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Trona Pan Donald
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

Augustine the African

by James J. O'Donnell

Augustine was born in Tagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 354 and died almost seventy-six years later in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba) on the Mediterranean coast sixty miles away. In the years between he lived out a career that seems to moderns to bridge the gap between ancient pagan Rome and the Christian middle ages. But to Augustine, as to his contemporaries, that gap separated real people and places they knew, not whole imaginary ages of past and future. He lived as we do, in the present, full of uncertainty.

Augustine's African homeland had been part of Rome's empire since the destruction of Carthage five hundred years before his birth. Carthage had been rebuilt by Rome as the metropolis of Roman Africa, wealthy once again but posing no threat. The language of business and culture throughout Roman Africa was Latin. Careers for the ambitious, as we shall see, led out of provincial Africa into the wider Mediterranean world; on the other hand, wealthy Italian senators maintained vast estates in Africa which they rarely saw. The dominant religion of Africa became Christianity--a religion that violently opposed the traditions of old Rome but that could not have spread as it did without the prosperity and unity that Rome had brought to the ancient world.

Roman Africa was a military backwater. The legions that were kept there to maintain order and guard against raids by desert nomads were themselves the gravest threat to peace; but their occasional rebellions were for the most part short-lived and inconsequential. The only emperors who ever spent much time in Africa were the ones who had been born there; by Augustine's time, decades had passed without an emperor even thinking of going to Africa.

Some distinctly African character continued to mark life in the province. Some non-Latin speech, either the aboriginal Berber of the desert or the derelict Punic the Carthaginians had spoken, continued to be heard in dark corners. In some of the same corners, old local pagan cults could still be found. When Augustine became a Christian clergyman, he found Africa rent by an ecclesiastical schism that had its roots at least partly in the truculent sense of difference maintained by the less-Romanized provincials of up-country Numidia, near the northern fringes of the Sahara.

So a young man like Augustine could belong irretrievably to the world Rome had made, but still feel that he was living on the periphery of that world. Augustine set out to make himself more Roman than the Romans and to penetrate to the center of the culture from which he found himself alienated by his provincial birth. But that was only the beginning of his story.

Augustine was born on 13 November, A.D. 354, in Tagaste, a town large enough to have its own bishop but too small for a college or university. His parents, Patricius and Monica, belonged to the financially imperilled middle class. They were well enough off to have educational ambitions for their son, but too poor to finance those ambitions themselves. The fourth century was an age of mixed marriages at this level of society, in which devout Christian women like Monica were often to be found praying for the conversion of their irreligious husbands. Her prayers were not unavailing; Patricius accepted baptism on his deathbed. Though Patricius offered no direct impulse towards Christianity for his son, he must not have been much more than a passive obstacle.

Of Augustine's childhood we know only what he chooses to tell us in the highly selective memoirs that form part of the Confessions. He depicts himself as a rather ordinary sort of child, good at his lessons but not fond of school, eager to win the approval of his elders but prone to trivial acts of rebellion, quick to form close friendships but not always able to foresee their consequences. He studied Latin with some enthusiasm but never loved Greek. While he was leading what he wants us to think was a rather conventionally boisterous adolescence (it is best to imagine him in a crowd of conformists, but edging towards the quieter fringes of the crowd), his parents were worrying about paying for his education. Finally, with the help of an affluent family friend, they managed to scrape together enough to send him to the nearest university town a dozen miles away, Madaura, the home of the famous second-century sophist and novelist Apuleius, which was the second city in the life of the mind in Africa.

After a time at Madaura, the youth's talents made Carthage inevitable. There he seems to have gone at about the age of seventeen. Not long after, his father died and his mother was left with modest resources and nothing to tie her to Tagaste. Augustine himself quickly set up housekeeping with a young woman he met in Carthage, by whom a son was born not long after. This woman would stay with Augustine for over a decade and, though we do not know her name, he would say that when he had to give her up to make a society marriage in Milan "his heart ran blood" with grief as she went off to Africa--perhaps to enter a convent. The son, Adeodatus, stayed with Augustine until premature death took him in late adolescence.

So far the conventional outward events of Augustine's young manhood. His intellectual life was a little more remarkable. The education he had received in Tagaste and Madaura had made him a typical late Roman pedant, with a comprehensive knowledge of a few authors (especially Cicero and Vergil) and a taste for oddities of language and style. Only at Carthage did his education show any signs of breaking the usual molds, but even then only in a conventional way. In the ordinary course of the curriculum, he had to read a work of Cicero's called the Hortensius. This book, since lost and known only from fragments quoted by Augustine and other ancient writers, was a protreptic, that is, a treatise designed to inspire in the reader an enthusiasm for the discipline of philosophy. Through all his other vagaries of interest and allegiance, until the time of Augustine's conversion to Christianity Cicero would remain the one master from whom the young African learned the most; Augustine is in many ways the greatest of Cicero's imitators in point of Latin style.

The zeal for philosophy led first in what may seem a strange direction. Fired with the love of wisdom from his reading of the quintessential Roman politician, Augustine immediately joined a religious cult from Persia that had planted itself in the Roman world as a rival of Christianity: Manicheism. This sensual but sensitive young man, brought up around but not exactly in Christianity, took his Ciceronian enthusiasm with the utmost seriousness on the moral plane. He knew his own life did not in fact match his noble ideals. He was torn between the conventional pleasures of adolescence and the conventional rigors of philosophy. For this tension, Manicheism offered soothing relief. Augustine was not to blame that he felt this way, the Manichees told him, for he was only the pawn of greater forces that could, because Augustine was lucky and clever, be propitiated. Security could be had without sacrifice, and guilt removed without atonement.

The world the Manichees imagined was torn between two contrary powers: the perfectly good creator and the perfectly evil destroyer. The world seen by human eyes was the battleground for their cosmic conflict. The Manichees and their followers were the few who were on the side of the good spirit and who would be rewarded for their allegiance with eternal bliss. In the meantime all sorts of misfortune might befall the individual, but none of the wicked things he found himself doing were his fault. If the devil does compel sin, then guilt does not ensue. A few Manichees, the inner circle, were said to live perfect lives already, but the claim was hard to verify since the many disciples were kept busy waiting on the perfect few hand and foot, to keep the few from being corrupted by contact with the evil world of matter. The many were thus kept on a leash with easy promises and a vague theology.

