What chance India, Pakistan amity?

DURING the question-answer session at a recent seminar in Karachi to mark the formal launch of a new daily, someone from the audience asked: Of what use is a seminar attended by a limited number of people in big cities, for the cause of peace and friendship between India and Pakistan, when the mainstream leaders and the masses in the two countries are uninvolved?

The question was meant perhaps more to unsettle the ‘keynote speaker,’ Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel ‘God of Small Things’ and peace activist, than to elicit an answer. She replied that the choice before her was not between addressing the Pakistani masses and addressing the seminars, but between addressing the seminars and not coming here at all to advance the cause of Indo-Pakistan amity. A beginning has to be made and hence she was here.

Many people in both countries hope for enduring peace in South Asia, but the task before the “friendship activists’ club” is a formidable one. Some ‘friendship activists’ may be harbouring the notion that just opening the door to mass contacts between the two peoples would lead to a ‘grand reconciliation,’ a ‘family quarrel’ would be patched up, everything forgotten and people in the subcontinent would live happily ever after.

Some of them hold the armies in the two countries, particularly in Pakistan, responsible for the continued tension between the two countries. Perhaps a greater number have strong reservations about developing an ‘open-door’ policy for reasons that vary from self-serving logic to sincere doubts about the good intentions of the other side. This distrust between the people — and governments — of the two countries is indeed the ‘core issue’ that blocks the establishment of normal friendly ties. A change of heart on both sides is therefore the real need of the time.

Past conflicts aside, the Indians have their RSS and other extremists and we have the firebrand mullahs to contend with, but if we look back in history, these very people were against the establishment of Pakistan and opposed the secular-minded Jinnah and his supporters. The latter won and Pakistan was established, though in a truncated form, far from the conception that most Indian Muslims had in their minds about the outlines of the new state. Yet the Muslims of the subcontinent gained, as they acquired a state of their own. It was up to them to make or mar their destiny with the newly gained state power. That the results have been a mixed blessing for the subcontinent’s Muslims is another matter, however.

Within 24 years, the eastern wing separated and became an independent state, with the active encouragement, abetment and later, participation of the Indian armed forces. The event has left scars in the hearts and minds of the Pakistanis as well as Bangladeshis, though their feelings and perceptions are very different.

But it is obvious that this was a trauma on a scale comparable to that which led to the carving out of the state of Pakistan from the subcontinent when it was freed of the British yoke in 1947.

On the other hand, extremists on both sides are still dreaming of the ‘conquest’ of the other. Hindu fanatics in India believe that they could reincorporate the part of ‘Bharat Mata’ that was snatched away over half a century ago and revive the glory of a strong, united Hindu state in the subcontinent, while some of our own extremists, who consist largely of the very same religious elements who opposed Jinnah, are dreaming of ‘planting their flag on the Red Fort in Delhi.’ They seem to place a great deal of faith in ‘the bomb.’

Strangely, such elements are even found among military men who, we thought, would know better the equation (or rather inequality) of military power between the two countries. As the ex-ambassador and foreign secretary, Shahryar Khan noted in his speech at the peace seminar, a conscious attempt is being made by such elements to militarize the minds of the people by creating monuments and place names that sound jingoistic and militaristic.

We have the Chagai monument in Polo Ground in Karachi to ‘commemorate’ the nuclear blasts of May, 1998, and a host of monuments and place names dating further back, such as ‘Teen Talwar’ and ‘Submarine Chowk.’

The replicas of planes and missiles installed at various places constantly remind the people of military themes. Many will challenge the idea that these things are totally inspired by the sentiment or aim of inciting militarism and say that they may well be the result of the unenviable task before Pakistan of defence against a much bigger, hostile neighbour, that has obliged Pakistan to maintain large armed forces and suffer its consequences.

Both the simplistic suggestions of ‘open-door’ policy and of extreme distrust are removed from reality, which lies somewhere in between. It remained for the leaders of the two countries to solve the problems the British left in their midst — festering sores that later cost more to the two countries than probably they were worth, except in their emotional value, and should have been resolved by now.

Arundhati Roy calls the Kashmir issue “a rabbit they pull out of their hats” to divert people’s attention from more pressing issues. In actuality, with the testing of the nuclear bomb, for which India’s reasons may have been more than just intimidating Pakistan (for example, rivalry with China, or an eye on a permanent seat in the UN Security Council), India committed a strategic blunder and gave Pakistan a strong reason to test its own bomb, which it probably would not otherwise have done. The result: ‘equalization’ — in terms of destructive power. Pakistan gained an effective deterrent against an Indian attack or advance into its territory.

