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 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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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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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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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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An Acquiescent U.S. in the Face of Russian Provocation

By JOHN VINOCUR

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 23, 2007

Does anybody out there remember Dick Cheney's harangue in Lithuania last year, the growlingly bellicose one that the Russians regard as heralding a new Cold War?

Here's how that dreadful man, who is 800 percent responsible for the Russians suspending the treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, threatening to target European Union members with new missiles, and even talking the possibility of an America versus Russia shooting war within the next decade, got it all started:

In a speech in May 2006 to a group of new democracies at the edges of the old Soviet Union, Cheney said, "None of us believe that Russia is fated to become an enemy."

"A Russia that increasingly shares the values of this community can be a strategic partner and a trusted friend as we work toward common goals," he said.

The Wild Man from the White House also asserted - although just in passing, a re-read of the speech shows - that there were opponents of reform in Russia trying to reverse its movement toward a lawful, civil society, and that "no legitimate interest is served" when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail.

For at-your-throat shock and provocation challenging peace among nations and good sense, that's it.

Fourteen months later, we have a remarkable situation. The Russians, insisting they face a vast, American-led Western menace, move almost weekly from new outburst to new provocation.

And the Bush administration, out-doing even some of its European allies, offers a half-contrite, half-rationalizing response that depends heavily on the idea that Russia's assertiveness is linked to nationalist posturing ahead of its presidential election (or selection) next year.

What seems to reign on the administration's policymaking floors - where's Cheney? - is the rather daring hope that this is a harsh Russian moment that will pass. In Europe, you can add to that wish the idea that if everyone sits tight now, greater impetus toward calm will surely accompany George W. Bush's departure in 2009.

But the circumstances show an intensifying pattern.

Well before Cheney's almost bland speech on Russia's regression toward authoritarianism, the Russians were threatening the energy supply of countries like Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland.

When the West had a chance to use its leverage to press a charter regulating fair energy supply at the G-8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg later in 2006, it let Russia off the hook. The American explanation was that Vladimir Putin's help was needed at the United Nations to stop the Iranian drive toward nuclear weapons.

Now, with the Russians still occupying the gatekeeper's chair at the UN Security Council, a third set of Iran sanctions that the Bush administration said would be enacted in July is off the rails because of Russian opposition.

Officials in Washington explain that there is growing agreement with Russia on the need to stop Iran, but that tactical differences are "heightened" and getting new sanctions is a tougher matter.

How could they not be? Russia sees that it can maneuver pretty much at will.

When Russia unilaterally announced 10 days ago that it was suspending its participation in the conventional forces agreement of 1990 - which ended the nose-to-nose troop confrontations of the Cold War, but included no provision for suspension - the Americans rationalized the move as a pause for rethinking a treaty that needs readjustment.

Last week, in the face of a Russian veto threat, the Americans and Europeans abandoned the Security Council as the enabling forum to deliver the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, a Russian client.

This was not just a tactical retreat. It was a victory for a Russian strategy that seeks to redivide Europe and re-establish its own spheres of influence.

On the scale of Russian successes since the Soviet Union's implosion, the partial Western climb-down on Kosovo was so marked that no new Russian leader, elected or imposed, would ever want to disregard it as a precedent.

This is bundled into a kind of Russian brow-beating that seems to have taken on a life of its own. Examples:

Sergei Ivanov, the Russian first deputy prime minister, says that if the Americans, Poles and Czechs go ahead with deploying a defensive missile shield aimed at potential Iranian nuclear threat, Russia would consider targeting nukes at Europe from Kaliningrad. That's a deployment area provokingly wedged on a speck of Russia outside its borders, between the NATO members Lithuania and Poland.

Major General Alexandr Vladimirov tells Russia's biggest newspaper, Komsolskya Pravda, that war with the United States is a possibility in the next 10 to 15 years.

The problem here is not just excess, but that the single American-European answer for it has been increasing the level of dialogue - with the Russian response, in turn, dismally clear on issues like Iranian sanctions or Kosovo.

With no Western push back marking their recent experience, the Russians have no objective reason not to try to turn so-called explanatory discussions on conventional forces or the missile shield into zero-sum negotiations: The Americans make concessions Russia wants, while Russia continues to demarcate the do-not-tread zone of its new influence.

The Bush administration's acquiescent manner has somehow rendered Russian action reasonable where it is not. Privately, the administration bewilders at least a couple of its European friends.