Augustine was too clever to settle for vague theology for long. His most poignant moment of disillusion is recounted in the Confessions, when he finally met Faustus, the Manichee sage who would (Augustine had been promised) finally answer all the questions that troubled Augustine. When the man finally turned up, he proved to be half-educated and incapable of more than reciting a more complex set of slogans than his local disciples had known.

But while Augustine soon dissented privately from the Manichees, he did not break with them publicly. Even when he had decided the slogans were nonsense, they still provided the assurance that all the evil in Augustine's life was not his own fault and could not be let go of easily. Augustine associated with Manichees who thought he was one of them as late as 384, more than a decade after his first involvement with the sect.

Once initial enthusiasm faded, Augustine's attention drifted from the niceties of metaphysics to the realities of his career, which preoccupied him through his twenties. At about age twenty-one, after four years or so in Carthage, he went back to his home town to teach. He could well have stayed there forever, but his talent encouraged him to entertain loftier ambitions. He left again the next year.

From this decisive return to Carthage can be traced a career to which the adjective "brilliant" scarcely does justice. Seven years in Carthage matured the young teacher into a formidable scholar and orator. Education in a university town like Carthage at that time was a free-market enterprise, with each teacher setting up independently around the city center to make a reputation and inveigle students into paying for his wares; it was a competition in which many young men like Augustine must have fallen by the way. Augustine prospered, however, for when he became unhappy with conditions there (the students were rowdy and tried to cheat the teachers of their fees), he could think only of one place to which to move--Rome.

Rome of the fourth century was no longer a city with political or military significance for the Roman empire, but nobody at the time dared say such a thing. By common consent, the pretense was maintained that this was the center of civilization--and so the pretense became self-fulfilling prophecy. Academic prestige, the emptiest of glories, is a matter of reputation rather than reality; Rome had a reputation stretching back for centuries. Understandably it took Augustine a few months to find a place there, but when he finally found his feet, he could not have done better.

Some Manichee friends arranged an audition before the prefect of the city of Rome, a pompous and inept pagan named Symmachus, who had been asked to provide a professor of rhetoric for the imperial court at Milan. The young provincial won the job and headed north to take up his position in late 384. Thus at age thirty, Augustine had won the most visible academic chair in the Latin world, in an age when such posts gave ready access to political careers. In the decade before Augustine's rise another provincial, Ausonius of Bordeaux, had become prime minister in the regime of a teen-aged emperor whose tutor he had been. Our estimate of Augustine's talents is based largely on his later achievements; but that judgment together with his swift climb to eminence as a young professor makes it safe to assume that if Augustine had stayed in public life, he would have found very few limits to his advancement.

Augustine saw his prospects clearly. When his mother followed him to Milan, he allowed her to arrange a good society marriage, for which he gave up his mistress. (But then he still had to wait two years until his fiancee was of age and promptly took up in the meantime with another woman.) He felt the tensions of life at an imperial court, lamenting one day as he rode in his carriage to deliver a grand speech before the emperor that a drunken beggar he passed on the street had a less careworn existence than he.

Thus the strain of rapid advancement began to tell. His old perplexities rose again to plague him. He had tried Manicheism and it had failed; he owed some allegiance to Cicero, but in his day Cicero stood for little more than style and skepticism. He settled for ambivalence and prudent ambition. He had been enrolled as a catechumen (pre-baptismal candidate) in the Christian church by his mother when he was a child; he acknowledged this status publicly (it was good for his career) to conceal anxiety and doubt.

His mother was there to press the claims of Christianity, but Augustine could probably have held out against her will alone indefinitely. Because, however, Monica was in Milan, and because Augustine was in public life and needed connections, he was soon caught between her and the most influential man in Milan, the bishop Ambrose. At first their encounters seem to have been few and perfunctory, but soon (due regard for his career probably required it) Augustine began to sit through a few of the bishop's sermons. Here Christianity began to appear to him in a new, intellectually respectable light. As before, his most pressing personal problem was his sense of evil and his responsibility for the wickedness of his life; with the help of technical vocabulary borrowed from Platonic philosophy Ambrose proposed a convincing solution for Augustine's oldest dilemma. Augustine had besides a specific objection to Christianity that only a professor of belles-lettres could have: he could not love the scriptures because their style was inelegant and barbaric. Here again Ambrose, elegant and far from barbaric, showed Augustine how Christian exegesis could give life and meaning to the sacred texts.

Resolution of his purely intellectual problems with Christianity left Augustine to face all the pressure society and his mother could bring to bear. More will be said below about the inner journey of his conversion, but the external facts are simple. In the summer of 386, not quite two years after his arrival in Milan, Augustine gave up his academic position on grounds of ill health and retired for the winter to a nearby country villa loaned by a friend in a place called Cassiciacum. He took along his family (son, mother, brother, and cousins) and friends, plus a couple of paying students who were the sons of friends. There they spent their days in philosophical and literary study and debate. Some of their conversations were philosophical and religious and come down to us in philosophical dialogues, and we know that they spent part of every day reading Vergil together. Though Augustine says he often spent half the night awake in prayer and meditation, the dialogues themselves are not dramatically theological. They seem to have been modest attempts to use the professional expertise of a rhetorician and philosopher to clarify technically the questions that had perplexed him. (The dialogues show a charming modesty about the powers of philosophical argument. In the midst of a long, abstract argument among the men, Monica would come into the discussion and in a few words, often quoting scripture, summarize an argument more clearly and concisely than the men had been able to do.)

In the spring of 387, Augustine and his friends returned to Milan for the forty days of preparation for baptism that preceded Easter. Then at the Easter vigil service on the night of Holy Saturday Augustine was baptized by Ambrose. Many people at that time, when Christianity was the fashionable road to success in the Christian empire, may have taken such a step casually and returned to their old ways, but Augustine was not one of them.

The great world of Rome had to be given up. Ambition now seemed hollow and sterile. Instead, Augustine and his friends decided to return to Africa, where they could still command a little property at Tagaste, to live in Christian retirement, praying and studying scripture. For a time their return home was held up by military disorders: a usurper came down out of Gaul and killed the emperor who resided at Milan, with ensuing disruption to the ordinary flow of commerce and travel in the western Mediterranean. While Augustine's party was at the port of Ostia near Rome, waiting for a boat back to Africa, Monica died.

Augustine returned to Africa at about the same age at which Dante found himself in the dark wood--thirty-five, halfway to the biblical norm of threescore and ten. He settled down at Tagaste in 389 with a few friends to form what we call, somewhat anachronistically, a monastery; it was probably very like the household at the villa at Cassiciacum in the winter of 386-87, but without the Vergil. Augustine would gladly have stayed there forever.