The question is whether mere awareness, at the citizen level, of the importance of peace in South Asia, is enough? The ‘Track 2’ diplomacy by the retired bureaucrats and generals of the two countries did get a lot of publicity but has not much to show for its efforts. Shekhar Gupta, editor of the Indian Express put it succinctly when he asked, in a lighter vein, at the Karachi peace seminar where these principles — and lofty sentiments — were when these gentlemen were in service? Or were they made helpless by their predominantly hawkish colleagues? That is the problem: authority and power makes you a hawk. Is that also why we have so many who grow beards and start praying five times a day only after they retire?

Well meaning citizens on each side should, besides creating awareness, seek to bring about a real change by influencing their own respective governments, emphasizing the futility of continued conflict and putting pressure, wherever possible, through public opinion and other peaceful mechanisms. A good option for the two governments is to create stakes between the two countries that lead to the need for an amicable solution of all disputes.

Arguments like the one made by some speakers at the Karachi seminar, as to what moral right the government that does not provide freedom to its people, have, to demand freedom for the Kashmiris, are redundant. History is replete with calls for freedom of specific territories or people, made by governments that could not by any stretch of the imagination, be called democratic. Democracy in all countries exists in an essentially imperfect form. One can see how the godfathers of democracy are tightening their laws and curtailing civil liberties in the name of their security after September 11.

That does not, however, detract from the need for freedom, and normalization of relations between the two main antagonists in South Asia. A change has to be brought about, steadily but cautiously, in the mindset that has led so far to tension and conflict.

The days of mass religious conversions are over and, hopefully, of religious wars, too. No one need have fears on that count. The points at issue are freedom and justice, not religion per se. One of the Indian journalists informed the audience at the Karachi seminar of the hollow claim of the Indian ‘missile man,’ President Abdul Kalam, that after the Indian atomic tests, “India has now become safe for ever from foreign invasion,” Let us keep in mind that South Asia is a large entity, that today invasion of South Asia by any outside power is unthinkable. It is South Asians themselves who threaten one another. That must become a thing of the past.

The need is to build up stakes in peace. When the people — businessmen, traders, industrialists, people related to culture and media fields, and the consumers generally, - will have a stake in preserving peace, both states will think twice before contemplating hostilities and feel the need to resolve, all issues including Kashmir.

There are moderate elements among the Indians, too, contrary to our popular perception that there are only Advanis and Modis among them. (The corresponding Indian perception is that Pakistan has only religious bigots).

There are also people like Arundhati Roy, and the editors who accompanied her on this trip, Shekhar Gupta of New Delhi and N. Ram of Chinnai, among the Indian intelligentsia, who deplore the rise of the Hindu right in India, and realize what devastation and misery war can bring to the common people of the two countries.

TNCs in economic recovery

ON a number of occasions and in several articles published in this space in the last few months, I have been extolling the virtues of close collaboration between a country such as Pakistan and the transnational corporations. Why Pakistan needs the TNCs, as they are usually called, is easily explained. Pakistan needs capital to invest in an economy that continues to perform sluggishly.

Since the Pakistani government does not save at all and since the country’s households save very little, we must look to the private sector — in particular domestic and foreign corporations — to invest in our economy.

Pakistan’s corporate sector has played very safe in the last decade or so. Again, the reasons for its reluctance to invest in the country’s economy and build value for themselves are not too difficult to explain. When private entrepreneurs invest they take a bet on the future. They will be very reluctant to commit their resources into an economy for which the future has been hard to predict. This has been the case in Pakistan ever since 1965 when we fought our second hot war with India.

The prolonged political agitation against the government of Ayub Khan in the late 1960s; the civil war between East and West Pakistan in 1971; nationalization of private industry, commerce and finance by the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; and the introduction of some aspects of Islamic economics into economic management by the government of General Ziaul Haq were factors that discouraged the private sector. All these events created an enormous amount of uncertainty.

The far-reaching liberalization of the economy in 1991 during the first year of Mian Nawaz Sharif government brought a waft of fresh air into the house of the troubled Pakistani economy. The private sector, sensing that the country may be turning a corner, responded vigorously. Across the border in India, a team of reformist economists led by Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, had begun to dismantle the “licence raj” that had kept the Indian economy growing at an anemic rate of 3 to 3.5 per cent a year for several decades. This was called the Hindu rate of growth by the Indian economists themselves.