A cabinet member of a West European government, who asked not to be identified, said that the explanation may be that 80 percent of the White House's preoccupations are concerned with Iraq. Anything outside that area is subordinate.

The Russians, it would seem, fall onto a B-list of concerns, having chosen mostly to leave the Americans alone to twist in their Iraqi misery.

It's in this climate that signs of resistance to Russia are regarded elsewhere with respect.

The British expulsion of Russian diplomats following apparent Kremlin involvement in a British citizen's murder in London is such a step.

The expulsions' subtext makes clear that in dealing with the Russians, there are points when potential commercial repercussions must not be taken into account.

"It's the hard option," said the European official. Alongside more talk, he called it "the right way to start."

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

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Sarkozy’s Ambitions Reach Wide, but Where’s the Depth?

By JOHN VINOCUR

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 16, 2007
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PARIS

A newspaper in the American South once claimed readership and reporting that covered Dixie like the dew. In the league of cynical response, that line linked up with a put-down which lives on with real universality: yeah, a mile wide, and an inch deep.

France, since May 17, has a new leader who could well be called the omnipresident. With a breadth of reach that is extraordinary, and a burst of an energy that makes his predecessors over the last quarter century look paralytic, Nicolas Sarkozy has leapt into French life as the man who will change everything.

He has made clear that he will run every aspect of government, turning the prime minister's office into a kind of chief-of-staff position instead of the baffle it provided previous presidents from the drudgery and mess of daily, incremental politics.

He has widened the political affiliations of his cabinet members and appointees to include Socialists, women, and minorities, casting himself as the open-minded gatherer of the nation and tolerant symbol of all of France (while devastating the mainstream-left opposition in the process).

He has presented a catalogue of wall-to-wall change and ambition: leadership in Europe; new leverage for France in the world; an economy that trashes the traditional rigidities of French capitalism; an institutional makeover that would streamline government in the name of modernity — and, obviously, facilitate Sarkozy's will to put his mark on all things.

The goals stretch enormously wide. For now, according to a poll last week, 52 percent of the French say they aren't shocked by Sarkozy's omnipresence.

You could call it a running, leaping, remarkably successful start that has blanketed France in a mood of hopeful expectation it hasn't known in years.

The hitch is that on inspection the depth of Sarkozy's convictions — or in many cases their definition — has not become clear.

The mile-wide, inch-deep label would be cruel and hasty. Still, for early days, the contradictions are already there. Examples:

A university reorganization bill that won approval turned out to be a relatively business-as-usual undertaking that abandoned the student-selection and tuition provisions which reformers said were needed to lift the French higher education system from growing mediocrity to modernity.

Friends of Sarkozy privately rationalized away the bill's innocuousness with the thought that he could not risk student protests in the Paris streets this fall and winter when he's likely to confront labor unions with the job-market liberalization central to structural change in the economy.

Last week, when a whiff of renewal concerning French Middle East policy was in the air — Sarkozy quite reasonably referred to Hezbollah as "terrorist'' — the presidential bureaucracy reverted to form 24 hours later, reaffirming France's opposition to including Hezbollah on the European Union's list of terrorist organizations.

A day or two later, the president, who as the campaigning Sarkozy openly expressed his unwillingness to let Russia strengthen its strategic influence over Europe, was on the phone with Vladimir Putin. Gazprom had just picked Total, the French energy concern, to assist in the development of its vast Stokman gas reserves.

The deal limited Total's involvement to that of a hired hand, with Gazprom controlling 100 percent ownership of the gas the new field will produce. Much of France's requirement happily comes from non- Russian sources and nuclear power, yet the now presidential Sarkozy passed up on the occasion to express concern about a regime that uses gas and oil as a means of pressure on other EU members.

This was not a new France speaking out on what its new leader, two months earlier, said was on his mind.

Concerning the EU itself, Sarkozy's voice, rather than solely that of a nation embodying change and cooperation as its new European creed, alternately has been one of the old self-interested France, comfortable with slipping around its obligations as a team player..

Sarkozy has talked up both a European industrial policy, which decoded comes out as reflexive French protectionism, and greater political involvement in policy making at the European Central Bank, which basically boils down to a desire to bolster French competitiveness through a cheaper euro.

At the same time — French exceptionalism redux — Sarkozy has temporarily (read: but maybe until his term ends in 2012) turned France's back on meeting the debt and deficit requirements of the EU Stability Pact.

