aim is to shake his country from tired habits. Any means are good.

Over the past quarter-century or so, I have clung to my youthful Francophilia. But it has been tried. I grew tired of the stultifying politics that posed Gaul as some grandiose counterweight to Anglo-Saxon hegemony; lost my patience with French portrayals of the United States as the land of cruel cowboy capitalism; became exasperated with the hypocrisy of Parisian hand-wringing about high unemployment; and laughed out loud at French notions of rolling back globalization.

As a result, Sarkozy feels like a breath of fresh air. Clearly I am not alone in believing his taboo-breaking is salutary: the French president's approval ratings are soaring. They are about double those of President George W. Bush, who may find time to see Sarko this month, if the two men ever get off their exercise bikes. With some coaching from Tony Blair, Sarkozy has intuited that politics these days is about style. Economic power lies with central bankers, global corporations and high-rolling masters of the universe. Military power is constrained by mutually assured destruction and the 24-hour news cycle. What remains are image, perception and identity.

Sarkozy is signaling many things: the passage of power from a Cold-War fashioned gerontocracy to a 50-something generation, the possibility of France exerting influence through modern magnetism rather than aloofness, the end of a form of presidential power that consisted of balancing rather than acting, and the shredding of debilitating nostrums about the United States.

Of course, some people are complaining, including the Socialist deputy, René Dosière, who wants to know how Sarkozy can afford the lakefront estate of Michael Appe, a former Microsoft executive.

But I suspect Sarkozy has got it right in his Microsoft vacation option. He and his wife, Cécilia, are playing the Kennedy card. They know more than 900,000 French people head for the United States every year. They recognize the draw of America's glamour. They are breaking barriers of silence the French were ready to break.

The Sarko effect will not last forever. Consider how Gordon Brown's bushy-browed seriousness now seems welcome merely because it is not the grinning charm of Blair. Political shelf lives have shrunk in the age of round-the-clock exposure.

The French will want to see results, first in overcoming high unemployment, but also in the extension of French global standing. Ending taboos has been heady. But the political "rentrée" of September may be arduous.

Still, Sarkozy has what it takes to outmaneuver the opposition. He has already ensured the creation of a new course at the Sorbonne: the semiotics of presidential vacations. That, I suspect, will be the least of his achievements.

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Twixt 8 and 12, the Tween

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 12, 2007
=====================

NEW YORK

At dinner the other night, my nine-year-old daughter asked me what the greatest shopping city in the world is. I confess I was not ready for that one. Vague memories of nightmare hours at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, stirred. But I decided to go with something more cosmopolitan.

"Hong Kong, I guess."

"Really?" she shot back. "That's fascinating. I had always heard it was between Paris and New York."

It is not often that I say something to my daughter that qualifies as fascinating. Still, the "always" was ominous. I wondered how long the small person opposite me had been pondering this weighty issue and who her source was on shopping heaven. "That's what my friends say," she told me.

Could she and Maggie and Sophia and the rest of them really be sitting around discussing the relative merits of London, Tokyo and Moscow for chocolate-sundae lip balm or purplish-pinkish nail polish or the latest cellphone model? Yes, they could.

I am the proud father of a "tween." Tweens, falling roughly into the 8-12 age group, used to be called pre-teens. They are now in a generational category of their own in part because that gives retailers a clearer target, but also because their preternatural state - between childhood and all-knowingness - demands it.

Tweens are worth studying. They are the future. In fact, they are also the present. The U.S. military and their families are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the rest of America is shopping or watching the Disney Channel or dreaming of becoming American idols.

There is a wider phenomenon of which tweens are a part. It is called "age compression" - roughly the cramming of experience into ever younger human vessels, creating an eerie disconnect between the outer child and the inner sophisticate. Marketers have an acronym for this, "KGOY," which stand for "kids getting older younger."

KGOY represents opportunity, of course. The U.S. apparel market for tween girls is now worth upward of $11 billion.

Tweens are discerning consumers. They think a lot about what they are going to wear, whether their outfit matches their peach-sparkle nail polish, how clothes sit with a teal-colored cellphone ("Can you believe Mom didn't know what color teal is?"), what kind of sushi they are going to eat, and what to read after books like "30 Guys in 30 Days."