The opening up of the Indian economy brought immediate dividends to the country. The Indian reforms and their impact were, no doubt, watched and studied by Sartaj Aziz, finance minister in the Mian Nawaz Sharif’s first government. He followed the Indian example and launched the process of liberalizing the Pakistani economy. The results were also encouraging and private capital, both domestic and foreign, began to flow into the economy.

Markets hate uncertainty for the simple reason that the future is hard to read in an environment where uncertainty prevails. Soon after Minister Aziz had launched his programme of reform, two things happened which made the investors nervous. The prime minister lost the confidence of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. And, equally troubling, the government began to take investment decisions based mostly on whims rather than on careful analysis. A number of these decisions involved the commitment of large amounts of public funds.

The decision to construct the Islamabad-Lahore motorway and to import thousands of cars under the “yellow taxis” scheme are two examples of such decisions. Private sector corporations looked at these developments in utter despair and withdrew into their cocoons. Domestic companies once again began to invest abroad. Consequently, capital, rather than flowing into the country, started to flow out of it. Foreign corporations were not likely to come in when domestic entrepreneurs preferred to stay out and mark time.

In the eight-year period following the launch of an effort to reform the Pakistani economy, the country saw in power three political and three “care-taker” administrations. Six governments in office in eight years cannot give a sense of continuity and certainty. It is not surprising, therefore, that large domestic and foreign corporations chose not to invest much in the economy in the 1990s.

Power sector was the only place in the economy where some investment was made. This was in response to a generous policy of support adopted by the second administration of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto which was in office from 1993 to 1996. But the handling of the independent power producers, mostly foreign but some also domestic, by the second Sharif administration (1997-1999) contributed enormously to the growing sense of uncertainty in Pakistan’s economic future.

The firm handling of the economy by the administration of General Pervez Musharraf may have created an environment somewhat more friendly towards private investors. In last week’s article I quoted from some recent World Bank reports that have commented very favourably on the series of government reforms. If the environment is not unduly disturbed by the shape of politics in the post-election period, Pakistan may well have prepared itself for getting investors to start investing in the economy once again.

A well tuned partnership between the representatives of the people and the military may come about after the elections scheduled for October 2002. If that happens, Pakistan may begin to appear on the maps of transnational corporations. If it does, foreign direct investment may return to the country, augment in a significant way the quantum of domestic investment, and get the economy moving once again. However, given what we now know about the way several large corporations have conducted their business in the United States in the last several years, should Pakistan be anxious to invite them to its shores?

Before saying that the answer to this question is most definitely yes, we should perhaps review the new mood of restraint that has now become visible in America’s board rooms. According to two analysts who focus on the Wall Street, “accounting practices, corporate governance, relations with Wall Street, executive compensation, a host of business methods that would have been condoned or even encouraged a year ago — all are now up for review.” [Andrew Hill and Adrian Michaels, “Hostile terrain,” Financial Times, August 13, 2002, p. 12].

A tough new legislation, called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after the names of its sponsors, has been added to the books of laws that govern corporate behaviour in America. The law includes heavy criminal penalties for errant corporate behaviour, strict accounting supervision and sweeping requirements for top executives to certify their accounts. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the American regulator for all public listed companies, required some 700 chief executives of large corporations to swear to the accuracy of their accounts by August 14, 2002. This created some uncertainty on the New York Stock Exchange. When the deadline passed, the CEOs of several hundred companies were prepared to put their signatures on the accounts they submitted.

The American government was not the only one forced to act. A number of proposals were made by the New York Stock Exchange and other stock markets to get the corporations to conform strictly to the legal and the regulatory framework governing their behaviour. These and other changes in the environment in which the American corporations do business will, no doubt, affect the way they look at the emerging markets. Will new requirements of good governance on the part of corporate America cause them to scale down their investments and operations in emerging markets?

Before answering this difficult question, let us see how the TNCs have responded in recent years to developments in Third World economies. The recently published report on the working of these corporations, prepared by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), offers some interesting information about the size and performance of transnational corporations. Twentynine of the world’s 100 biggest economic entities are transnational corporations. When the UNCTAD talks about “economic entities,” it includes countries as well as corporations in the list. Exxon is the largest TNC — it is larger than all but 44 national economies with an estimated value added of $63 billion, about the same size as the economy of Pakistan. Ford, Daimler Chrysler, General Electric and Toyota are all comparable in size to the economy of Nigeria.