Again, friends of the president say this has to be understood in the domestic political context as the kind of position that would play to French reflex and soothe public opinion while the deep reforms bringing France in line with the European Union's public spending guidelines are put to work.

By stealth?

Perhaps, because in addressing the country last week, Sarkozy talked about the necessity of a ''strong state.'' This falls on French ears as a promise of a free-spending, all-protective one.

Psychologically, at least, it's in total contradiction with the need to reduce the massive number of public sector jobs, and end the civil service anachronisms, like lifetime employment and retirement at 50- something, which have become the notional standards for all employment. Not for nothing do polls continue to show a risk-averse majority of French young people want to work for the state.

So, where and when do the breadth of Sarkozy's presidential presence, his considerable double-edged language, and — based on performance so far — the legitimate questions about the variable level of his commitment to change run into political reality, and/ or trouble?

One of his friends, who spoke recently to the president, had an indirect answer. He said:

"Mitterrand and Chirac, in their way, shared the same analysis: nothing should be changed in France. 'You can't touch the country or it will break.' That was their analysis. Sarkozy believes the people are saying, 'It's got to be now. Do what's necessary.'"

Pushed to name an hour for the hard, deep stuff to begin, another ally just laughed.

October, November? he was asked.

There was a long, nonargumentative pause. ''Nicolas has been terrific,'' the man said. ''It's a very impressive start.''

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Sweet Cakes With a Terrorist

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: July 8, 2007
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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.

Email: rocohen@iht.com

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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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Why Are We Surprised?

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: June 20, 2007

NEW YORK

With all the sudden talk of a "West Bank first" strategy, embracing the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and consigning Hamas-dominated Gaza to the dogs, it is easy enough to forget that we are just over two years down the road from a "Gaza first" approach that had the Bush Administration excited.

To reacquaint myself with this reality, I contacted James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president who, in April of 2005, was appointed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement.

It was critical, Rice said at the time, to "seize the moment" of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza because "we have an opportunity right now to help Israelis and Palestinians build trust with one another and achieve the peace and security they both desire."

Fine words that proved as consequential as yesterday's newspapers. Wolfensohn, a seasoned negotiator, tried. He tried to the point of raising almost $15 million - including $10 million from a single American donor - to acquire greenhouses Israeli settlers were abandoning in the summer of 2005.

"We even gave them the greenhouses!" is now a refrain from the Israeli government in arguing that the "test case" of Gaza has failed, leading not to the democratic embryo of a Palestinian state but to a nest of Hamas-led terror.

The refrain overlooks Wolfensohn's role and the cash paid. More important, it overlooks the fact that the greenhouses looked set to become a profitable Gaza industry before Israel shut the border and the produce rotted.

"Once it was clear the business was viable, threats stopped and the community took tremendous pride in growing flowers, fruits and vegetables for export to Israel," Wolfensohn told me.

"The absolute tragedy was that within months of the commencement of that activity, issues of security at the border, some proven, some not, led to the border being sealed and everything getting wasted," he added.

"There is one inevitable truth in the Middle East: Unless you provide economic activity to young people who are 70 percent of the population, you will have conflict. They will shoot the people they blame and in the end they will shoot each other."

Of course, Hamas rose in Gaza. It won the election in early 2006 that the West had called for. That was problematic. Hamas has been deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union. It has rejected calls to recognize Israel, forswear all violence and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian accords.

But "seizing the moment," as Rice said, involves risk. It is inconceivable without some sort of good-faith engagement. There was no way that Gaza, a slither of impoverished territory crammed with 1.3 million Palestinians, driven into the ground by corrupt Fatah governance, was going to show Swiss moderation in its first election.

To believe otherwise is to inhabit an imaginary Middle East - a transnational Green Zone - and it is not in a world of the imagination that anything is going to get solved. Hamas, right now, represents a very large number of Palestinians, like it or not. "West Bank first" will not change that.

Wolfensohn, no dreamer, said: "I can only tell you that the Israeli closing of the Gaza borders was made with less consideration of the impact than needed. Aside from the military analysis, you have to consider the impact on a society, because social dislocation leads to anger and violence."

After a year in the job, marginalized, he slipped away. "The view on the American and Israeli side was that you could not trust the Palestinians, and the result was not to build more economic activity, but to build more barriers," Wolfensohn said. "And I personally did not think that was the way forward."

