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If it were possible to quantify all the causal factors, the predatory economic and political activities of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East over the past 100 years might well account for 90% of the causes of terrorist attacks against them, including 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7. These predatory activities have infuriated successive generations of indigenous populations throughout the Middle East by preventing them from acquiring political and civil rights, or fully exercising their right to develop sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies. A quantitative analysis, were one possible, might well also show that the remaining 10% of the causes of terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies can be attributed to the adoption by radical Islamists of an Islamic veneer to voice and legitimize their grievances against the U.S. and its allies, justify the use of force against "soft targets" to terrorize their enemies, raise money and recruit operatives. Military retaliation by the U.S. government and its allies for recent terrorist attacks has proven to be a counterproductive failure by swelling the ranks of terrorist networks, increasing terrorist attacks around the world, and causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Terrorist attacks against the West will continue, spread and increase in frequency around the world until global civil society intervenes to establish and deploy nonaligned multilateral forces comprised of nongovernmental organizations and nation-states committed to human rights. Only these forces are capable of brokering permanent ceasefires in terrorist conflicts, administering emergency humanitarian assistance, and providing long-term policing and technical support that empowers indigenous peoples to acquire and exercise political and civil rights, and develop sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies. The Third Force Network is designed to assist global civil society constituents, activists and nongovernmental organizations leverage the Internet and its 900,000,000 users to mobilize their political forces to develop, fund and deploy these multilateral forces wherever they are needed.
A Rude Awakening 1. Global shifts in public awareness after 9/11 Dramatic shifts in public understanding occurred after the attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York on September 11, 2001. The first came with the general public's realization that the attacks were part of a long-standing armed conflict between two major groups that had been underway for more than a decade. They discovered that one of these groups is a non-state transnational network known as al Qaeda, and the other is a U.S.-led group of Western and Middle Eastern nation-states. While many people were aware that sporadic attacks had been launched abroad against unarmed citizens and U.S. diplomatic and military forces, it was not until the attacks of 9/11 took place on the U.S. mainland that the public began to realize that all of the attacks were part of a deeply-rooted global conflict between the U.S.-led group and the transnational network, whose seeds had been sown during the first half of the 20th century. Although the U.S. government had started to take retaliatory military actions abroad against the transnational network in the late 1990's, most people had never heard the name "al Qaeda" until after the attacks of 9/11 when U.S. President Bush accused it of having perpetrated the attacks. Despite the fact that U.S. government agencies had received numerous warnings that al Qaeda operatives were planning to attack U.S. mainland targets, this information was not shared with the general public before the attacks of 9/11, nor was it used to develop plans to foil or respond to these specific attacks if they occurred. A second shift in public understanding, equally dramatic, came with popular realization that this unprecedented global conflict would inevitably trap unarmed civilians in a crossfire of attacks and counterattacks in densely-populated areas, launched by the transnational network and the military forces of their own governments against network suspects. Military conflicts would no longer be conducted by traditional armed forces in well-demarcated war zones across visible enemy lines. Instead, in the post 9/11 world, they would be fought by clandestine operatives and guerilla warriors from both the U.S.-led group and the transnational network launching surprise attacks against each other that would hit civilians and suspected enemy combatants alike. In the years immediately following 9/11, warnings of attacks and actual attacks became commonplace, causing mounting civilian casualties throughout the world. The Bush administration declared a global "war on terrorism" and began large-scale military operations in Afghanistan to uproot terrorist groups operating in that region. It also invaded and occupied Iraq, an invasion that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan declared illegal according to international law. U.S. use of unmanned aircraft equipped with explosives increased its global footprint by enabling it to attack and kill suspects deep inside other countries' borders. Al Qaeda rapidly scaled up its forces and showed that its operatives and sympathizers, like those who carried out terrorist attacks in Madrid, Spain in March, 2004, are capable of carrying out surprize attacks against military and civilian targets in a broad range of countries around the world. Given the shift to new technologies of war accessible to small groups, including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction that can be launched by lone individuals, the steady stream of warnings and attacks served as a grim reminder that citizens can no longer rely on their own governments to keep them out of harm's way, either at home or abroad. By the middle of the decade, the U.S. "war on terrorism" had spread around the world causing tens of thousands of casualties that far exceeded 9/11 casualties. (Note: The terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" are used in this paper to refer to acts and perpetrators of acts that are designed to influence, intimidate or coerce others, and/or obtain military and psychological advantages over adversaries. These acts include intimidation, threats of physical attacks and attacks themselves that injure or kill civilians and combatants, and/or create fear, civil disorder, chaos or a climate of opinion that induces changes in conduct. Such acts can include suicide-bombing and plane hijacking by attackers who die with their victims, torture, conventional military force and the use of weapons of mass destruction.) 2. Diverging opinions about the root causes of terrorism, and how to stop it As these new realizations dawned on vulnerable civilian populations around the world, many people began raising fundamental questions about the long-standing terrorist conflict in which the two groups were engaged. By 2004, a striking chasm had emerged in world public opinion that divided the world into two lopsided camps regarding the root causes of the attacks of 9/11, and the effectiveness of the military strategy being pursued by the U.S.-led group to prevent future attacks. According to public opinion polls described below that were conducted immediately after the attacks, the members of the smaller camp believe that the attacks were caused by a "small, radical group". More than half of the U.S. adult population belong in this smaller camp. The members of the larger of the two camps believe that the attacks of 9/11 were caused by adverse economic and political conditions in the Middle East. This camp consists primarily of non-U.S. residents and world leaders, and less than half of the American public. The members of this larger camp of world opinion view the economic and foreign policies of the U.S. as factors contributing to these adverse conditions. They also believe that the use of force by the U.S.-led group is proving to be counterproductive in eliminating leaders and operatives belonging to the transnational network. 3. Mission of the Third Force Network The Third Force Network is designed to provide the members of this larger camp of world public opinion an effective alternative to the use of force to stop violence and terrorism. It will enable them to become part of the global civil society movement, and join civil society constituents, activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their allies around the world to prevent future terrorist attacks and retaliatory attacks like those of 9/11 in New York, 3/11 in Madrid amd 7/7 in London, and those launched by the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, by eradicating the root causes of individual and collective violence and terrorism.(1) The Network is also designed to help them replace unilateral forces deployed in the U.S. "war against terrorism", which violate international law, with nonaligned multilateral forces that respect international law. These forces will be comprised of nation-states, transnational NGOs and their allies who are committed to protecting human rights and human security rather than national security, and resolving conflicts nonviolently. Through the Network's Grassroots Hotline, NGO Emergency Requests Helpline, Livelihood Lifeline, and Third Force Network Bank described below, the Network will help NGOs raise money to finance their participation in nonaligned multinational forces that can broker and enforce cease-fires and peace accords. These multinational operations will eradicate the economic and political causes of terrorism by helping indigenous peoples build sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies that generate and retain wealth at the local level, and engender democratic decision-making.