What should be made of all this? It is plausible to take a dark view, seeing in the spread of "tweendom" the commercial exploitation of young girls (and to a lesser extent boys), their corrupting transformation into shop-until-you-drop mini-citizens, and their premature sexualization.

Sharon Lamb, a child psychologist and the co-author of "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes," sent me an e-mail saying, "Tween is a word made up by marketers in order to sell teen items to younger and younger girls." She added: "Shopping itself is sold as a quintessential girl activity before girls even have an allowance to spend."

I cannot argue with that, although tween is also a term that seems to capture the psychological tension of late childhood in the Internet age. Moreover, the sophistication of tweens is not confined to shopping.

Another thing my daughter said to me recently was that we should buy a "high bird." I eventually worked out she meant a "hybrid." We needed one, she explained, because the world is getting warmer, ice caps are melting, and too many cars in America are belching heat-trapping gases.

Right. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was smart in declaring that the fight against global warming will be his first priority, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, has been smart in leading a campaign against greenhouse gases. Green is sexy. Any tween will tell you that - and they will be voting within a decade.

It is encouraging that the tween generation has taken global warming, as well as global shopping, to heart. The world is knit ever closer. It is itself in a "tween" state - poised between hope and menace.

Tweens keep you on your toes, which is important. When I suggested to mine the other day that she should brush her teeth, she retorted that George Washington had very bad teeth. But, I noted, the girls in "Twist" and other magazines for tweens, as well as the girls on Disney channel, all have white teeth.

"You want me to take them as a model rather than George Washington?" she asked.

There is hope out there in tween city.

Email: rocohen@iht.com

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Sweet Cakes With a Terrorist

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 8, 2007
=====================

The West Bank town of Nablus sits in a valley, baking in its amphitheater, its white apartment buildings climbing hills, its central market a maze of alleys. Carts carry watermelons, cucumbers, green and red tomatoes. From dark interiors seep the smell of falafel frying and the sweet tobacco of hookahs.

Rubble from buildings destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, nourishes rose bushes that somehow rise from the stones. The city's haunting, troubled beauty makes the senses swim. Nablus stays with you. I was there a few weeks back and am haunted still.

Throughout the town, as elsewhere on the West Bank, Palestinian ''martyrs'' and prisoners are remembered. One poster in Jericho showed a young man from the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist group, with the words: ''My enemy, do not think that I will forget the day of my being killed and occupied. If you put me in jail as a prisoner, please know that I am a prisoner in my own house. And in my prison I will find people who will avenge my situation.''

The words chilled me: The gyre of killing keeps widening. A friend suggested she could arrange an introduction to Mahdi Abu Ghazali, the leader of Al Aksa in Nablus.

On the principle that looking someone in the eye is the path to understanding, I accepted. The war on terror is a phrase that has agglomerated terrorists — those fighting for national goals like a state, and nihilists intent only the destruction of the West. It is important to distinguish between them. There are answers to national struggles.

A shoe salesman named Ahmad Hassan Al-Assi led me through the labyrinth of the market. ''I think the West Bank will go to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt,'' he said. ''How are we supposed to make a state?''

We met an Al Aksa operative who took us here and there before climbing a maze of stairs and ushering me into a room with battered chairs. A toy pistol lay on one.

Direct and clean-shaven, with a weary gaze, Abu Ghazali speaks some Hebrew, having spent three years in Israeli jails. He described a life of hide-and-seek in a city plied every night by the IDF. Claiming that more than 1,000 Palestinians have died on the West Bank since 2003, he said: ''Israel calls Palestinians terrorists. But it is a terrorist state. End the occupation, give us what we own, and we'll stop everything.''

Unctuous sweet cakes were served and a rifle brought in for Abu Ghazali. ''The situation in Gaza makes me sad,'' he continued. ''Fatah is divided into an Americanized group and the old guard, and Hamas has an Iranian faction and a Haniya faction'' — a reference to Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, whose Hamas-led government has been fired by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. ''We need one umbrella, like the Palestine Liberation Organization.''

Aged 34, he talked about a life lived in its entirety under Israeli occupation. I asked him why he fought. ''It's in the blood,'' he said. ''I opened my eyes to this reality.''