Nor do I. "Gaza first" imploded because Gaza was cut off. Intra-Palestinian mayhem ensued. Hamas has terrorist elements. But it remains more a Palestinian national than a global jihadist movement. There are members of Hamas with whom dialogue is possible. To make peace you have to get the enemy to the table.

American and European money is now being rushed to Abbas and his emergency government in the West Bank. President George W. Bush, meeting this week with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, called Abbas the "president of all the Palestinians."

What independent Palestinian state Abbas could ever one day govern is another matter. Unless the real world is addressed, "Gaza first" and now "West Bank first" will one day give way to "Ramallah first" as putative Palestine perishes.

"This has been a terrible example for me of hope being turned into real tragedy," Wolfensohn said.

Email: rocohen@nytimes.com

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Small, Uneasy Georgia Praises the New France

By JOHN VINOCUR

International Herald Tribune

Published: June 18, 2007

PARIS

Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, was talking about Nicolas Sarkozy: "Things are so very different now in France," he said. "This optimism, this strong conviction. Everything is possible. Everything is open. There's something revolutionary here. It's the start of something grandiose."

For pure political rapture, not much in this register had been heard since North Korea recited anthems to Kim Il Sung, its old strongman.

Surely excessive, but certainly hopeful and sincere, Saakashvili's wild enthusiasm about Sarkozy's month-old presidency has at least a toehold in reality.

From the point of view of Georgia, a former Soviet republic of 4.6 million with both real concern for its security and ambitions to become a Western-type democracy, Sarkozy is already engineering French foreign policy away from the Chirac years' complaisant view of Russia's wanting a belt of limited-sovereignty countries at its borders.

In a conversation after he met here with Sarkozy last week, Saakashvili said that French officials once had a standard answer for almost any Georgian need or concern: "That's interesting." Now, when he asked about buying two frigates, a request previously turned down, the French response, Saakashvili said, was "Why not?"

By the standard of showing your convictions, this is not France saying "sure" to an order for patrol boats from Switzerland. Russian troops remain on Georgian territory, and Russia has banned all Georgian imports. Russia also supports independence movements in two regions Georgia regards as its own, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

On top of that, the Russians hardly like the idea of Georgia's joining NATO, but Sarkozy gave the plan (which goes for Ukraine, too) a no-ifs-or-buts yes during the campaign. While Saakashvili was in Paris, approval was also granted for French assistance to the Georgian Army and police and to a plan to help Georgia in developing nuclear energy.

This, of course, is not a New French Foreign Policy, whole and articulated. That's to be determined as a vast or partial makeover of several months duration.

But in dealing with a small country that irritates Russia, the Sarkozy team turned away from approaching Georgia as if it were to be handled by tongs in a stealth operation. When he was asked by a reporter if there was any symbolism in this early-days, top-of-agenda Georgian visit, the government spokesman, David Martinon, said, unhesitatingly, "Yes."

The world was meant to notice. In Paris last week for a meeting on Kosovo, the U.S. State Department's third-ranking official, Under Secretary R. Nicholas Burns, described France these days as "breaking the mold" in positive terms on a number of issues.

Indeed, there was more. After seeing Saakashvili, Sarkozy traveled to Poland to try to ease it toward more suppleness this week at the European Union summit meeting about the EU constitution - a trip that would have been unthinkable for Chirac.

Since the failed attempt by Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, bolstered by Vladimir Putin, to align the EU in opposition to the United States at the outset of the war in Iraq, Poland (like Georgia, an eager ally of America) has been extremely wary of any changes in EU statutes that would limit its prerogatives.

Now, the tone of French policy under Sarkozy has changed so much as to make a French conciliation mission welcome. Le Monde explained that Poland's unbending stance in defending its European interests, particularly in relation to Germany, was "in part the consequence" of its earlier experience - a clear reference to the Chirac/Schröder/Putin triangle.

Sarkozy's move away from some of France's old reflexes also extends toward more existential issues involving Iran and Russia.

With other NATO countries, France joined in tacitly accepting last week the American missile shield (Ségolène Royal, for one, opposed it), whose deployment Russia regards as an intrusion into the sphere of influence it's seeking to reassert over former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and the Czech Republic.

During the election campaign, Sarkozy also made clear that he would consider additional sanctions against Iran to follow enactment of a third-round of UN Security Council measures scheduled for July. These supplemental sanctions would involve a group of countries willing to bypass the Security Council and Russia and China's potential blocking role there.

The new restrictions are described as hard enough to serve as an unmistakable warning to Iran against pursuing its nuclear drive.