But such talent and devotion could not be left alone. Two years later, while on a visit to the coastal city of Hippo Regius, he found himself virtually conscripted into the priesthood by the local congregation. He broke into tears as they laid hands on him in the church and his fate became clear. Cynics in the audience thought these were tears of ambition and disappointment at not being made bishop straight off, but they were only tears of deeply felt inadequacy. Augustine had for some time been avoiding cities that needed bishops in fear of just such a fate.

He soon enough accepted his fate. He asked his new bishop, Valerius, for a little time to prepare himself for his duties. Now, if not before, he devoted himself to the mastery of the texts of scripture that made him a formidable theologian in the decades to come. His first expressly theological treatises come from this period, devoted mainly to attacking the Manichees he knew so well. (Not only did his experience make him an astute critic of the cult, but it was politic for him to take a stand publicly, to thwart the inevitable innuendoes from other Christians that perhaps he had not truly abandoned the Persian cult but was some kind of Trojan horse sent to subvert the church.) His abilities were quickly recognized, and by 393 he was being asked to preach sermons in place of his bishop, who was a Greek speaker by birth. The old man passed on in 395 and Augustine assumed responsibility for the church at Hippo. He would remain at this post until his death thirty-four years later.

Conventional accounts sketch Augustine's episcopal career in terms of the controversies in which he took part. This brief sketch will do likewise; but I must first point out the main inadequacy of this approach. Augustine's first order of business through the decades of his episcopate was the care of the souls entrusted to him. Most of his life was an endless round of audiences with his clergy and his people. He was constantly called upon to adjudicate all kinds of disputes that had arisen in a world where the man of God was more to be trusted as judge than the greedy magistrate sent from abroad to represent Roman justice. The real focus of his activity lay elsewhere still: the liturgy.

The early church was an institution centered upon the worship of the community. Of a Sunday, every orthodox Christian in Hippo could be found jammed into Augustine's basilica, standing through a service that must have lasted at least two hours. We know from the hundreds of sermons that survive how much care and imagination Augustine put into preaching, tailoring his remarks to suit the needs and capacity of his audience. The man who had been orator enough to declaim for emperors must have been a spellbinding preacher.

But even the homiletics of Augustine did not efface the dignity of the central act of worship. God was present on the altar for these people and this event was the center of Christian community life. Lukewarm believers in the throng attended out of respect for social pressure and a fear of divine wrath and were not much moved, but for Augustine, this was his central task. The controversies were only sideshow, important only when they threatened to disrupt the unity of the community's worship.

But we know Augustine for his writings, and many of them were controversial. Three great battles had to be fought: the first was an ecclesiastical struggle for the very life of his community, the second a philosophical battle to effect the Christianization of Roman culture, and the last a theological quarrel of great subtlety over the essentials of faith and salvation. The first is the most obscure to moderns, while the second and third will be treated in more detail in the chapters that follow. Here we will concentrate on the ecclesiastical war that Augustine fought and won in his first decade and a half as bishop.

Donatism is the movement Augustine opposed, named after a bishop at Carthage some eighty years before Augustine's time to Hippo. In those days the church had just recovered from the last bitter wave of persecution begun in 303 by the emperors Galerius and Diocletian. When fear subsided, Christians could breathe again and indulge in recriminations over the lapses of some of their number in time of trial.

The official position of the church was that those Christians who had compromised their religion in time of persecution could, with due repentance and atonement, be readmitted to full membership in the religious community. But there was a minority faction of enthusiasts who insisted that cooperation with the authorities in time of persecution was tantamount to total apostasy and that if any traitors wanted to reenter the church they had to start all over again, undergoing rebaptism. Evaluation of the credentials of those who sought reentry would be in the hands of those who had not betrayed the church.

The logical result of the Donatist position was to make the church into an outwardly pure and formally righteous body of redeemed souls. The orthodox party resisted this pharisaism, seeing in it a rigorism inimical to the spirit of the gospels. But Africa was known for its religious zealots and the new Donatist movement proved a resilient one. Even after official imperial disapproval had been expressed, the schismatic church continued to grow and prosper. By the time of Augustine's consecration as bishop, in fact, it looked as if the "orthodox" party was on the wane. In Hippo itself the larger church and the more populous congregation belonged to the Donatists in the early 390s. A constant state of half-repressed internecine warfare persisted between the communities. Popular songs and wall posters were pressed into service in the cause of sectarian propaganda. In the countryside, Donatist brigands ambushed orthodox travelers in bloody assaults.

Augustine began his anti-Donatist campaign with tact and caution. His first letters to Donatist prelates are courteous and emphasize his faith in their good will. He assumed that reasonable men could settle this controversy peaceably. But Augustine quickly discovered that reason and good manners would get him nowhere. In the late 390s, then, Augustine resigned himself to a course of action others in the church had long been urging: the invocation of government intervention to repress the Donatists. Augustine was dismayed at coercion in matters of religion, but consented to the new policy when he became convinced that the perversity and obtuseness of the Donatists were complete. Even charity itself demanded that the Donatists be compelled to enter the true church in the hope that at least some would genuinely benefit from the change. They could not be worse off than they were.

Even when this policy had been settled upon, another decade of instability remained. Finally, in 411, an imperial commissioner conducted a detailed hearing into the facts of the matter, attended by hundreds of bishops from both orthodox and Donatist factions, and decided in favor of the orthodox party. From this time on Donatism was illegal and, though the schismatic community apparently showed some signs of life in remote parts of Africa until the Moslem invasions centuries later, the back of the movement had been broken, and at least the security and position of the orthodox party had been guaranteed.

The principle for which Augustine fought deserves emphasis. Christianity was not, he claimed, something external and visible; it was not to be found in obedience to certain clearly-defined laws. Christianity was a matter of spirit rather than law, something inside people rather than outside. Most important, the church had room within itself for sinners as well as saints, for the imperfections of those in whom God's grace was still working as well as for the holiness of the blessed. Augustine drew the boundary of the church not between one group of people and another but rather straight through the middle of the hearts of all those who belonged to it. The visible church contained the visible Christians, sins and all; the invisible church, whose true home lay in heaven, held only those who were redeemed. Charity dictated that the visible church be open to all, not lorded over by a few self-appointed paragons choosing to admit only their own kind.