His older brother, Maher, was killed during the first intifada in 1987. ''Three bullets from the IDF,'' he said. But it was not just his brother. The death of friends, and of what he called ''the whole nation,'' produced ''an internal need to fight them.''

And what about suicide bombings, blowing up Israeli women and children? ''The suicide bombing was right,'' Abu Ghazali said, ''because it balanced the fear scale for a while. This was the result of their aggressions. I see a 4-year-old killed and I have to react. They call it terrorism. We call it reaction.''

For now, however, suicide attacks were suspended, he said. ''We fight soldiers on the West Bank. We could do operations in Israel, but we choose not to.''

Abu Ghazali smiled. I was unsure what to make of his claim. Braggadocio? Probably.

In the moment when he justified suicide bombings, I felt a surge of anger. Still, I could not help feeling that if you could just get a group of Israelis and Abu Ghazali in the same room, let the Israelis talk about their fears and him about his slain brother, the Israelis about Zion and him about the olive groves of Palestine, the Israelis about the Holocaust and him the Nakba, the Israelis about a fence that keeps them safe and him about a wall of confinement — in short let them duel it out with their respective pain, more good than ill would come of the encounter.

Email: rocohen@iht.com

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Time to Call in the Iran Chips

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 5, 2007

NEW YORK

If one country should have been happy with the post-9/11 upheaval the United States has engineered in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was Iran.

The Shiite mullahs in Tehran were delivered from their sworn enemy, the Taliban, against whom they had amassed 200,000 troops on the Afghan border in 1997, and from Saddam Hussein in Iraq, against whom they had fought an inconclusive war in the 1980s that took one million lives.

Afghanistan came under the authority of President Hamid Karzai, who has called Iran a ''close friend.'' Iraq's social revolution brought Shiite brothers to power. All this came thanks to the ''Great Satan,'' at no cost in Iranian treasure (growing by the day with oil at $70 a barrel) or blood.

I know history has its ironies, not least the fact that the United States funded the creation of Muslim holy warriors, Osama bin Laden among them, as agents in the Afghan undoing of the Soviet Union, only to face these warriors reinvented as death-to-America jihadists once the Cold War ended.

This was harsh payback for Washington. But Iran's payback for the favorable power shift gifted upon it has been as bitter.

In contrast to Iran, the countries that ought to have been most unhappy with the regime changes were America's regional allies — Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — Sunni powers with scant sympathy for the governments installed in Kabul and Baghdad.

They are indeed displeased by the power shifts. Everyone is irked, Iran chief and most dangerous among them.

The failure to parlay two American military interventions that served Iran's objective strategic interest into substantive engagement between the two countries constitutes the Bush administration's most costly diplomatic failure. Such expenditure of U.S. treasure and blood merited more creative diplomacy.

This failure hurts U.S. interests in Iraq and Lebanon and in finding an Israeli-Palestinian peace. It has even begun to hurt U.S. interests in Afghanistan where, in a fantastic turnabout, Iran is arming its erstwhile mortal enemy, the Taliban.

If America is engaged in another Cold-War-like generational conflict, which is the way the administration has chosen to characterize the war on terror, then Tehran is the closest equivalent to Moscow.

Iran combines ideological fervor, military vigor, strategic agility, domestic repression, economic weakness (petrol shortages despite having the world's second largest oil reserves) and serious social fissures in ways suggestive of the former Soviet Union. It is, in the assessment of one seasoned American diplomat, ''a worthy adversary.''

That adversarial role is now channeled into a proxy war in Iraq. U.S. accounts this week of Iranian involvement, through agents of its elite Quds Force, in the killing of five American soldiers in January were the most specific of a series of persuasive U.S. and British charges against Tehran.

What is Iran up to in Iraq and Afghanistan? It wants to keep America bleeding. Looking down the barrel of a gun over its nuclear program, Iran likes the idea of American forces stretched as thin as possible. It wants its Shiite proxies armed in the event of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. And, angered by the notion that Pakistan can have nukes but not Persia rising, it is looking for respect.