The Third Force Network will address global power shifts that have created deepening conflicts among the major forces that shape human affairs and international relations, placing civilians in harm's way on a scale unprecedented in human history. Two of these forces, the nation-state and the market economy, grew up along side emerging civil society and the ordinary people who comprise it, and the nongovernmental organizations who work on their behalf outside of government and the marketplace. Within the past 100 years, however, these two forces have begun to dominate civil society in many countries around the world to such an extent that they have dramatically increased global poverty, insecurity, violence, warfare and terrorism.(See the seminal analysis of this global economic and political power shift by Robert W. Cox, "Globalization, Multilateralism, and Democracy").(1) Civil society is commonly understood to comprise individuals and groups favoring the use of reason over force to resolve differences, and the rule of democratically-formulated laws to govern human affairs and protect human rights. Formulating and enforcing laws is viewed in this context to be the province of popularly-elected representatives who are voted into office through free and fair elections. Organizationally, civil society is understood to comprise millions of voluntary organizations that work on its behalf, meeting needs that are not met by government or the marketplace, and solving problems that government and the marketplace have neglected, failed to solve, or created in the first place. As the Secretary General of Civicus, Kumi Naidoo, has pointed out, civil society includes a broad array of heterogeneous civic institutions that go well beyond community-based organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and individual civil society constituents who are active in the public sphere to protect and promote the interests of civil society. (2) These institutions include trade unions, foundations, affinity groups such as gender-based and religious groups, and social movements and networks. Of increasing importance is the growing number of transnational NGOs that now number in the tens of thousands, whose vital work is cross-national in scope. As discussed below, they not only provide a wealth of direct services to civil society constituents, but play an increasingly pivotal role in influencing the formulation, implementation and enforcement of policies that protect human economic, political and social security within and across borders. As Keck and Sinkkink have pointed out in a pioneering study, these transnational NGOs band together and form alliances with a variety of partners in the public and private sectors. Such alliances enable these organizations to pick and choose from the full range of political influence strategies and tactics those needed to build consensus within and across borders and continents. This flexibility enables them to attain transnational objectives that often overcome the initial objections of particular nation-states and inter-governmental organizations, in what Keck and Sinkkink refer to as a "boomerange effect". (3) (See Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998). Because of the growing political influence of these transnational organizations, they are increasingly referred to as a political movement, a global civil society movement, even though they do not have or need a centralized governing structure, as discussed below. The Third Force Network is designed to promote the transformation of the global civil society movement into a politically-powerful third force capable of defending the interests of civil society against nation-states and market forces that jeopardize them. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the U.S.-declared "war on terrorism" are a case in point. Historically and chronologically, in Western Europe and North America, the political struggles and economic productivity of the individuals who were part of emerging civil society created the governmental and economic institutions belonging to the first and second forces that now prevail around the world. Civil society emerged after the feudal era in Western Europe as common people gained ascendancy over feudal lords, and gradually began separating the secular realm from the control of organized religions. They delegated their sovereign power to governmental officials they elected so that these officials could make and execute laws in their name. Their labor created the second force, the market economy, by producing goods, services and wealth that in turn led to the establishment of economic and financial institutions through which enterprises could be financed and transactions could be carried out locally, regionally and transnationally. By the opening of the 21st century, however, the first and second forces appear to have turned the tables on civil society and the individuals from whom they originally derived their power and influence. In many countries that were once considered democracies, first and second force institutions now exert a determining, unaccountable and often adverse influence over the lives and livelihoods of the countries' citizens. In many countries that do not have robust civil societies, democracies, sustainable economies or needed livelihoods, first and second force influences are interfering with their development. While these power shifts appear to be the result of inherent and inexorable generic processes that foster first and second force dominance, equally powerful generic forces make it inevitable that civil society will eventually reassert itself and become the dominant force. After all, the rights of the citizenry, and the earning power and productive capacity of working people, are the original sources of the political and financial power that first and second force institutions and actors have accumulated to attain their 21st century dominance. Moreover, the number of working people and civil society constituents all over the world drawfs the number of first and second force actors. If the political power of the citizenry is severely curtailed, they will mobilize their political resources to outmaneuver and oust their oppressors. If their buying power is severely diminished and they cannot buy the products and services offered by second force institutions and actors, these institutions and actors will go bankrupt. 21st century terrorist conflicts will further fuel the resurgence of civil society as people realize that their own governments cannot protect them even through the use of overwhelming military force and the killing and detention of large numbers of suspected terrorists abroad. These conflicts and casualties, which have claimed the lives of more than 100,000 innocent civilians in Iraq alone, are forcing civil society constituents to realize that they must act through their own nongovernmental organizations to protect themselves from the crossfires in which terrorist networks and their own governments and economic institutions have trapped them. They are also realizing that their best strategy for stoping these conflicts is to join, support, fund and help shape the priorities of NGOs who can take initiatives with others to create nonaligned multilateral forces that can define and implement their own mandates with those who need their help. For only these forces can intervene to negotiate and enforce cease-fires in terrorist conflicts, and provide long-term policing to enforce international laws that protect human rights and security. These citizens and civil society constituents will support NGOs that can operate on the ground to stop violent conflicts by providing emergency relief and livelihood support to destitute populations and combatants willing to lay down their arms. They will finance organizations that know how to facilitate local efforts to create self-reliant, democractic communities and sustainable indigenous economies and livelihoods that can eventually be integrated into national, regional and global economies through non-predatory economic development and fair trade practices. In short, civil society constituents and transnational NGOs will put civil society in charge of human affairs.