In A.D. 410, the city of Rome, with all its glories, was taken by barbarians under the leadership of the Visigoth Alaric. It is customary to say that shock waves ran throughout the Roman world at this event, but it is more correct to say that shock waves ran through those citizens of the Roman world prosperous enough to care about expensive symbols of Roman grandeur. A fair number of wealthy Romans fled the city to country estates in Campania, in Sicily, and in north Africa. Enough of them showed up in Hippo for Augustine to warn his flock that they should receive the refugees with open arms and charity.

Not long after the refugees settled on their African estates and began to frequent the salons of Carthage, the more intellectual among them began to wonder aloud whether their new religion might not be to blame for the disaster they had suffered. After all, the argument ran, Rome had been immune from capture for fully eight hundred years; but now, just two decades after the formal end of public worship of the pagan gods (commanded by the emperor Theodosius in 391), the city fell to the barbarians. Perhaps it was true what pagans had said, that the new Christian god with ideas about turning the other cheek and holding worldly empires in low esteem was not an efficient guardian of the best interests of the ruling class. Most of the people who indulged in these idle speculations were themselves Christian. The "paganism" of these people was no revival of ancient religion, but only the persistence of the ancient notion of religion as a bargain you struck with the gods in order to preserve your health, wealth, and complacency.

Augustine was invited by a friend, the imperial commissioner Marcellinus, who was in Africa to look into the Donatist quarrel for the emperor, to respond to these charges. He knew that it was more than a question of why Rome fell; here were Christians who still did not know what Christianity was about, how it differed from the Roman religions it had replaced. His response was a masterpiece of Christian apologetics, City of God, whose composition stretched over fifteen years. The first books, consoling those the Visigoths had frightened, were published quickly and seem to have done their job. But the work as a whole continued to come forth in installments, revealing a broad vision of history and Christianity.

Marcellinus, a devout layman, also played a part in the the last great controversy of Augustine's life. One of the refugees from Rome had been an unassuming preacher named Pelagius, who had stirred up a moral rearmament movement at Rome. Pelagius seems to have appealed particularly to affluent ladies whom he urged to set an example through works of virtue and ascetic living. He apparently had a considerable effect for the good on the conduct of those with whom he came in contact. But Augustine saw in Pelagius and his followers an extreme position exactly opposite to the one he had just rebuked in the cultured critics of Christianity, but one no less dangerous. Pelagianism, as we shall see in more detail later on, was theologically rather similar to Donatism, in that it assumed that people could, by their own virtue, set themselves apart as the ones on whom God particularly smiled.

Augustine never met Pelagius, though the latter had passed through Hippo in late 410. Instead, he had to deal at all times with the "Pelagians," the most notorious of whom, Caelestius, was apparently a good deal more tactful and restrained than his teacher had been. While Pelagius went off to the Holy Land, where he became an unwilling center of controversy as he visited the sacred sites, Caelestius and others back in Africa waded into the fray with Augustine. Whatever the merits of the case, Augustine's side prevailed in the ensuing controversy. The authority of the papacy was invoked eventually--not without difficulty--and later that of the ecumenical council of Ephesus in 431. Pelagius and his disciples were clearly and soundly defeated.

But the controversy did not end with the defeat of Pelagius. Augustine had to face further questions, as the logical consequences of the positions he took against Pelagius were examined by friend and foe alike. Both in Africa and in Gaul, monks and their leaders protested that the Augustinian theology of grace undermined their own ascetic efforts in the cloister. In Italy, the young bishop of Eclanum, Julian, engaged Augustine in a bitter debate that tainted the last decade of the old bishop's life. A deep poignancy marks the old man's dogged defense of himself and his belief against a young, resourceful, and resilient foe.

Old age and pressing concerns at home eventually delivered Augustine from the necessity of answering Julian. By 430, a band of barbarians had found its way even to Africa. The Vandals, who had first come from Germany into Roman Gaul in 406 and later passed through Gaul into Spain, had been invited into Africa by a Roman governor in rebellion against the emperor. The Vandals, like the Saxons later in the same century, proved to be deadly allies. In the summer of 430 they were besieging the city of Hippo as the aged bishop lay dying within. Shortly after his death they captured the city. Not long after, they captured Carthage and established a kingdom that lasted a century.

Distant Dunes
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

The war trumps all other issues, so insufficient attention will be paid to the planned demise of Delma Banks Jr., a 43-year-old man who is scheduled in about 24 hours to become the 300th person executed in Texas since the resumption of capital punishment in 1982. Banks, a man with no prior criminal record, is most likely innocent of the charge that put him on death row. Fearing a tragic miscarriage of justice, three former federal judges (including William Sessions, a former director of the FBI) have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to block Wednesday's execution.

So far, no one seems to be listening.

"The prosecutors in this case concealed important impeachment material from the defense," said Sessions and the other former judges, John Gibbons and Timothy Lewis, in an extraordinary friend-of-the-court brief.

Most reasonable people would be highly disturbed to have the execution of a possibly innocent man on their conscience or their record. But this is Texas we're talking about, a state that prefers to shoot first and ask no questions at all. The fact that the accused might be innocent is not considered sufficient reason to call off his execution.

(One of the most demoralizing developments of the past couple of years is the fact that George W. Bush has been striving so hard to make all of the United States more like Texas.)

Delma Banks was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of 16-year-old Richard Whitehead, who was shot to death in 1980 in a town called Nash, not far from Texarkana. There was little chance that this would have been a capital case if both the accused and the victim had been of the same race. Or if the accused had been white and the victim black.

But Banks is black and Whitehead was white, and that's the jackpot combination when it comes to the death penalty. Blacks convicted of killing whites are the most likely to end up in the execution chamber. In Texas this principle has been reinforced for years by the ruthless exclusion of jurors who are black.

Just two weeks ago the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that criticized courts in Texas for ignoring evidence of racial bias in a death penalty case. Lawyers in the case noted that up until the mid-1970s prosecutors in Dallas actually had a manual that said, "Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or well-educated."

The significant evidence against Banks was the testimony of two hard-core drug addicts. One was a paid informant. The other was a career felon facing a long prison term who was told that a pending arson charge would be dismissed if he performed "well" while testifying against Banks.

The prosecution deliberately suppressed information about its arrangements with these witnesses - information that it was obliged by law to turn over to the defense.