''Iran and the United States were closest on Afghanistan and Iraq, and farthest apart on the nuclear issue, Hamas and Hezbollah,'' said Vali Nasr, the author of ''The Shia Revival.'' ''The conciliatory logic of Iraq might have dominated, but the reverse has happened and Iranian moderates were never cultivated.''

Iran is an ugly regime. Its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a foul-mouthed buffoon. But it is also a sophisticated country and the only one in the Middle East with a government far more anti-Western than its generally America-loving population. Placing Iran in the ''axis of evil'' and isolating it has served no constructive purpose.

It is time to put the onus on the mullahs. The United States should propose broad, high-level talks with Iran across the range of issues confronting the two countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, nuclear weapons, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine — while dropping its meaningless insistence that Iran suspend nuclear enrichment activities before talks begin.

That will test whether the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Ahmadinejad feel they can survive without the ''Great Satan'' distraction from acute domestic woes.

If the answer to the invitation is no, and Iranian-orchestrated attacks in Iraq continue, America should play hardball. Iran, like Iraq, is a multiethnic country. Its Kurds, ethnic Baluchis and other minorities can find money and weapons flowing to them from a ''worthy adversary'' of the mullahs' regime.

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The Filthy Rich Are Different From You and Me

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 1, 2007

LONDON

With $1 billion in the bank, you have to try hard to avoid getting richer. Assuming a 10 percent rate of return, your arduous task is spending $100 million a year, or about $274,000 a day. Hermes ties will not get you there.

This may seem too marginal a problem to be of interest. Who has such money, after all? More and more people do. To make this year's list of the 25 highest paid hedge-fund managers, published by Alpha magazine, you had to make $240 million. At the top was James Simons of Renaissance Technologies with $1.7 billion.

Simons used to crack codes for the U.S. Defense Department before moving on. Good luck to him. It is clearly more lucrative to detect small pricing anomalies in the Polish zloty or penny stocks - piling into them with your clients' billions - than to ponder clandestine North Korean signals.

Hedge-fund managers use technology, and their brains, to arbitrage little inefficiencies. Who would have dreamed this ultimate refinement of making money out of money would make them masters of the universe?

I found myself musing on these conundrums here because London is no longer an expensive city. It is a phenomenally expensive city, one that has parted company with ordinary mortals who must now gaze at Mayfair-dwelling plutocrats rather as serfs once contemplated the Pharaohs.

It's not just the $120 taxi fare from Heathrow to central London (three times its New York equivalent), or the $100 entrees at mediocre restaurants, or the cozy (read small) $6-million homes. It's the uneasy feeling that something is going on here, some tectonic shift not altogether easy to grasp.

Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economics professor, had the same sensation during a recent stay. As a member of the "upper income but not extremely wealthy" class, he is unused to wandering around Chicago and thinking: "Holy Cow - that is some upper crust with $8 million to spend on a house!"

London precipitated such thoughts daily. His disquiet is shared. The city has distilled globalization: The international elite is pricing British accountants, engineers and, yes, journalists out the multimillion-dollar housing market. More than half of homes over $6 million go to foreign residents with wealth matched only by their tax breaks.

As goes London, so, to some degree, go Moscow, Hong Kong, New York and Paris. Masters of the universe condemn mere professionals to being upper-losers. Income inequality grows. In the United States, the top 300,000 earners pocketed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million in 2005.

I asked Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, to explain what gives. Capital has gotten cheaper, he said, enabling those who use it to do so more lucratively. Capitalists' talents are now deployable on a global scale, increasing their value. Technology favors those with skills to exploit it, raising the premium for the super-educated but failing to spread education much wider.

"People accept that Bill Gates made a ton of money because he has a real product," Becker said. "When somebody makes it from a hedge fund, it's harder for people, including myself, to accept. But as an economist I have to say, O.K., these guys are managing a lot of capital, and if they get some of the value they create, that is what the market is telling us."

Where Becker balks, and I balk too, is at the fact that in the United States, fabulous wealth creation has been unmatched by improved education. Teaching that will get you recognized in a globalized world is denied minority kids in failing schools.

The proportion of American children not completing high school - around 25 percent - has scarcely changed in recent decades. Hedge-fundocrats and their private equity cousins should consider ways to pile money into ending this national failure.