Notes
The Emergence of Two Camps 4. Polarized worldviews The post-9/11 emergence of two sharply divided camps of world public opinion, with the largest located outside the U.S., was preceded by sharp divisions in the views of world leaders. One year after the attacks of 9/11, Roman Catholic Pope John Paul II expressed the views of the larger camp of world public opinion when he asserted that the roots of terrorism grow out of scandalous conditions of injustice, oppression and marginalization that afflict large parts of the world.(1) He warned that the world cannot disregard the underlying causes that lead young people to such despair that they fall prey to violence, hatred and a desire for revenge at any cost. In contrast, U.S. President Bush expressed a divergent point of view that dismissed economic and political conditions as root causes. In a November, 2002 interview for Radio Free Europe, he specifically rejected poverty as the sole or even a main cause of terrorism. He asserted that "terrorists" are a "group of fanatics" and "killers" who hate America because of the country's love of freedom. He acknowledged that they use poverty as a tool for recruitment, but he insisted that poverty does not cause killers to exist. He said he hoped people do not confuse the mentality of the terrorist leaders with economic plight, because these leaders live comfortably, and some of them are actually "rich".(2) Public opinion polls conducted in the years immediately following the attacks of 9/11 show that public opinion became sharply divided along the lines of these two diverging points of view expressed by Pope John Paul and President Bush. The members of the first, smaller camp of U.S. residents hold the same views as the U.S. president and his administration. They, too, believe that the U.S.-declared "war on terrorism" was provoked by "a small, radical group". And they also support the use of military force by the U.S., including unilateral pre-emptive strikes, to eliminate the leaders, operatives and supporters of the transnational network.(3) In contrast, the members of the larger, second camp, which consists primarily of non-U.S. residents and approximately 40% of U.S. residents, believe that the underlying roots of the conflict are adverse economic and political conditions. As discussed below, they also believe that the attacks of 9/11 are the result of U.S policies abroad that failed to alleviate these conditions, or made them worse.(4)
Notes 5. Popular doubts about U.S. motives in declaring a "war on terrorism" In addition to these negative views regarding the impact of U.S. economic and foreign policies on non-Western developing nations, surveys show that non-U.S. residents are also doubtful of the reasons the Bush administration gives for fighting its "war on terrorism". Many believe the administration has exaggerated the threat posed by the conflict between the U.S.-led group and the al Qaeda network in order to justify its pursuit of other objectives. These include increasing its influence around the world and invading Iraq in order to gain control of its oil.(1) Majorities in 7 out of 9 countries surveyed believe that controlling Middle East oil supplies was an important motivation behind U.S. occupation of Iraq. In more recent polls, the members of the second camp, the larger of the two, express the view that the use of force by the U.S. and its allies is proving to be ineffective, and share the opinions of intelligence experts who think it is exacerbating and spreading the conflict. By pre-emptively invading a sovereign country, causing tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and detaining and abusing thousands of civilians suspected of being combatants, many of whom are Muslims, they believe U.S. use of force is inflaming Muslim passions, and helping al Qaeda attract new sympathizers and recruit new operatives. In addition, U.S. actions are believed to have weakened collective security and isolated the U.S. from its traditional allies, with the exception of the United Kingdom. Non-U.S. residents surveyed who believe that U.S. policies have made the world more dangerous also believe that their own governments should undertake defensive actions to guard against possible U.S. incursions into their countries and regions.(2) They think their own governments should take measures to develop defensive regional alliances independently of the U.S. By mid 2005, these preferences were increasingly reflected in policies establishing and strengthening regional alliances designed to outflank and exclude the U.S. (See Tom Engelhardt, "Winners and Losers: Moving Out of the Superpower Orbit " 3 May 2005 (3); and Associated Press, "At Brazil summit, a challenge to U.S. influence: Arab and S. Americans seek greater benefits from globalization", 10 May 2005. )
Notes 6. Rich versus poor: the U.S. role in sowing the seeds of terrorism In contrast to the Bush administration'espoused view that terrorism is caused by a small group of fanatics that can be rooted out by military force, 3 out of 5 non-U.S. residents who were asked if U.S. policies are considered by many or most ordinary people to be "a major cause" of the 9/11 attacks agreed that they are considered a major cause. In contrast, only 1 in 5 U.S. residents surveyed said many or most people consider U.S. policies a major cause, revealing a growing chasm between the U.S. and the rest of the world. More pointedly, non-U.S. residents expressed the view that the U.S. bears some responsibility for the gap between rich and poor, and that the world's wealthiest country does too little to assist those who have the least. Although non-U.S. residents think U.S. policies are a major cause of the attacks of 9/11 and that the U.S. should do more to help the poor abroad, it is striking to note that many Americans attach less importance than they did before 9/11 to U.S. support of efforts to raise living standards abroad, alleviate world hunger, prevent infectious diseases, or curb global warming. This change is most noticeable among American youth. In surveys conducted after 9/11, only a third of Americans under age 30 give top priority to alleviating world hunger, compared with 54% who did so before 9/11. These diverging views may be attributable to the post-9/11 realization by many Americans that the U.S. mainland is vulnerable to future attacks, and their belief that the country must invest its resources in military strategies for preventing such attacks rather than sending these resources abroad as foreign aid. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning deflects attention from the role that adverse economic conditions might have played in motivating the 9/11 attacks, or the role that ameliorating these conditions might play in preventing future attacks. In addition, conventional American views about the causes of poverty, and the central role that Americans believe individual efforts and responsibility play in getting ahead, may help explain this discrepancy between the views of non-U.S. residents U.S. residents regarding the root causes of the attacks of 9/11, and what should be done to prevent future attacks. When it comes to helping those in need, Americans are generally more individualistic and less compassionate than their counterparts abroad, according to surveys conducted since 9/11. Among nearly 50 nations surveyed, many more Americans than non-Americans think that being successful is within their control, and that most people who fail in life have themselves to blame rather than society. And although most Americans surveyed are in favor of a social "safety net", they are less strongly committed to government taking care of citizens who cannot take care of themselves than people of other countries.(1) These beliefs reflect core ideological values of American conservatism.(2) In addition, this divergence between the views of non-U.S. residents and U.S. residents may well be due to the tendency many Americans have to overestimate the amount of foreign aid the U.S. provides, and to underestimate the resentment that people living abroad feel about growing inequalities and poverty in the developing world, American standards of living and consumption, as well as the increasing concentration of wealth in American hands.(3) For example, when asked how much the U.S. gives in foreign aid, American respondents tend to put the figure at 10%, 15% and even 25% of U.S. Gross National Product (GNP). Since the U.S. gives less than 1% of its GNP, but U.S. officials stress that U.S. aid in absolute numbers is higher than that of any other single country or even groups of countries, these respondents appear to be confused by what these numbers and comparisons actually mean. This confusion ill-equips many Americans to understand the sources and gravity of the growing antipathy that is being directed towards them, and to envisage ways to prevent the hostility from erupting into preventable armed conflicts. (See Jeffrey Sachs, "The US Fight Against the Fight Against Poverty", 13 September 2005.)(4) The facts of the matter are that people in poor countries see little help coming from the most advanced industrialized countries, most of whom differ little from the U.S. in that they contribute less than 1 percent of their GNP to foreign aid. But even within this group, the U.S. ranks among the lowest of the low. With respect to the share of national resources devoted to development aid for poor countries in the years leading up to 9/11, the U.S. ranked the lowest of all 21 countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), compared to the efforts of other OECD donor countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan. (5) In addition, U.S. corporations, investors, financial institutions and international banks such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which receive a significant portion of their funding from the U.S. public via the U.S. Treasury, are the primary engines and beneficiaries of free market globalization.(6) More pointedly, Civicus Secretary General Kumi Naidoo argues that the World Bank should own up more honestly to the fact that the "neo-liberal Washington Consensus", whose policies underlie this lop-sided distribution of benefits, has been thoroughly discredited.(7) It should come up with workable alternatives in light of the fact that economic globalisation, is exacerbating global inequality:
"Its 'rules' - to the extent we can call them that - appear to be driven by the rich at the expense of the poor. The relentless lauding of so-called 'free trade' in fact masks a set of double standards that protect certain markets in wealthy countries and deny poor and developing countries the chance to benefit from the most promising segments of their own economies." While the capital and know-how provided by institutions like the World Bank have brought improved living standards and economic opportunities to many regions of the world, they have also lowered these standards and opportunities elsewhere through practices that destroy as many livelihoods as they create, and in some cases, more than they create. In tandem with the growing concentration of extraordinary wealth in U.S. hands, poverty has increased around the world. None of the poverty-reduction programs that have been created to pick up the pieces have proved successful.(8) As a result, recent surveys and research show that the U.S. has become a bitterly-resented "market-dominant minority" in the global economy. It is deeply estranged from major non-Caucasian ethnic groups around the world whose members believe the U.S. has extracted more than its fair share of world resources and wealth, according to Yale University law professor Amy Chua in World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003).(9) Less than 5% of the population of the world owns 60% of its wealth, leaving half the world's population to live on less than a few dollars a day. It should be noted that severe disparities are also reflected in the distribution of wealth within the U.S., the world's richest country where 35 million people live in poverty out of a total population of 295 million. Minimum wages have been held so low by the political and economic forces that hold sway over U.S. Congressional representatives that typical full-time employees at Wal-Mart, America's largest corporation, earn only $17,000 a year. This sum is too little to cover food, shelter and health insurance.(10) As political analyst Kevin Phillips and political economist Gar Alperovitz have pointed out, the political power of U.S. economic forces has become so great that the U.S. is now considered by many to be a "plutocracy", a society governed by the wealthiest.(11) Alperovitz's research shows that the real income of working people has remained virtually unchanged since 1973, while the compensation of the ten most highly paid CEOs jumped to an average of $154 million in 2000 from $3.5 million in 1981. He cites the observation of economist Lester Thurow that never before has such a rapid increase in inequality been recorded in any country except those undergoing revolutions or military defeats. Not only is income highly concentrated in the U.S., with the top 1% of the U.S. population of nearly 300 million earning as much as the bottom 100 million, but the richest 1% of American households now own half of all wealth, in terms of ownership of stock, securities, trust equity and business equity. Clearly, the same economic and political forces are at work inside and outside the U.S., creating similar patterns of inequities and gaps in income and concentration of wealth. It is these disparities, Chua reports, that have led many people throughout the world to hate the U.S. and rejoice in the attacks of 9/11 even while deploring the loss of innocent lives. They sympathasize with the perpetrators of the attacks of 9/11, not because they subscribe to their espoused religious views, but because the attackers have taken a stand against an unjust power. While many Americans are becoming aware of these dynamics and perspectives, only a minority of the population as a whole appears to understand them well enough to broaden their views beyond the Bush administration's version of the causes of the attacks of 9/11, or to consider whether nonviolent alternatives focused on economic development strategies that reduce economic, political and social inequalities and conflicts might be more effective in stopping terrorism than the use of military force. A number of reports and critics, including the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee in 2002, have concluded that Western financial and economic institutions, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Western-controlled multinationals, must transfer the wealth-generating capacity of American entrepreneurialism and free market capitalism to economic development models and initiatives that meet the livelihood needs of working people throughout the world, particularly in economically fragile and conflict-prone regions.(12) They have urged these institutions to develop new policies and programs that harness Western business acumen and capital to the economies of developing nations so that indigenous entrepreneurs and working people can build the sustainable businesses, livelihoods and grassroots economies that are so desperately needed. However, as Robert Cox has pointed out, over the past 30 years, nation-state governments, the first force in human affairs, have been eclipsed by the second force, the institutions of the market economy, as its ideologues have gained the ascendancy and created a virtually unregulated, privatized, domestic and global market-driven economy.(13) The state, which was once the guardian of the interests of civil society in general, and those of the vulnerable in particular, has been co-opted into the role of using its political leverage to enforce corporate policies and contracts, and protect the free market economy from any interferences in its quest for untrammeled profit-taking. Cox's analysis is seconded by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who points out in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (2000), that these Western-based "second force" interests have yet to put the needs of developing countries on a par with their own.(14) They have yet to help indigenous populations participate on a large scale in the free market system on free and fair terms that enable them to retain an equitable share of the wealth they help to create. Instead, U.S. economic and foreign policies and U.S. taxpayer-supported financial institutions have presided over the downward slide into insolvency of nearly 100 countries that have accepted Western loans and investments. These are often used to pay for huge infrastructure projects that Western firms are skilled at building but the countries' developing economies can ill afford and do not immediately need. In some cases, these projects do more to help Western businesses establish themselves and become profitable than they do to help indigenous businesses flourish. Too often these projects help Western businesses put indigenous enterprises out of business and destroy locally-created livelihoods, while leaving the country to foot the bill for developing the infrastructure these Western businesses use to outmaneuver their local competition. As a result, the receiving countries become debtor nations obliged to transfer out of their countries billions of dollars annually to their lenders and investors in the West.(15) Their creditors, eager to make sure they receive these payments, typically impose "structural adjustments" and external controls over the countries' public and private sectors to make sure the funds are available.(16) These "adjustments" force the governments of debtor nations to drastically curtail spending on vital "safety net" services such as health care and food and shelter for the poor, leaving next to nothing for education and vocational training to prepare their work force.(17) When indigenous opposition to these controls and adverse economic conditions becomes too forceful, it is often met with armed repression, which in turn sparks more violence and armed conflict. All too often these countries become fertile recruiting grounds for extremist movements and terrorist networks. Curiously, many of the developing countries that are the richest in the natural resources extracted by Western enterprises are also those that suffer the highest rates of poverty, corruption and conflict.(18) For example, oil-rich Middle Eastern countries closely allied with the U.S. tend to fit this pattern. The ruling monarchies of countries like Saudi Arabia and their U.S. trading partners, for instance, have benefitted handsomely from Middle East oil reserves, but the indigenous populations that spawned the al Qaeda network have suffered from severe economic deprivation and political repression for decades. Instead of allowing dissident groups to form political associations to protest these conditions legitimately through democratic channels, autocratic rulers chose instead to execute or imprison dissenters without fair trials. As a result, indigenous forces working to build civil society, defend human rights and promote democratic processes faced severe obstacles, while economic opportunities were monopolized by the ruling elite whose members grew rich on oil revenues. As former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich pointed out recently, U.S. financial interests and government officials virtually ignored the economic and political problems that were piling up in the region over the past 50 years while they were creating lucrative trading alliances with Middle Eastern countries that enabled them to fuel the American economy with the region's vast oil reserves.(19) Not only did Western governments support oppressive regimes in order to obtain oil, but they also created and installed such regimes. In 2000, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright acknowledged that the U.S. government played a key role in a 1953 coup d'etat inside a Middle East country, Iran, against its democratically-elected leader who had nationalized the oil industry. (20) Iran's newly-elected prime minister, Mossadegh, had nationalized the industry in order to obtain what he considered a fairer share of the oil revenues that British and American oil interests were taking out of the country.