And prosecutors made sure that all the jurors at Banks' trial were white. That was routine. Lawyers handling Banks' appeal have shown that from 1975 through 1980 prosecutors in Bowie County, where Banks was tried, accepted more than 80 percent of qualified white jurors in felony cases, while peremptorily removing more than 90 percent of qualified black jurors.

The strongest evidence pointing to Banks' innocence was physical. He was in Dallas, more than three hours away from Texarkana, when Whitehead was killed, according to the best estimates of the time of death, based on the autopsy results.

Prosecutorial misconduct. Racial bias. Drug-addicted informants. If the authorities walk Banks into the execution chamber on Wednesday, and strap him to a gurney, and inject the lethal poison into his veins, we will be taking another Texas-sized step away from a reasonably fair and just society, and back toward the state-sanctioned barbarism we should be trying to flee.

March 11, 2003

If George W. Bush and his government were serious about mobilizing support for the coming war against Iraq, they would make every effort to seize the moral high ground by proving their political system and society to be superior to others. That they refuse to do so, and that states such as Texas keep on executing prisoners whose actual or legal guilt is in doubt, or whose crime was to be of the wrong color, is just another sign of the arrogance that characterizes the current administration. This strategically unwise behavior alienates potential allies.

Bert de Bruin, Nesher, Israel
March 13, 2003

Dante's Other View
Photographer: Peter Gorwin

The impending Iraq war has become a watershed event. It will permanently alter the American relationship to the Islamic Middle East. It has already provoked serious change in Europe's relations with Washington. It may have lasting influence on what becomes of American society.

American troops already operate inside Iraq, and President George W. Bush and his people insist that nothing short of Saddam Hussein's abdication will now stop them.

Nonetheless, the Turkish Parliament's failure to permit an attack on Iraq by way of Turkey came as a staggering and unexpected blow to Washington.

Even if the Turkish Parliament, under intensified pressure, were to reverse its decision, an old and important American alliance has broken.

The scale of international demonstrations against the war has shocked the White House.

No one may have to veto the Anglo-American-Spanish resolution. It simply will fall short, possibly badly short, of the nine votes needed to pass.

Some in the White House are said to argue that the recent capture of a senior Al Qaeda figure could be spun so as to shift attention away from Iraq and back to terrorism, while UN inspections were allowed to continue. This could save Tony Blair, who was reported on Thursday to want more time for the inspectors. It could mean wider support when and if the war does come.

But such a backdown before the French, Germans and Russians, after Washington's six-month buildup to war, and after all that the president has said, would itself alter the perceived international balance.

Bush, in any case, seems much too committed for anything now to stop him. Anyway, he doesn't have to go to the United Nations. He claims the right to go to war without further Security Council action - even if that would mean too bad for Tony Blair and the president's other foreign allies.

His neo-conservative desk strategists assure him that the geopolitical consequences of victory in the Middle East and the effect on American relations with Muslims will be positive. It will promote democracy as the way to go, while providing an intimidating display of U.S. power. Pessimists, such as myself, say the consequences will be bad for the Middle East, for American interests and, in the long term, bad for Israel (as well as for the Palestinians, as if anyone still cared about the Palestinians).

On past odds, pessimism is where the smart money should go. Certainly, the trans-Atlantic relationship will not be the same after this. If the administration's Iraq gamble succeeds, Washington intends to divide Europe and build a new alliance with Central and Eastern Europe as the base for U.S. power-projection in the Middle East and Central Asia.

If the gamble fails, there probably will be a general American fallback toward an embittered version of the anti-internationalist and America-first policies with which Bush began his term two years ago. A policy metaphor recently popular in Washington has been that of European Lilliputians unsuccessfully trying to tie down an American Gulliver. The effort supposedly is led by politically craven of vainglorious Lilliputian politicians, unwilling to share the burden of global responsibility, ungrateful, longing for lost national glories etc.

The recent Washington-inspired campaign against the motivations, persons and moral character of individual German, French and even Belgian leaders has been the most vicious in postwar trans-Atlantic relations.

The whole affair nonetheless has served to clarify a number of things. One is that the Bush administration has, without understanding what it was doing, created a situation in which the majority of nations see the United Nations as the only institution that has the possibility of checking American power and limiting the consequences of American unilateralism.

In the future, shifting coalitions of the willing are likely to work through the United Nations and other major international institutions, and use the unprecedented means the Internet provides for mass mobilization (including inside the United States itself) to counterbalance or contain the United States on many economic and politico-military issues.

It may also be that America will no longer be entirely free to set the international agenda. Rogue states, war against terrorism, anti-proliferation, trade globilization and other American causes may not automatically dominate international political and media attention.

Washington only now is discovering that its efforts to override or divide oppositions to what it wants on Iraq have created a coherent international opposition that before was not there. It has diminished rather than affirmed its old international leadership.

March 11, 2003

A Window Rock
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

You might sum up the president's call to war last week as "Message: I scare." As he rolls up to America's first preemptive invasion, bouncing from motive to motive, Bush is trying to sound rational, not rash. Determined not to be petulant, he seemed tranquilized.

But the Xanax cowboy made it clear that Saddam was going to pay for Sept. 11. Even if the fiendish Iraqi dictator was not involved with Al Qaeda, he has supported "Al Qaeda-type organizations," as the president fudged.

We Americans are scared of the world now, and the world is scared of us. (It's really scary to think we are even scaring Russia and China.)

Bush officials believe that making the world more scared of us is the best way to make us safer and less scared. So they want a spectacular show of American invincibility to make the wicked and the wayward think twice before crossing us. Of course, our plan to sack Saddam has not cowed the North Koreans and Iranians, who are scrambling to get nukes to cow us.

It still confuses many Americans that, in a world full of vicious slimeballs, we're about to bomb one that didn't attack us on Sept. 11 (like Osama); that isn't intercepting our planes (like North Korea); that isn't financing Al Qaeda (like Saudi Arabia); that isn't home to Osama and his lieutenants (like Pakistan); that isn't a host body for terrorists (like Iran, Lebanon and Syria).

I think the president is genuinely obsessed with protecting Americans and believes that smoking Saddam will reduce the chances of terrorist's snatching catastrophic weapons. That is why no cost - shattering alliances, Tony Blair's career and the U.S. budget - is too high.

Even straining for serenity, Bush sounded rattled at moments: "My job is to protect America, and that is exactly what I'm going to do."

"I swore to protect and defend the Constitution; that's what I swore to do. I put my hand on the Bible and took that oath, and that's exactly what I am going to do."