With Paris presumably on board, Burns said publicly for the first time that work on these supplementary sanctions was moving forward among a group of unidentified countries.

Re-enter Saakashvili, who besides Sarkozy also saw the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, and Burns. With Georgia bordering on Russia and sharing common neighbors with Iran, Saakashvili talked about how these areas of concern run together.

Of Sarkozy and Putin, with whom he spoke two weekends ago in St. Petersburg, Saakashvili said, "They are from radically different worlds," while declining to compare them.

Instead, he focused on Sarkozy, saying, "Europe can't miss the chance to profit from his energy" and willingness to be bold.

There was a quiet admonition here. When Europe engaged in what Saakashvili said was convincing itself of its "pragmatism or realpolitik," or drifted along with "romantic and sentimental" ideas, it often wound up being weak. Showing strength and unity was its best card, he said.

This was "specially" and "particularly" true in relation to Russia, he said, adding, very reasonably, that Russia wanted and deserved the Europeans' "acceptance and respect."

On the other hand, Georgia has some immediate Russian worries. If Russia vetoes independence for Kosovo in the coming weeks or months, and the United States and the EU recognize Kosovo, Russia has threatened to recognize Abkhazia's independence.

This would violate Georgia's sovereignty and create an explosive situation. "It would be folly," said Saakashvili, this time using a phrase not so far from what U.S. officials have told the Russians.

"We have strong support from France and the United States on this," Saakashvili said. "I think the Russians have the sense of realism to deal with it. But you've got to be vigilant."

Sarkozy's France newly agrees on this, and for a small, worried country on the Black Sea, that's a real reason for satisfaction. Not to mention a fact that well explains some hagiographic language to describe the new French president.

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The Long View in Iraq

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: June 17, 2007

NEW YORK

The Iraqi conflict is going to be with us for years if not decades. The country has become the focus of a crisis of Islamic civilization that is closer to its onset than its conclusion. Violent conflict between the now dominant Shiite community and Sunnis nostalgic for power is but one aspect of this epochal upheaval.

As in the Palestinian territories, the Iraqi struggle has been complicated by the presence of forces driven not by national goals but by the global objectives of jihadist Islamism. These jihadists, finding inspiration in their reading of the sacred texts of Islam, have embarked on a holy war against the West.

It is against such fanatics, some of whom call themselves Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, that General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, has just announced a major offensive. I wish Petraeus and the 155,000 troops now in Iraq luck, but I am not hopeful.

The fact is that however many bomb makers are taken out, however many cells broken, the social and religious forces driving angry young men across the Muslim world into this sort of fight are not about to abate.

A population explosion is pushing these men into societies with few jobs and scant hope for the future beyond a range of causes - from Palestine to Iraq to the perceived debauchery of modernity - capable of drawing them into a consoling, if nihilistic, zealotry.

Against this reality, exacerbated in Iraq by the whirlwind fragmentation that often occurs in multi-ethnic societies when the lid of despotism is lifted, America's September deadline for measuring the progress achieved by the addition of 30,000 troops looks almost comical.

Let's face it folks, things are not going to be measurably better in Iraq by September. They may be about the same; they could be worse. The destructive energy disaggregating the country is still building. Wars tend to end when their participants are exhausted. We are not there yet, not even close.

The other day, I met Mokhtar Lamani, a distinguished Moroccan diplomat who took on the thankless task of representing the Arab League in Baghdad. He recently quit because, as usual, the Arab League could not get its act together. Anyway, a non-Arab state, Iran, is the major regional player in Iraq. Its envoy would not even call on Lamani.

Before he left, Lamani did something useful. Each time there was a bomb or killing, he asked his staff to identify the group claiming responsibility and, if its existence could be verified, note it down. The list reached more than 300 names. "We are not talking about a civil war, but a series of civil wars," Lamani said.

These wars - bringing together global, religious, regional and national struggles - should be seen as facets of the crisis of Islamic civilization.

The United States is a big country at the apogee of its power. But there are historical forces that even very big countries cannot stop. At best, they can be contained - and it is to containment that President George W. Bush must now look. He should have the courage to admit his mistakes, but also to resist calls for complete withdrawal driven more by electoral calculus than concern for Iraqis.

The last military build-up will not be repeated. Americans have no stomach for a further "surge" and the U.S. armed forces have no capacity for one. Republicans, facing an unpopular war, are going to walk off the reservation unless the president changes course in the fall.