(19) After the U.S.-backed, CIA-led coup, the autocratic Shah of Iran was installed in power. He permitted British oil interests to retain more than 50% control of Iran's oil industry, of which U.S. oil interests got approximately 40%. (As discussed below, after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. established a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that proceeded to privatize all state-owned industries, including the oil industry. The CPA dismissed all of the government's 500,000 employees who ran these industries and served in Iraq's military and police forces. There is widespread agreement among intelligence analysts that these jobless individuals are the core of Iraq's present insurgency, which is working with al Qaeda and related terrorist operatives who have infiltrated the country.) The Shah ruled for more than 20 years without modernizing the country's economy or government to increase living standards and introduce democratic processes. In 1979, he was ousted by an indigenous anti-American uprising led by militant Islamic clerics and their followers. They seized the U.S. embassy and boldly took U.S. citizens hostage in an unprecedented demonstration of pent up anti-American outrage. According to Middle East scholars, the U.S. government's interference in Iraq's internal affairs has had a boomerang effect on U.S. political and economic interests in the area. It transformed Iran into an incubator of militant, anti-Western Islamic fundamentalist sentiment throughout the region, a role that many believe it continues to play even in 2005, forty-five years after the initial American-backed coup d'etat. When Albright acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup, she admitted that it obstructed Iran's political development and provoked great resentment towards America. Although few Americans are aware of these historical antecedents of contemporary anti-American sentiment, they appear to part and parcel of the complex motivations driving successive generations of insurgent Muslim groups throughout the Middle East that ultimately gave birth to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. (21) When seen through the lens of this paper's framework of analysis, these antecedents and their repercussions serve as a prime example of what can happen when the first and second forces, the state and the free market system, are in the control of actors who put their interests before those of the people and the emerging civil society they should be serving, obstructing the development of sustainable livelihoods and inalienable political rights in the process. The seeds of 21st century Middle East terrorist networks were sown by the economic and political interventions of the U.S. and its Western allies throughout the region. As discussed below, these preceded and triggered the rise of politically-aggressive religious fundamentalists seeking to expel Westerners from the region and topple oppressive Middle East governments so as to replace them with theocratic regimes led by Islamic caliphs. As discussed below, U.S. actions in Iran were part of a pattern and sequence repeated elsewhere in the Middle East, which set the stage for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York in 2001, and 3/11 in Madrid in 2003.
Notes 7. Psycho-social correlates of individual and collective violence and terrorism Chapter 8 below will analyze in more detail the ways in which religion and religious devotees, groups and institutions were increasingly used throughout the later half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st by groups and individuals in both camps, on the U.S. side and on the al Qaeda side, to attain political and economic ends. This commingling of politics and religion in both the U.S. and the Middle East hardened the resolve of all the parties, intensified their mutual animosity, and escalated their confrontation. In advance of that discussion, however, it is important to note that the analysis will not condone or justify the horrendous violence that has been wreaked on unarmed civilians by non-state terrorists through suicide missions, beheadings, mutilations, and other forms of torture. Nor will it seek to lessen the resolve of those who are tracking down terrorists to bring them to justice, since they are truly a threat not only to civil society but to the survival of mankind. At the same time, clinical research into the generic psycho-social correlates of individual and collective violence and terrorism does throw light on mechanisms that induce individuals and groups to engage in violent acts. In addition, and most importantly, it also throws light on preventive and remedial measures that might prevent such violence. The findings of a pioneering figure in this field, Harvard University Medical School psychiatrist James Gilligan, are based on decades of clinical investigations and treatments of individuals who are murderers and/or criminally insane. These investigations and treatments enabled him to identify root causes not only of mass murders in the U.S. but politically-motivated mass murders carried out by suicide bombers in organizations like al Qaeda and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). In fact, he found a striking similarity in the motivations for violence on the part of individuals and political mass murderers like Hitler and Osama bin Laden. Significantly, his conclusions point to generic causes of both types of mass murder which can be eradicated nonviolently, once the public understands these causes and decides to support the implementation of the appropriate remedies. The common denominators of individual and collective violence and terrorism identified by Gilligan include the following:
What sets the stage for the psychological propensity of certain individuals and groups to engage in violence are their feelings and perceptions that they have been unfairly treated and shamed socially and economically. Translated to social, economic and political structures in particular societies, the stage is set for individual and collective violence in economically distressed areas that do not provide poor, humiliated and enraged individuals and groups with opportunities to improve their social and economic economically, and organize legitimately to seek redress of their grievances peacefully, through democratic processes. When nonviolent channels are perceived to be closed, terrorism appears to be the sole remaining option. The significance of Gilligan's findings, in the context of the terrorist conflict between the U.S.-led group and the al Qaeda group, is that they show how adverse economic and political conditions can have negative psychological and social consequences on groups that suffer from them. These conditions create feelings of shame and humiliation in the minds of group members who cannot escape destitute economic conditions, and who feel powerless to change their social and political status in relation to other more powerful groups whom they hold responsible for the conditions they cannot change. These social, economic and political influences create in these groups the psychological propensity to engage in individual and collective violence. Gilligan found "overwhelming statistical evidence" in three dozen studies that show a highly significant correlation between economic inequity, on the one hand, and individual and collective violence, on the other hand. In fact, the single most powerful predictor of the murder rate throughout the world, according to Gilligan's findings, is the size of the gap between the rich and the poor. For example, the U.S., which has the greatest gap between rich and poor of all developed countries, also has a murder rate 10 times higher than that of Western European countries for the past 50 years. Western Europe and Japan, which have the lowest gap between rich and poor among developed countries, have murder rates that are one tenth of the U.S. rate. This correlation of violence with wealth inequity within nation-states is also reflected in the rates of collective violence between nation-states. Gilligan cites a United Nations study which found that wars were much more common among poor countries than richer countries. Poverty lends itself to collective violence when one state attacks another state because it perceives that there are no other channels open to it for resolving the problems created by its poverty. Similarly, these findings help to explain why a transnational group like al Qaeda, whose founders came from many states throughout the Middle East, and also shared common ties to Islam, came to attack not only their own repressive governments, but their governments' most powerful ally, the U.S. To the extent that al Qaeda's founders felt they did not have non-violent channels within their home countries that they could effectively use to attain their objectives, and because they shared common bonds to the region's religion, Islam, their movement was led to adopt a transnational strategy based on collective violence and the espousal of goals couched in Islamic metaphors. As an illustration of this thesis, Gilligan also cites Osama bin Laden's public statements after 9/11 decrying 80 years of Muslim humiliation and disgrace by oppressive governments and Western colonial powers. Gilligan believes they reflect a collective feeling of inferiority vis-a-vis ruling monarchies and their Western backers that had arisen among Muslims throughout the Middle East. Despite the fact that groups like al Qaeda and the PLO can commit desperate, regressive and pathological acts, Gilligan asserts that their grievances and propensity to engage in collective violence can be addressed more effectively by nonviolent means than by the use of military force. Foremost among them is the creation of more equitable economic systems, and more participatory democratic political systems. Gilligan claims that these reforms will be far more effective in preventing individual and collective violence than all the arms and armaments in the world, and all the prisons systems and punishments in the world.