But citing Sept. 11 eight times in his news conference was exploitative, given that the administration concedes there is no evidence tying Iraq to the Sept. 11 plot. By stressing that totem, Bush tried to alchemize American anger at Al Qaeda into support for smashing Saddam.

William Greider writes in The Nation, "As a bogus rallying cry, 'Remember Sept. 11' ranks with 'Remember the Maine' of 1898 for war with Spain or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964." A culture more besotted with inane "reality" TV than scary reality is easily misled. Greider pointed out that in a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 percent believe Saddam was personally responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and in an ABC News Poll, 55 percent believe he gives direct support to Al Qaeda.

The case for war has been incoherent due to the overlapping reasons that conservatives give for wanting to get Saddam.
The president wants to avenge his father and please his base.
Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America's primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively preempt nuclear threats.

And in 1997, conservatives published a "statement of principles," signed by Jeb Bush and several future Bush officals. Rejecting 41's realpolitik and shaping what would become 43's preemption strategy, they exhorted a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," with America extending its domain by challenging "regimes hostile to our interests and values."
Saddam would be the squealing guinea pig proving America could impose its will on the world.
With W., conservatives got a Bush who wanted to be a Reagan. With Sept. 11, they found a new tragedy to breathe life into their old dreams.

March 12, 2003

Valley
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

When a closely divided Parliament voted this month against allowing the United States to launch an attack on Iraq from Turkish soil, it stunned this country's leaders and disappointed American military planners who argue that Turkish cooperation will mean a shorter war.

It also highlighted how the United States haste to subdue Saddam Hussein is claiming other victims. The North Atlantic alliance may be one casualty. Turkey's bid to demonstrate that Islam, democracy and the Western alliance are compatible may be another, equally important, casualty.

In November, upstart Justice and Development Party won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections that eliminated most of the political class of the time. While the bulk of the party's membership has an Islamist lineage, the party has distanced itself from its religious roots to take a conservative democratic stance.

Immediately after the elections, the party's leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, traveled to European capitals to lobby for putting Turkey on an irreversible path to join the European Union. Erdogan, despite his Islamist background, was more energetic in his campaign than his secular predecessors were.

This government's determination to ease restrictions on freedom of expression and lift the immunity of perpetrators of torture seems stronger than that of any previous government. Last but not least, it has been working towards a solution of the Cyprus conflict with unprecedented vigor.

The Justice and Development experiment may prove conclusively that a pious Muslim worldview is compatible with a first-rate democracy. The course the party charts is being closely watched in the Muslim world - not least by reformers in Iran. Few things would encourage peace in the world and support long-term American interests more than homegrown democracy thriving in the Middle East.

While much rides on the fate of the Justice and Development experiment, the party itself is still a work in progress. The leadership, Erdogan and Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, are ahead of the party and pulling it to the center. But by pressing them to take deeply unpopular positions, the United States runs the risk of thwarting this invaluable experiment whose results would be in America's interest. The context in which the Parliament made its decision needs to be understood. As it met in closed session to deliberate whether to allow in American troops, 100,000 people were demonstrating against the resolution in the streets of Ankara.

The realpolitik argument that the United States will wage war with or without Turkey, so why not join the winning side and get some money in the bargain? - sounded profoundly immoral.

In short, Washington asked the Justice and Development Party to do something quite extraordinary, possibly more extraordinary than it may have realized. Pushing it to open Turkey to American troops could hurt the democratic experiment in one of several ways: The party may lose its resolve to reposition itself and go back to its old ways, a permanent rift may emerge in the party, or worse, demagogues of the right may capitalize on the party's difficult predicament. The Turkish Parliament's agony should remind the United States what is at stake and lead it to reassess its strategy.

The writer is director of the Open Society Institute - Turkey.

March 11, 2003

Hearst Stairs
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

Paris
The door to war is not yet opened, but the unexpected has already struck. Donald Rumsfeld's announcement Tuesday that British forces might not take part in the initial intervention against Iraq suggests that Britain may be out of the coalition.

The reason is that the United States and Britain will almost certainly fail to get a Security Council resolution this week authorizing invasion of Iraq. Without that, if Tony Blair goes to war he could lose the prime ministership. Neither event was imaginable in Washington as recently as late February.

President George W. Bush finds himself in a huge international controversy that he thinks is about policy towards Iraq. Everyone else knows that it is about the Bush administration, and beyond that, about the future place of the United States in the international system.

Washington is unwillingly and uncomprehendingly grappling with the possibility that the United Nations is not irrelevant. Kofi Annan said on Monday that the United States really does need the legitimacy Security Council approval could provide. Without it, the United States may have to well and truly go it alone.

Critics are perfectly right to ask why the United Nations, this organization of governments, few of them democratic, many if them lamentable in their respect for civil liberties and human rights, should pass judgment on the United States. The answer is that the United Nations is the only forum where the world's nations can make any collective judgment on international matters.

The international system rests on the principle of absolute sovereignty of states, which has nothing to do with the merits or morality of governments. By trial and error, this has been found the least bad of international diplomatic and legal systems. The United nations is the agent of this system for exercising international authority.

The United States, in the Iraq crisis, is proposing to break the system. This is what the current crisis is really about. The Bush administration says that unless the Security Council gives the United States what it wants, America will ignore the United Nations and from now on do whatever it thinks right. In this, a different international order is implicitly proposed. The United States making a claim to the sovereign right to intervene in, disarm, and carry out "regime change" in other countries, subject to no external restraint. In its national strategy statement last fall, it stated its intention to maintain overwhelming global military superiority and take whatever action is necessary to prevent the emergence of a rival.

The logic in this is open to negative or positive appreciations. The hostile interpretations are all around us at the moment. The Iraq intervention is said to be a step towards seizing global engergy control, or hegemonic world economic and trade domination, or to assure Israel's expansion.

There is even a claim that Bush sees himself acting out prophesies concerning the Biblical Apocalypse and the Second Coming, as interpreted by certain marginal American Protestant fundamentalist groups that have his ear.

The positive interpretaion of American intentions, the one made by most Americans themselves, is that the United States is a responsible nation with benevolent intentions, and in cooperation with its close democratic allies it would use its great power to protect democracy and peace.

Iraq is a crisis for the United States because UN members see this prospect of unchecked American world power being tested. What they have seen is a United States that insists on its way and no other.