Where I also balk is at tax treatment that allows many of the ultra-rich to pay 15 percent capital gains tax in the United States on much of their earnings, rather than the top income tax rate of 35 percent, and the global ultra-rich buying up London to sidestep many taxes, including stamp duty.

Tax authorities in the United States and Britain resemble dinosaurs pursuing space ships. They have lost touch with the super-rich, as has most of humanity.

Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner, once gave Americans this clue to Britain's New Labour: "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."

He did add, however, that the filthy rich should pay their taxes. That would be a start, some consolation for upper-losers, workers and the rest.

Email: rocohen@iht.com

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No Thought Control Needed

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: June 27, 2007

LONDON

Take a stroll in Hyde Park these days, with the summer’s shimmer to accompany you, and, depending on your generation, you might just get transported back to the Pink Floyd free concert almost 40 years ago with Roger Waters and David Gilmour at the helm of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.”

A line from that song speaks of “the man who raged at a wall,” and the sound most likely to draw the dreamer back from summer reveries in what is now Gordon Brown’s Britain is that of conversation in Hungarian or Hindi or Hausa, a polyglot symphony that captures this country’s wall-defeating openness.

With the end of Tony Blair’s decade as prime minister, and the passage of power to Brown, the “feral beast” of the British press is gnawing at the Blair legacy. A gloomy view would cite the abyss between the super-rich and the poor of Europe’s “Richistan,” betrayals of trust, enduring health service woes, and of course Iraq.

But, alongside peace in Northern Ireland, I choose openness as the overriding achievement. Perhaps you need to have grown up in an insular Britain with its everyday bigotries, its loss-of-empire chip on the shoulder, and its snotty references to snail-eating Gauls, to appreciate the enormity of the restorative distance Blair has covered.

The process had begun before him and barrier-breaking globalization has helped. But if the City is now the world’s largest financial center, and Poles work England’s farms, and French youth have been Channel-crossing in droves to find jobs, it is because Blair and Brown, the odd couple of politics, chose freedom - for the Bank of England and European Union workers alike.

With openness came tolerance. The nearest thing to a royal wedding here in recent years was the celebration of the civil partnership of Sir Elton John and David Furnish, a gay union covered by the BBC with a reverence once unimaginable. The squirming British have grown more comfortable in their skin, and more comfortable with the skin colors and sexual inclinations of others.

Blair, with his sunny ease, has personified this shift. Which brings us to the odd-couple business. Brown, the smoldering son of a Presbyterian minister, the introvert to Blair’s extrovert, the Scot to Blair’s cosmopolitan, is an altogether different politician.

To say Pangloss is ceding to Macbeth would be unfair to both men, but not entirely. Blair never allowed a setback to upend him. Brown will have to fight his inclination to brood as he moves from a budget-setting job he could plan to Star Wars at Number 10, where everything comes at you at once.

The style will change, but what about the content? Brown has presided over Britain’s economic miracle. Anyone who imagines he will try a tax-and-spend approach to bridging the rich-poor divide is deluded. He promised equal-opportunity change in assuming Blair’s mantle, but has ruled out a return “to the failed approaches of the past.”

The relationship with President George W. Bush will be awkward at first. The president likes proofs of fealty. Brown, an election looming in the next couple of years, has to mark some distance or risk the return of the poodle epithet.

But there will be no abrupt reversal on Iraq or abandonment of the trans-Atlantic bond. If Brown chose to quote Abraham Lincoln, speaking of “the better angels of our nature” in describing his social conscience, it is because he is a convinced Atlanticist.

Blair has departed just as he got the Europe he wants, with market-reforming, America-drawn leaders in Berlin and Paris. Wondering how the Iraq war run-up would have unfolded with Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy is a beguiling what-if. But the hypothetical in history is as intriguing as it is ultimately useless.

Brown should also benefit from this new political configuration, with its consensus for a more open and competitive continent, even as he keeps Britain outside euroland. In his calibration of Britain’s role as trans-Atlantic bridge, he will have to bear in mind that Bush now has other European leaders he can turn to if necessary.