I see four core American interests in Iraq that cannot be abandoned. There must be no Afghan-like Al Qaeda takeover of wide areas. There must be no genocide (say a Shiite sweep against Sunnis). There must be no regional conflagration (for example, a Turkish invasion). And there must be no return to the old order (murderous Stalinist dictatorship).

To ensure this, the United States must keep a military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The size of this deterrent force is up for debate, but 50,000 soldiers, or 105,000 less than today, is one talked-about figure. The timing of the drawdown will have to be discussed with Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, but it should begin soon after September.

Pulling out a lot of troops is the only way to increase pressure on Maliki to make the political compromises - on distribution of oil revenue, the constitution and de-Baathification - that will give Iraq some long-term chance of cohering. That chance will be increased if, as the United States steps down, the United Nations steps up.

E-mail: rocohen@nytimes.com

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The Cry of the Disappeared

By ROGER COHEN

International Herald Tribune

Published: June 13, 2007

NEW YORK

To disappear became a transitive verb in Latin America. Military dictatorships "disappeared" their opponents. That is to say, they kidnapped, tortured, murdered and disposed of them, leaving only an inconsolable absence in the place of a human being.

I spent some time in Argentina in the aftermath of the 1976-83 dictatorship. Enough to become familiar with countless picture frames holding images of impossibly lovely young women, taken from their homes for "brief questioning," never to be seen again. Enough to know the unquenchable parental tears these disappearances provoked.

It was not too early then, in rooms filled with the animal sobbing of the bereaved, to feel rage at the junta's crimes. But it was too early to know the full extent of them: the 30,000 disappeared, the torture at the Navy School of Mechanics in Buenos Aires, the corpse-dumping flights out to sea.

Argentines still hoped back in the 1980s. They hoped, whatever their heads told them, that the longing in their hearts might return their loved ones intact. No doubt, many still hope.

With disappearance, closure is impossible, for there is no evidence of an ending. In this infinite prolongation of suffering lay the particular contribution of the generals to the infliction of pain.

There was something else we did not know back then. Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, told Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, the Argentine foreign minister, in June 1976: "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures."

Later, Kissinger assured the admiral that the administration "won't cause you unnecessary difficulties." He also grew angry when he learned that the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, has given the junta a warning about violations of human rights. "In what way is it compatible with my policy?" Kissinger asked, before suggesting that Hill might have to go.

These exchanges, records of which were obtained in recent years under the federal Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit National Security Archive, suggest how the surrogate battles of the Cold War, as fought in the American hemisphere, drew the United States into forms of complicity that remain a shadow on its conscience.

More recently, the historian Robert Dallek unearthed transcripts in the National Archives that show Kissinger, bitter at negative newspaper coverage of the 1973 coup in Chile, complaining to President Richard Nixon that, "in the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes." The coup would lead to thousands of "disappearances."

I was thrust back into this Latin American vortex, which haunted me in the 1980s, by a powerful show called "The Disappeared" at New York's El Museo del Barrio. It features works about horrors, often followed by impunity, to which the United States turned a blind eye at best.

Ana Tiscornia's blurred portraits, palimpsests in which the subjects seem to hover between life and death, capture the slow fading of the disappeared, and their flickering hold on those from whom they were seized.

A corridor full of photographs of young couples feature women who were pregnant when "disappeared." The Argentine military would wait for the child to be born before murdering the mother. The babies went to childless military couples. Laconic captions say: "The couple and their child remain disappeared."

As Laurel Reuter and Julian Zugazagoitia write in their introduction to the show, organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art, the artists "ask us, as North Americans, to question what role our own country played in supporting the Latin American governments which killed their people as a matter of course."

The artists also ask us something else. This month six human rights groups listed 39 people they believe are secretly imprisoned in unknown locations by the United States as part of the war on terror.

President George W. Bush acknowledged last year that some individuals deemed particularly dangerous had been moved "to an environment where they can be held secretly." In effect, categorized as enemy combatants, they have been "disappeared."

This practice is unconscionable. It does not matter that the purpose of the disappearance is not murder, as it was in Argentina.

Once people disappear, every basic human right is at risk because every check, every balance, has gone with them. The worst becomes almost inevitable because there is nothing to stop it.

The United States demands accountability of others when its own people go missing. It must demand the same accountability of itself, whatever the fight. The lovely, longing and lost young faces of Latin America require at least that.

E-mail: rocohen@nytimes.com

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