They have seen it unable to provide a rationale for its Iraq policy that can convince the majority of the democracies, its natural supporters. They have seen it intemperately denounce those who criticize it, and threaten serious and damaging material retaliation against the democracies that actively oppose it on the Iraq issue - France, Germany, Belgium, and Turkey.

They have, in short, seen Washington demand submission, and take steps to obtain this through force. This, to the rest of the world, is not very reassuring, to put it mildly.

Unchecked American global power has precipitously lost appeal. From World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States exercised international leadership with responsible policies and sensitivity to the demands of alliance. For this reason there has until now been relatively little concern at its emergence as the world's sole superpower. The United States continued to possess the confidence of the international community. The Bush administration has managed in this Iraq affair to undermine, if not destroy the American offer of benevolent and responsible international hegemony. It has made the United Nations seem more relevant than ever.

One may add by so doing, it has perhaps done a favor not only to the world but to the United States itself. I myself am not of the opinion that the values of the American republic would survive the possession of absolute power.

March 13, 2003

Stones
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

New York
Now that U.S. strikes against Iraq have begun, Americans should get rid of one canard immediately, and that's the notion that criticism of the Bush administration and opposition to this U.S.-led invasion imply in some sense, a lack of support or concern for the men and women who are under arms.

The names of too many of my friends are recorded on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial for me to tolerate that kind of nonsense. I hope that the war goes well, that American troops prevail quickly and that casualties everywhere are kept to a minimum.
But the fact that a war may be quick does not mean that it is wise. Against the wishes of most of the world, we Americans have plunged not just into war, but toward a peace that is potentially more problematic than the war itself. Are Americans ready to pay the cost in lives and dollars of a long-term military occupation of Iraq?
To what end?
Will an occupation of Iraq increase or decrease our security here at home? Do most Americans understand that even as they are launching one of the most devastating air assaults in the history of warfare, private companies are lining up to reap the riches of rebuilding the very structures the United States is in the process of destroying?
Companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger and the Bechtel Group understand this conflict a heck of a lot better than most of the men and women who will fight and die in it, or the armchair patriots who'll be watching on CNN and cheering them on. It's not unpatriotic to say that there are billions of dollars to be made in Iraq and that the gold rush is already under way. It's simply a matter of fact. Back in January, an article in The Wall Street Journal noted: "With oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia's, Iraq would offer the oil industry enormous opportunity, should a war topple Saddam Hussein.
"The early spoils would probably go to companies needed to keep Iraq's already run-down oil operations running, especially if oil-services firms such as Halliburton Co., where Vice President Dick Cheney formerly served as chief executive, and, and Schlumberger Ltd. are seen as favorites for what could be as much as $1.5 billion in contracts."
There is tremendous unease at the highest levels of the Pentagon about this war and its aftermath.
The president and his civilian advisers are making a big deal about the anticipated rejoicing of the liberated populace once the war is over.
Iraq, however, is an inherently unstable place, and while the forces assembled to chase Saddam from power are superbly trained for combat, the military is not well prepared for a long-term occupation in the most volatile region in the world. What's driving this war is President George W. Bush's Manichaean view of the world and messianic vision of himself, the dangerously grandiose perception of American power held by his saber-rattling advisers, and the irresistible lure of Iraq's enormous oil reserves.
Polls show that the public is terribly confused about what's going on , so much so that some 40 percent believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.
That's really scary.
Rather than correct this misconception, the administration has gone out of its way to reinforce it.
I think the men and women moving militarily against Saddam are among the few truly brave and even noble individuals left in U.S. society.
They have volunteered for the dangerous duty of defending the rest of the American people. But I also believe they are being put unnecessarily in harm's way. As a result of the military buildup, there is hardly a more hobbled leader on Earth at the moment than Saddam Hussein.
A skillful marshaling of international pressure could have forced him from power. But then the Bush administration would not have had its war and its occupuation. It would not have been able to turn Iraq into an American protectorate, which is as good a term as any for a colony.
Is it a good idea to liberate the people of Iraq from the clutches of a degenerate like Saddam?
Sure. But there were better, less dangerous ways to go about it.
In the epigraph to his memoir, "Present at the Creation," Dean Acheson quoted a 13th-century king of Spain, Alphonso X, the Learned:
"Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe."

March 21, 2003

Definition:
Manichaeism, n. the religion founded by Mani (ca. 216 - ca. 276), a Persian who held that the universe is dually controlled by opposing powers of good and evil, which had become intermingled in the present age, but at a future time would be seperated and return to their own realms. Mani's followers were to aid this seperation by leading an ascetic life. The religion spread widely in Asia and around the Mediterranean, but died out in the West by the 6th century, although it was a major religion in the East until the 14th century. It influenced several early Christian heresies.

Mission Diagonal
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'

The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.

This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.

The report describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'. The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by Wolfowitz and Libby that said the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.

"As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s most preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievement of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

"[What we require is] a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.

"Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership of the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of the past century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership."

PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Suite 510, Washington, D.C. 20036
Telephone: (202) 293-4983 / Fax: (202) 293-4572

The Path
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

Either alternative seemed to us shortsighted. The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible. There are, however, potentially powerful states dissatisfied with the current situation and eager to change it, if they can, in directions that endanger the relatively peaceful, prosperous and free condition the world enjoys today. Up to now, they have been deterred from doing so by the capability and global presence of American military power. But, as that power declines, relatively and absolutely, the happy conditions that follow from it will be inevitably undermined.

At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.

Preserving the desirable strategic situation in which the United States now finds itself requires a globally preeminent military capability both today and in the future. But years of cuts in defense spending have eroded the American military’s combat readiness, and put in jeopardy the Pentagon’s plans for maintaining military superiority in the years ahead. Increasingly, the U.S. military has found itself undermanned, inadequately equipped and trained, straining to handle contingency operations, and ill-prepared to adapt itself to the revolution in military affairs. Without a well-conceived defense policy and an appropriate increase in defense spending, the United States has been letting its ability to take full advantage of the remarkable strategic opportunity at hand slip away.

With this in mind, we began a project in the spring of 1998 to examine the country’s defense plans and resource requirements. We started from the premise that U.S. military capabilities should be sufficient to support an American grand strategy committed to building upon this unprecedented opportunity. We did not accept pre-ordained constraints that followed from assumptions about what the country might or might not be willing to expend on its defenses.

In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. Leaked before it had been formally approved, the document was criticized as an effort by "cold warriors" to keep defense spending high and cuts in forces small despite the collapse of the Soviet Union; not surprisingly, it was subsequently buried by the new administration.