However, there is much greater volatility in the measured size of TNCs since it is dependent on the valuations placed on them by the stock markets. Briefly in the spring of 2001, Cisco, an American firm that specializes in producing equipment for IT networking, became the world’s largest corporation beating by a wide margin such old economy companies as Exxon and GE. After a plunge in the price of its shares, it is now valued at about one-sixth of the size it had purportedly achieved in 2001. Microsoft, the giant software producer, occupied the top position in this league of large corporations for a good while longer. Like other “new economy” companies, it has also been humbled.

In its report, UNCTAD says that the economic importance of the 100 biggest TNCs relative to national economies has grown in the past decade. Although, the position of the 20 largest companies had declined slightly over the same period, as a group the TNCs will out-perform national economies. Their domination of the global economy will increase over time. In spite of what the forces opposed to globalization have said about the influence of the TNCs, it is important for countries such as Pakistan to try to attract them to their shores.

Anti-globalization protesters have complained with some passion that since TNCs are considerably wealthier and more powerful than the economies of many countries in which they do business, they can do a great deal of mischief. They can, for instance, use intra-firm trade to avoid paying taxes where production takes place. They can also inhibit the development of local enterprises. They can force countries wishing to develop their economies to stay focused on the sectors in which the TNCs will not face much competition. The list of things that the TNCs may do — and sometimes, in fact, do — is a long one. Nonetheless, the countries that have opened themselves to the entry of TNCs have done much better than those who have been suspicious of their activities.

We have to look no further than the remarkable performance of East Asia — including China — to develop a more positive brief for the contribution TNCs have made to the economic development of the host. My advice to the policy makers who will take over the management of the Pakistani economy after the October elections is to make the country attractive for the TNCs.

The rains came: ALL OVER THE PLACE

I HAD been abroad from 1947 and did not return till late 1953. Prior to this, I had lived in Bombay and every year, in the months of June till late August, there would be the monsoon and it would rain and rain.

I cannot recall missing a single day of school or college and I used public transport. I cannot recall any power failures or the telephones going kaput. The only inconvenience I underwent was when there was no play on the cricket maidans because rain had stopped play. In Los Angeles where I spent many years, rain was called liquid sunshine and in England, it never seemed to stop raining and when the sun came out and everybody congratulated everyone with the greeting: “Nice day, isn’t it?”

The weather remained fair in Karachi for the first few months until one day, as I sat in the offices of the late The Pakistan Standard, it started to rain. It was not as if the heavens had opened, it was a downpour that did not last long. The lights in the office went off and the telephones went dead. That was not all.

On my way home, I found that the roads had been flooded and Karachi was in an advanced state of infrastructure collapse. But every cloud has a silver lining and I wrote a column on rain in Karachi and it was my first and it started me off as a columnist, a career I have pursued, barring a short lay-off, lasting some 25 years, when I worked for PIA.

Everytime it has rained in Karachi, I have written about it and I can reproduce any one of those columns and would not need to change a comma and it would hold good. Thus, in writing about rain in Karachi last week, I am performing a ritual that goes back to 1954.

Nothing has changed in all these years and we have had every kind of government, from palace-coups to military-coups with intermittent interruptions of political governments. We have even had the late Jam Sadiq Ali as chief minister who was so powerful that he could have had the weather-gods abducted.

But rain and its repercussions on the city of Karachi, this noble land’s most populous and prosperous, with its Clifton, Defence Officers Housing Society, Bath Island, has never been on the agenda of the various administrations that have stamped their authority on this city and the havoc of rain has provided a photo-opportunity even for those who can lay no claims to being photogenic or telegenic.

No candidates in the numerous elections we have had, local, provincial or national has ever campaigned on a rain-promise, that is to say, that he or she will lessen the misery of Karachi’s poor when it rains or remove the inconvenience of the well-to-do. It is simply a non-issue. In that very first column I had written, when Tito, Franco and Eisenhower were still alive, that Karachi lives blissfully in the belief that it has never rained in Karachi, it does not rain in Karachi and that it will never rain in Karachi. We still do.

As soon as it started to rain seriously last week, we knew exactly what would happen and because the infrastructure of the city is on life-support, each year the misery and havoc is greater, a fact compounded by an increase in population.