For a decade, the waking thoughts of Blair and Brown have been each other. A fundamental change is that Brown will govern without Blair - off to pit his bend-the-world-to-my-convictions certainties against the ultimate challenge of the Middle East. Relieved, or bereft, of the other, they confront enormous tests.

But then these are the guys who turned Labour into a pro-business party, confounding the Conservatives to this day. They are the architects of pro-openness transformation. As Pink Floyd put it: “We don’t need no thought control.”

Email: rocohen@nytimes.com

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Of Sarajevo and Baghdad

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: June 24, 2007

NEW YORK

On a visit to Serb-encircled Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, I drove the treacherous Igman road with Samantha Power, then a twenty-something rookie reporter and now a Harvard professor and a Pulitzer prize-winning author. Her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," has become a reference.

Moving at high speed on a twisting dirt track exposed to Serbian fire, I lost control. We veered toward a vertical drop that would kill three American diplomats later that year. She looked at me; I looked at her. Such moments, survived, create a bond.

So it has been hard seeing Power agonize, as I think the whole Bosnia generation has agonized, and come down, like David Rieff and Edward Vulliamy and other eloquent voices of Balkan interventionism, against the Iraq invasion.

Power concluded in early 2003 that intervening would "make the world a much more dangerous place" even if it might make Iraq "a more humane place." The former, for her, outweighed the latter.

Iraq did not grow more humane, not yet anyway. The world is still dangerous, possibly more so. When I spoke to Power the other day, she said something sad but probably true:

"Humanitarian intervention - the nonconsensual use of force - is dead. It had a very short life - September 1995 to the summer of 2003 - and it's been killed for the next decade. America is the only power than can do it and, after Iraq, we would just be recruiting fodder for this apocalyptic nihilism."

Put U.S. soldiers in Darfur, in other words, and you create a target for the global jihadists.

An Iraq invasion turned ex-post-facto into a humanitarian intervention does not sit well with human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantànamo. The Bush Administration's hubris has vitiated America's moral clout.

Still, what a difference a dozen years make. Power waited, as I did, for American force, deployed too late but deployed nonetheless, to end to the mass murder of Muslims in Bosnia by a repressive Serbian regime

It was American power again, used in Kosovo without the backing of a United Nations resolution, that brought to justice the regime's loathsome dictator, Slobodan Milosevic.

But, of course, compared to Saddam Hussein, Milosevic was a plaything. And there's the rub.

Have we liberal interventionists of the Balkans, members of the rapidly emptying school of "liberal hawks," been too quick to abandon our principles out of fear of alignment with the neo-cons?

Or perhaps, more inexcusably, have we fallen short merely because of a failure of the imagination, an inability to conceive of and work for a better Middle East, as if Arabs and freedom were somehow incompatible?

I think so. Paul Berman, a political historian, has a useful phrase to characterize American Middle East policy over the six decades before the Iraq invasion: the pursuit of "malign stability."

This approach, involving acquiescence to dictatorships in the name of stable repression and a stable oil supply, found its vilest expression in U.S. support of Saddam through his 1980s war with Iran (about 1 million dead) and the Kurdish genocide of 1988.

Backing turned to indifference when, in 1991, Saddam slaughtered Iraqi Shiites and Kurds whom the United States had encouraged to rise up. As malignity goes, that takes some beating.

The price of "stability" safeguarded by cynicism is worth recalling at a time when the Middle East's name is instability. Whatever else the bungled Iraq operation has been, it marked the end of American buttressing of a poisonous Middle Eastern stasis and a murderous Stalinist regime.

It is also worth recalling that it was in the time of quiet malevolence, back in 1998, that Osama bin Laden declared: "To kill Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim."

Malign stability did not work, not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia. It produced a backlash that ended America's self-image as sanctuary protected by two wide oceans.

The global jihadists were not created by the Iraq invasion. They were thriving on American policy prior to it.

The manifold blunders of America in Iraq have made it unfashionable to recall such truths.

Fashion is a poor compass. The next time a car bomb goes off, remember Saddon al-Saiedi, a 36-year-old Shiite army colonel, father of two, abducted by Saddam's goons on May 2, 1993, and never seen again.

As he went, so went numberless others, without a bang. Totalitarian hell - malign stability - holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than we have allowed.

Email: rocohen@nytimes.com

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