Notes 8. Historical and religious dimensions of the conflict between the U.S.-led group and the al Qaeda network Instead of religious factors, Gilligan's findings demonstrate that collective violence and terrorist acts are correlated with psychological predispositions that are created by social, economic and political inequities and injustices. The findings also indicate that these predispositions can be changed by reducing the inequities and injustices that divide hostile groups. Yet most Americans in the smaller, first camp of public opinion described above, who are unaware of the historical antecedents of the terrorist attacks and subscribe to the Bush administration's views of terrorists and their motivations, believe that these terrorists are so unjustifiedly fanatical in their hatred for the U.S. that they can only be stopped by overwhelming military force. Since it is these Americans whose political support has given the administration carte blanche to conduct its 'war on terrorism" with maximum military force, the historical record bears reviewing. For it may prove helpful to those with open minds who are willing to reformulate their views and consider alternative courses of action, such as those that redress grievances resulting from U.S. and Western interference in the Middle East for the better part of the last century. A brief synopsis of that record must begin with the colonial era, during which European governments extended and demarcated their spheres of interest throughout the region by creating new states where none had previously existed, arbitrarily drawing formal boundaries and establishing new regimes and their own hand-picked rulers. While most of these regimes functioned in a secular way in developing their external trading relationships with foreign powers, many of these regimes were so closely aligned with Islamic institutions and Islamic laws regulating conduct in the social sphere that they also functioned as quasi-theocracies. Throughout the 20th century, Islamic "Sharia" law was the the "law of the land" in spheres that had become secularized in Western nation-states in which established religions had long been "dis-established" by emerging civil society and the proliferation of competing religious denominations. These Middle Eastern quasi-theocracies were so powerful that they thwarted indigenous populations in their efforts to expand human rights, political rights and popular sovereignty. As time passed, the failure of these artificially-created regimes to provide their subjects livelihoods and political rights to express their grievances sparked the creation of insurgent groups and movements throughout the Middle East, which opposed these regimes and their Western backers. These movements were known as "jihads", the Arabic word for "struggle".(1) In the absence of legitimate political channels for expressing their views, dissidents couched their grievances in Islamic metaphors and religious principles, and claimed to speak on behalf of aggrieved Muslims throughout the Middle East. These radicals appealed to their more moderate fellow Muslims for moral and material support, and recruited followers from radical Muslim milieus and schools that welcomed them. The al Qaeda movement grew out of these movements, which were nurtured in fundamentalist Islamic centers in Egypt and Saudia Arabia, one of the most oppressive of these regimes. The extreme Wahhabi school of Islam took root in Saudi Arabia, and provided a home for the most vehement opponents of these regimes. Osama bin Laden is one of them. Although the usually unspoken view that terrorism is an outgrowth of Islam became fairly widespread after 9/11, most scholars and analysts reject it. For example, Harvard University researcher Jessica Stern traveled extensively abroad to interview dozens of terrorists for her book, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2003). She found that religiously-expressed violence and conflicts are most likely to occur in Middle Eastern countries whose regimes have a history of political repression and fail to provide basic "safety net" services.(2) University of Pennsylvania scholar James Furth's historical analysis of the causes of these conflicts converges with Stern's.(3) He too found that it is poverty and oppression rather than religion that are the original causes of the conflicts that terrorists express in religious language. The primary causal factors lie in their governments' failures to modernize their countries' economic and political systems so as to provide their impoverished populations opportunities to improve their economic, social and political status. It is true that Osama bin Laden's pronouncements make repeated religious references and that al Qaeda relies heavily on suicide attackers who are devout Muslims. In addition, the pronouncements of radical Muslim groups like al Qaeda often contain references to their intention to establish an Islamic caliphate to rule the Middle East. Moreover, it is also true that Islam is interpreted in many areas to justify the use of coercive and even brutal methods to obtain the fealty and obedience of its followers, and silence its adversaries. However, over and above the personal devotion of its leaders and followers, al Qaeda's proclaimed association with Islam and use of retrograde religious metaphors and compliance mechanisms, is also likely to be due to the absence of nonviolent channels that they perceive could be effective in reversing adverse economic and political conditions from which Muslims suffer. Moreover, given the fact that al Qaeda is not a nation-state, it does not have access to a national treasury to finance its operations. Nor does it have national armed forces from which to recruit its foot soldiers. Its leaders' exploitation of enraged Muslims to serve as suicide attackers is therefore less likely to derive from the network's espoused religiosity than from a lack of alternative means of recruitment. Such religiously-based practices appear to be born of weakness rather than strength. Support for this assertion is provided by Stern and others, who have pointed out that suicide-bombers are recruited from the thousands of enraged young people who have witnessed first-hand or know people who have witnessed Western forces injure, maim and kill relatives and close friends. It is their first-hand experience with Western brutality that prompts their recruitment into terrorist organizations that convince them to perpetrate suicide attacks. As Indian activist Arundhati Roy has suggested, terrorists may well be using brutal and cruel methods to force Westerners out of areas they wish to control because they have no other ways and means to fight adversaries who have opted to use overwhelming military force against them. (4) (See Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, 2004.) These historical facts and interpretations make it difficult to embrace the view held by a majority of Americans and the Bush administration that the conflict that surfaced on 9/11 is confined to a "small radical group" that is driven only by its hatred of American freedom. Many decades before the attacks of 9/11 took the American people by surprise, Middle Eastern jihadists had created an underground network throughout the region to fight their own regimes and their Western backers as well. The al Qaeda network under the leadership of Osama bin Laden and his associates and mentors became one of their offshoots. The loosely-organized al Qaeda group had publicly expressed its anti-Western grievances well before the attacks of 9/11, all focused on the cessation of Western interference in the Middle East. It had also publicly identified the specific targets of its jihad, namely, governments of Middle East nation-states created by Western colonial powers that they considered repressive - including the Jewish state of Israel established in the region by these same powers in 1948, with the support of the United States. As the U.S. increased its support for Israel, and became its staunchest ally, the jihadist's hostility toward the U.S. intensified. It was magnified even further by the furor created within its ranks by U.S. conduct in the Soviet-Afghan War. It has been reported that Osama bin Laden was particularly exercised by the United States' precipitous withdrawl from Afghanistan after the Soviets had been repelled. During the war, which lasted from 1979 to 1988, the U.S. had actively recruited, trained and equipped Muslims, including bin Laden, to fight against the Soviet invaders, only to abandon them in