But the havoc that the rain causes in Karachi is a symptom (a symbol?) of a more general disease and that disease is civic arrogance. The day to day problems of the city’s population, be it electricity, water, roads, hospitals, air and noise pollution, law and order, appear not to be worthy of concern, much less corrective measures, because they are not seen as a part and parcel of good governance.

Ministers fly flags on their cars, how dare we ask them about a large garbage dump that adjoins a hospital? The lungs of the city are choked by foul air, so we turn open space, not into parks but into highrise buildings or marriage halls. No one thinks twice of chopping down a tree or more than one tree. No one is worried that residential areas have been turned into bazaars.

The PECHS is a case in point. I once lived there. I wonder if anyone still resides in PECHS considering that most of the houses are now offices. The list is endless. Karachi has been turned into a slum. It was one of the cleanest cities in the world when I had first arrived to live in it. How far away that seems.

A city one belongs to is home. Why have we allowed our home to become a rubbish-dump? One is supposed to have pride in one’s home, be it if ever so humble. One does not neglect one’s home even if one does not have the means to beautify it. The neglect to which Karachi has been subjected has nothing to do with financial constraints. It has to do with a lack of caring.

The Metropolitan section of this newspaper carries every day, reports of power failures and water shortages, to say nothing of a tally of cars that are stolen, often, at gun-point. Anyone who matters reads this newspaper. I have often wondered if there is any unease at the obvious conclusion that someone is not doing his job. It is at this level that there is no accountability. This is this big picture that we should be looking at.

We are not yet done with the rains. We may get another downpour. One does not have to be a soothsayer to know what will happen. What will happen is what happens everytime it rains in Karachi. There will be civic mayhem. Learning nothing from experience has been institutionalized. Who says that our institutions have been destroyed?

The limits of trust

SINCE the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has argued that law enforcement and intelligence agencies can be trusted to wield broad new powers — both those additional powers voted into law last year and powers still under consideration. Officials have in many instances brushed aside suggestions that accountability and openness should accompany these new authorities.

And their “trust us” mantra has largely carried the day as Congress has approved intrusive new powers for the executive branch. So it is no wonder that the Justice Department did not hasten to produce to Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., a copy of an extraordinary May 17 opinion by the seven judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The work of this super-secret tribunal, which considers government applications for search warrants and wiretaps in intelligence matters, almost never sees the light of day — in fact, this is the first opinion the full court has published since its creation in 1978.

But in this instance, the judges themselves, responding to a request by the senators, took action to make sure that the senators and the public saw their unprecedented, unclassified opinion. The opinion, which the three senators released, paints a disquieting portrait of the FBI’s trustworthiness, or lack thereof, in some of the most sensitive matters it handles.

The opinion was written in response to a Justice Department proposal to change the rules governing the relationship between prosecutors chasing criminals and intelligence operatives chasing information. In criminal cases, prosecutors generally must show probable cause of criminal activity before a judge will allow them to wiretap or search a suspect.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes such intrusive surveillance for intelligence purposes with a less rigorous showing. While this material can end up being used in a criminal case, the lower standard is constitutional only because the statute’s purpose — and the purpose of the surveillance — is to gather foreign intelligence.

So the FISA judges have historically been careful to make sure that criminal prosecutors were not directing surveillance under the law as a way of bypassing the strictures of domestic criminal rules. In the USA Patriot Act, Congress substantially lowered the wall between intelligence-gathering and crime-fighting; the Justice Department argued to the court that the new law meant the judges should ease up and stop insisting that prosecutors not take over intelligence surveillance.

The court said no. It cited a variety of legal considerations, but underlying these was another factor: The judges report that the FBI has not played straight with them over the role prosecutors have been playing in the process in the past.

In September 2000, the judges recount, the government “came forward to confess error in some 75 FISA applications related to major terrorist attacks directed against the United States.” These errors almost uniformly “involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors.”

They included an “erroneous statement” by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and misrepresentations in the FISA applications of FBI agents concerning “the separation of overlapping intelligence and criminal investigations.” They also included “omissions of material facts from FBI FISA affidavits relating to a prior relationship between the FBI and a FISA target.” Furthermore, the judges complain that they have yet to receive any explanation of how they came to be misled, despite the fact that internal investigations have been ongoing “for more than one year.”

Attorney General John Ashcroft is not blamed for these transgressions. Most or all of the misstatements appear to have taken place during the prior administration, and the court notes that the department and bureau wrote new rules last year to ensure the accuracy of FISA applications.