Although the experience of the past eight years has modified our understanding of particular military requirements for carrying out such a strategy, the basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound. And what Secretary Cheney said at the time in response to the DPG’s critics remains true today: "We can either sustain the [armed] forces we require and remain in a position to help shape things for the better, or we can throw that advantage away. [But] that would only hasten the day when we face greater threats, at higher costs and further risk to American lives." The project proceeded by holding a series of seminars. We asked outstanding defense specialists to write papers to explore a variety of topics: the future missions and requirements of the individual military services, the role of the reserves, nuclear strategic doctrine and missile defenses, the defense budget and prospects for military modernization, the state (training and readiness) of today’s forces, the revolution in military affairs, and defense-planning for theater wars, small wars and constabulary operations. The papers were circulated to a group of participants, chosen for their experience and judgment in defense affairs. (The list of participants may be found at the end of this report.) Each paper then became the basis for discussion and debate. Our goal was to use the papers to assist deliberation, to generate and test ideas, and to assist us in developing our final report. While each paper took as its starting point a shared strategic point of view, we made no attempt to dictate the views or direction of the individual papers. We wanted as full and as diverse a discussion as possible.

Our report borrows heavily from those deliberations. But we did not ask seminar participants to "sign-off" on the final report. We wanted frank discussions and we sought to avoid the pitfalls of trying to produce a consensual but bland product. We wanted to try to define and describe a defense strategy that is honest, thoughtful, bold, internally consistent and clear. And we wanted to spark a serious and informed discussion, the essential first step for reaching sound conclusions and for gaining public support.

New circumstances make us think that the report might have a more receptive audience now than in recent years. For the first time since the late 1960s the federal government is running a surplus. For most of the 1990s, Congress and the White House gave balancing the federal budget a higher priority than funding national security. In fact, to a significant degree, the budget was balanced by a combination of increased tax revenues and cuts in defense spending. The surplus expected in federal revenues over the next decade, however, removes any need to hold defense spending to some preconceived low level.

Moreover, the American public and its elected representatives have become increasingly aware of the declining state of the U.S. military. News stories, Pentagon reports, congressional testimony and anecdotal accounts from members of the armed services paint a disturbing picture of an American military that is troubled by poor enlistment and retention rates, shoddy housing, a shortage of spare parts and weapons, and diminishing combat readiness.

Finally, this report comes after a decade’s worth of experience in dealing with the post-Cold War world. Previous efforts to fashion a defense strategy that would make sense for today’s security environment were forced to work from many untested assumptions about the nature of a world without a superpower rival. We have a much better idea today of what our responsibilities are, what the threats to us might be in this new security environment, and what it will take to secure the relative peace and stability. We believe our report reflects and benefits from that decade’s worth of experience.

Our report is published in a presidential election year. The new administration will need to produce a second Quadrennial Defense Review shortly after it takes office. We hope that the Project’s report will be useful as a road map for the nation’s immediate and future defense plans. We believe we have set forth a defense program that is justified by the evidence, rests on an honest examination of the problems and possibilities, and does not flinch from facing the true cost of security. We hope it will inspire careful consideration and serious discussion. The post-Cold War world will not remain a relatively peaceful place if we continue to neglect foreign and defense matters. But serious attention, careful thought, and the willingness to devote adequate resources to maintaining America’s military strength can make the world safer and American strategic interests more secure now and in the future.

Donald Kagan, Gary Schmitt - Project Co-Chairmen, Thomas Donnelly - Principal Author

 
Window
Photograph: Peter Gorwin

 
Peter Gorwin - Artist

Based on this injustice, the mighty have the power to buy and reward those who might be willing and to disdain and even punish the unwilling. The words of the current American president -- "Those who are not with us are against us" -- weigh on current events with the resonance of barbaric times.

It is hardly surprising that the rhetoric of the aggressor increasingly resembles that of his enemy. Religious fundamentalism leads both sides to abuse what belongs to all religions, taking the notion of God hostage in accordance with their own fanatical understanding. Even the passionate warnings of the Pope, who knows how lasting and devastating the disasters wrought by the mentality and actions of Christian crusaders have been, were unsuccessful.

Disturbed and powerless, but also filled with anger, we are witnessing the moral decline of the world's only superpower, burdened by the knowledge that only one consequence of this organized madness is certain: Motivation for more terrorism is being provided, for more violence and counterviolence. Is this really the United States of America, the country we fondly remember? The generous benefactor of the Marshall Plan? The forbearing instructor in the lessons of democracy? The candid self-critic? The country that once made use of the teachings of the European Enlightenment to throw off its colonial masters and to provide itself with an exemplary constitution? Is this the country that made freedom of speech an incontrovertible human right?

It is not just foreigners who cringe as this ideal pales to the point where it is now a caricature of itself. There are many Americans who love their country too, people who are horrified by the betrayal of their founding values and by the hubris of those holding the power. I stand with them. By their side, I declare myself pro-American. I protest with them against the brutalities brought about by the injustice of the mighty, against all restrictions of the freedom of expression, against information control reminiscent of the practices of totalitarian states and against the cynical equations that make the deaths of so many innocents acceptable, so long as economic and political interests are protected.

No, it is not anti-Americanism that is damaging the image of the United States; nor do the dictator Saddam Hussein and his extensively disarmed country endanger the most powerful country in the world. It is President bush and his government that are diminishing democratic values, bringing sure disaster to their own country, ignoring the United Nations, and that are now terrifying the world with a war in violation of international law.

We Germans are often asked if we are proud of our country. To answer this question has always been a burden. There were reasons for our doubts. But now I can say that the rejection of this preemtive war by a majority in my country has made me proud of Germany. After having been largely responsible for two world wars and their criminal consequences, we have made a difficult step. We seem to have learned from history.

The Federal Republic of Germany has been a sovereign country since 1990. Our government made use of this sovereignty by having the courage to protect Germany from a step back to a kind of adolescent behavior. I thank Chancelor Gerhard Schroeder and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, for their fortitude in spite of all the attacks and accusations.

Many people find themselves in a state of despair these days, and with good reason. Yet we must not let our voices, or No to war and Yes to peace, be silenced. What has happened? The stone that we pushed to the peak is once again at the foot of the mountain. But we must push it back up, even with the knowledge that we can expect it to roll back down again.

Gunter Grass was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for literature. This comment was translated from German by Daniel Slager. April 10, 2003

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