a prostrate wartorn Afghanistan after the Soviet forces were defeated. These self-serving actions convinced Bin Laden that the U.S. acted only in its own interests. They prompted him to move quickly to exploit the power vacuum that had been created in Afghanistan by the U.S. departure, in order to usher in the repressive Taliban regime and set up a training camp there for al Qaeda operatives from around the world. When viewed against this historical backdrop, the attacks of 9/11, although unjustifiable on any grounds whatsoever, cannot be viewed as an isolated act of belligerency against the U.S. devoid of articulated grievances or warnings. Despite the fact that al Qaeda expressed and continues to express its economic and political grievances and demands in Islamic metaphors, its primary objections and objectives are economic and political in nature, rather than religious. While its founder's religious fervor is unmistakable, beneath his movement's proclaimed association with Islam lies a strategy to legitimize and support a political struggle to improve adverse economic and political conditions affecting Muslims throughout the region by means of an alternative governmental regime. Evidence to support this interpretation that the 9/11 attackers are descendants of an early 20th century pan-Arab jihad formed to protest Western interference in the Middle East are contained in Osama bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to the American People".(5) In it, he explains why al Qaeda is fighting and opposing Americans. He writes that its actions are in response to the Americans who attacked "us" more than 80 years ago by helping and supporting the British in giving Palestine to the Jews, and occupying it militarily, while expulsing, oppressing and killing its indigenous occupants. In the same letter, he complains that the American people "steal" Middle East wealth and oil at paltry prices because of their international influence and military force, acts that he calls the "biggest theft" ever witnessed by mankind. Bin Laden bluntly asserts his fundamental premise, which is that because he believes his people were attacked first, they have the right to attack back to "destroy the villages and towns" of those who destroyed their villages and towns. More ominously, he states his belief that they are entitled to destroy the economy of those whom they believe have stolen their wealth, and to kill the civilians living in the countries of those whom they believe have killed their civilians. In addition, he criticizes U.S. military occupation and "seige" of "our sanctities" in the Middle East and pillage of "our treasures", objecting particularly to the stationing of U.S. troops in Islamic holy lands in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. It is this bone of contention that appears to spark the strongest expression of objections to U.S. actions in the Middle East. Bin Laden's letter concludes with a list of demands that include U.S. cessation of its support of Israel and "corrupt" leaders in Middle Eastern countries, as well as cessation of its interference in Middle Eastern politics and education. In what appears to be an overture to ending the conflict through negotiations, he calls on Americans to "deal with us" on the basis of mutual interests and benefits rather than on policies that he asserts are based on theft and occupation. While the rationale behind al Qaeda's resort to violence and suicidal attackers may be open to debate, its drive to mobilize Muslim support around the world appears to be bearing fruit. Post-9/11 surveys show that despite the fact that the Muslim community as a whole objects to al Qaeda's resort to violence, a growing segment of the commmunity is becoming more sympathetic to its struggle. Surveys show that its members are deeply offended by U.S. military actions that kill, injure, detain and abuse Muslims. In fact, disapproval of U.S. actions has led increasing numbers of Muslims to regard the U.S. "war on terrorism" as a direct attack on Islam. This belief appears to have several sources, and bears directly on the religious affiliations and political alliances among the protagonists who are confronting each other in current Middle East conflicts, namely the U.S., Israel, Middle East regimes like Saudi Arabia, and non-state networks like al Qaeda. It also points to the increasing role of religiously-oriented electoral blocs and special interest groups in American politics over the last 30 years, and in the Bush administration's electoral base that brought it to power in 2000. As recent analyses show, with the exception of the original rationale for establishing the state of Israel in the Middle East, it is becoming increasingly apparent that political and economic interests have been the driving forces on all sides. They have expanded their power bases by deliberate and successful efforts to co-opt supporters and allies by appealing to their religious affiliations. According to a recent, well-researched BBC documentary, "The Power of Nightmares", key figures in the U.S. and in the Middle East who were associated with "jihadist" groups devised political strategies many decades ago designed to co-opt large population groups in their countries into religiously-based political movements that would lead to radical change.(6) In the U.S. these efforts were driven by neo-conservatives and financial interests. In Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, they were dirven by insurgent Muslim groups. While the "neocons" succeeded in the U.S., the insurgents failed to take over any regimes in the Middle East. These failures forced them to remain underground, and exacerbated their sense of outrage at their treatment by foreigners and their own regimes. These failures and outrage also prompted them to develop increasingly violent cells, groupings and movements that over time became more directly connected to loosely-organized networks that eventually evolved into the al Qaeda network that perpetrated the attacks of 9/11. By wedding religious convictions and monotheisms to long-term political and economic strategies, these long-standing protagonists have created an intractable conflict in the Middle East whose roots are of such complexity that few understand them, but which has become a conflict of such intensity that it now threatens the survival of mankind. The key reason for this dismal prospect is that the U.S. government is now dominated by a single party that appears poised to remain in power for the foreseeable future. It serves the interests of the Evangelical Christian groups that comprise its core electoral constituency, the wealthy, and the neoconservatives and their allies. These allies include a coterie of special interest groups that profit from U.S. foreign policies and warfare abroad that provide them defense contracts and access to natural resources such as oil. Seen in this light, it is these domestic U.S. political and economic dynamics coupled with their co-optation of religious power blocs and a century of Western interference in the Middle East that have led to the current conflagration in region, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Insurgent Muslim groups have been gathering their forces for decades to demand U.S. withdrawal from Muslim lands and cessation of support for corrupt Middle East regimes and Israel, only to have their demands ignored. The attacks of 9/11 brought them to U.S. shores. The U.S., without giving a moment's notice to their long-standing, publicly-proclaimed grievances, retaliated with the full force of the U.S. military in both Afghanistan and in Iraq, only to find that it could not secure either region even with massive military force and more than 100,0000 casualties by 2005. In the process, U.S. actions and conduct in detaining and abusing Muslim prisoners convinced even moderate Muslims around the world that it is attacking their religion, setting the stage for an interminable global conflict. Concretely, the U.S. provided them ample reason to come to this conclusion. First among them is the presence of U.S. forces in the three Middle Eastern regions considered most holy by Muslims--the Arabian Peninsula, Jerusalem and Iraq. Not only do these forces contain a large contingent of Christians deployed from a nation that is overwhelmingly Christian, but its president, George Bush, a Christian, publicly invoked his Christian faith in explaining his decision to order the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (7) Moreover, many Muslims have become aware of the fact that fundamentalist Christians occupy key positions in the Bush administration, and comprise a core political constituency of the Republican Party, which it has systematically courted for the past 30 years to obtain its electoral votes.