—The Washington Post

The Munich analogy

IF you really want to attack somebody and you can’t come up with any convincing reasons, your best tactic is to accuse your opponents of being appeasers who are planning another Munich. Which is why US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken to comparing himself to Winston Churchill.

He was at it again in a speech last Tuesday in California, telling 3,000 Marines that “it wasn’t until each country got attacked that they said: ‘Maybe Winston Churchill was right. Maybe that lone voice expressing concern about what was happening was right’.”

The Lone Defence Secretary’s message was clear. Saddam Hussein is another Adolf Hitler, and if he is not stopped now, he and his weapons of mass destruction will gobble up one country after another. Next thing you know, the Iraqi hordes will be casting lascivious eyes on the United States itself.

Rumsfeld couldn’t be that far off his trolley? Try this gem, from the previous week: “Think of all the countries that said, well, we don’t have enough evidence. ‘Mein Kampf’ had been written. Hitler had indicated what he intended to do. Maybe he won’t attack us. Maybe he won’t do this or that. Well, there were millions dead because of the miscalculations.” As there presumably will be again if America doesn’t destroy Saddam now.

So let’s explore this analogy a bit. Hitler’s Germany in 1933 was the second-biggest industrial country in the world: a scientific and technological leader in the heart of Europe with a fairly homogeneous population of about 80 million people. In only six years Hitler gobbled up all or bits of three countries, and was starting in on Poland when Britain and France finally went to war to stop him. (The United States remained neutral for over two more years.)

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, by contrast, is only the fourth-biggest country in the Middle East. Industrially and scientifically, it ranks about fortieth in the world, and its population of just over 20 million people is deeply divided into mutually hostile Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs.

Saddam Hussein has been running the place for decades, and in that time he has conquered nobody.

True, he did launch an aggressive war against Iran in 1980, but Mr Rumsfeld doesn’t dwell on that episode much because Saddam launched that attack with tacit US backing. Even when Saddam used poison gas on his own rebellious Kurdish population during that war — not to mention using it regularly against Iranian soldiers — Washington made no criticism of his methods, because he was a de facto ally at the time.

Saddam was lucky to escape from the war with a no-score draw after eight years. It left him desperately deep in debt, a problem he attempted to solve by invading Kuwait in 1990.

He would never have done it if he had realised that the United States and its allies would respond militarily, but he doesn’t know much about the way the rest of the world works.

So he got thoroughly whipped, and has spent the past ten years just trying to hang on to power. Not only is he not a Hitler; he barely qualifies as a mini-Mussolini.

The choice is not between ‘appeasing’ Saddam and launching a pre-emptive attack against him (as Vice-President Dick Cheney advocated in a speech to US war veterans on 26 August), because he isn’t trying to expand. Nor is he likely to pass on any ‘weapons of mass destruction’ he may have to al-Qaeda and its various emulators, because he and they are profoundly hostile ideological enemies.

As Saddam’s domestic insecurity has grown, he has begun to make a great public show of his devotion to Islam (though a thoroughly mainstream, non-radical brand of Islam). However, as a lifelong member of the Ba’ath Party, a pan-Arab and radical socialist movement with no time at all for religion, his whole intellectual and political background is secular and even anti-clerical. Saddam may or may not be a believer in private, but Osama bin Laden would certainly regard him as an infidel.

If an appeal to patriotism, as Sam Johnson said, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then analogies with Munich and appeasement are the last resort of a bankrupt foreign policy. But there is one aspect of the long political career of Winston Churchill (whose bust is prominently displayed in the Oval Office) that the Bush administration would do well to study: his views on what should be done about Iraq.

Iraq was a British colony in the 1920s, and a very fractious one where the tribes were for ever rising in revolt: a permanent nuisance to Britain but not a grave threat, rather as Saddam’s Iraq is to the region and the world today.

Churchill was Colonial Secretary, and did not want to waste a lot of British soldiers’ lives dealing with the revolts — so he advocated using the new Royal Air Force to bomb the rebel villages instead. Local administration by fighter-bomber, you might call it.

That is very similar to what the United States and Britain have been doing, with a fair measure of success, since Saddam threw out the United Nations arms inspectors three years ago.

It’s the kind of low-key, low-cost containment policy that radicals hate, but until last September 11th neither Washington nor anywhere else showed an interest in a more aggressive policy. Absolutely nothing has changed since then except the psychology in the White House, which is a poor reason for a war. —Copyright