(8) (Richard Viguerie and David Franke describe the political strategies, direct marketing techniques and media that Republicans used to win over the "Christian right" in their 2004 book, America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power.) Having made the inference that the U.S. is attacking their religion, post-9/11 surveys show that many Muslims have also adopted the view that suicide attacks against Americans to defend Islam can be justified in certain circumstances. In all likelihood, it is the same respondents who have come to hold favorable views of Osama bin Laden, according to survey results that show he is favorably regarded by respondents in such widely-disparate regions of the world as Pakistan, where 65% view him favorably, Jordan, where 55% have favorable views, and Morocco, where 45% view him favorably.(9) If judged by these views and surveys, U.S. actions in conducting its global "war on terrorism" and sustained military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq with tens of thousands of Muslim casualties, is inciting such severe religiously-based animosity towards the U.S. among Muslims that increasing numbers of them approve of conducting terrorist acts against the U.S. and its allies, including politically-inspired mass murder via suicide-bombings. While U.S. use of military force is proclaimed in many official quarters to have prevented further attacks on the U.S. mainland after 9/11, dissenting views argue that it has actually increased such attacks abroad rather than decreased them, and increased rather than decreased the number of terrorists in Muslim nations. Analysts claim that this increase is of such proportions that al Qaeda's rapid growth around the world can be characterized as a spontaneous "metastasis", similar to the metastasis of cancerous tisses that can spread unchecked throughout a human body. More ominously, according to recent investigations by Jessica Stern, these new terrorist cells appear to be operating autonomously of any "command-and-control" center, linked to the al Qaeda nucleus only by a shared anti-U.S. ideology rather than by a disciplined organizational structure.(10) Exactly how and why terrorist influence is expanding so rapidly has been explained by a senior CIA intelligence expert who was employed by the CIA until late 2004. Michael Scheuer in his book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism (2004), argues that the U.S. is failing to win its "war on terrorism" because of its ignorance of the historical roots of the conflict, and its excessive use of force resulting in the killing of thousands of innocent civilians.(11) Whenever the U.S. or its allies in the Middle East respond with excessive force that injures or kills innocent Muslims, or shames and humiliates Muslims, as was the case at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, these actions help terrorists recruit suicide-bombers among young people who have been eye-witnesses to atrocities committed by Americans against people like themselves. Continual television broadcasts and rebroadcasts of videotypes of these atrocities throughout the Middle East, like the pictures of a female U.S. soldier abusing a male Muslim prisoner at Abu Graib, inflame Muslim hatred for the U.S., and help al Qaeda recruit new supporters and suicide-bombers.
Notes 9. Stalemate The historical record analyzed above indicates that a multi-faceted stalemate has emerged among the protagonists in the U.S.-declared "war on terrorism". Although the original causes of the stalemate are adverse economic and political conditions caused by Western interference in the Middle East and retrograde Middle East regimes they created and support, these causes have become intertwined with religious animosities fomented by political forces on all sides seeking to use them to gain political and economic advantages. Their deliberate political machinations have pitted against each other the followers of all three of the "desert born" religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism which emerged in the region thousands of years ago. The end result is that the al Qaeda terrorist network and its allies and sympathizers have gained support and strength around the world, and now pose a more formidable threat in 2005 than in 2001 when they attacked the U.S homeland. Not only do post-9/11 Muslim survey respondents express the view that suicide attacks are justified against Americans, but they have embraced al Qaeda's view that they are also justified against Israelis, attesting to the opposition that has emerged in the Middle East and in many parts of the world to both the U.S. and its ally, Israel. A 73% majority of opinion leaders surveyed around the world believe the U.S. has shown too much support for Israel, in contrast to just 35% of U.S. leaders who hold this view. 76% of these non-U.S. leaders believe that terrorism would be reduced if the U.S. induced Israel to establish a Palestinian state. Here, in contrast to other points of disagreement, 67% of their counterparts in the U.S. agree with them that terrorism would diminish if the U.S. pressured Israel to establish such a state. However, most Americans surveyed do not advocate any weakening of U.S. support of Israel. Nor does the U.S. administration show any signs of considering other strategies for stopping terrorism than the use of military force, despite growing evidence that these strategies are actually spreading the conflict. U.S. President Bush and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden continue escalating their use of force and high-flown "never-say-die" rhetoric, even in the face of serious and continuing setbacks on both sides, and worldwide condemnations of their actions. The primary victims of their policies are innocent, unarmed and virtually indefensible civilians, most of whom do not share either leaders' professed religiosity. Most civilians prefer greater secularization of public life, as opposed to the increased commingling of religion and politics evident in both leaders' pronouncements. While few 21st century individuals can imagine laying exclusive claims to large tracts of land on behalf of religious groups to which they belong, such claims have moved to the center of the conflicts in which the U.S., Israel, and al Qaeda are embroiled in the Middle East. While the underlying economic and political conditions that triggered the formation of the non-state protagonist, al Qaeda, can be corrected by political and educational reforms, and effective reconstruction programs that build flourishing indigenous economies, the religious overlayers of the conflict have led the protagonists to adopt positions that appear to be so intransigeant as to be irremediable in terms of their willingness to open negotiations for ceasefires or peace accords on their own initiative. The "war on terrorism" serves the interests of the political and economic forces within the U.S. that brought the Bush administration to power, just as it serves the interest of al Qaeda to have just cause to recruit more supporters, sympathizers, operatives and suicide attackers around the world. Even though a majority of people around the world do not support the positions of current U.S. and al Qaeda leaders, the latter benefit from the support of so many millions of followers holding passionate and unequivocal views that even if both leaders were replaced, it is likely that their followers would continue the conflict. Both sides have the resources they need to persevere, but neither appears capable of vanquishing the other. Since both have vowed to destroy the other, neither can withdraw from the conflict. The ability of the al Qaeda network to continue attacking U.S. assets and interests abroad three years after the U.S. declared a "war on terrorism" has emboldened many Muslims and non-Muslims to subscribe to its anti-Western ideology, and join its ranks as sympathizers and supporters. They sympathize with al Qaeda not because they approve of its tactics but because they support its opposition to the U.S., and U.S. economic and foreign policies. Just as al Qaeda, and the jihad that spawned it, arose from economic and political grievances directed towards the U.S. and its allies, al Qaeda is now being joined by Muslims and anti-U.S. groups and individuals around the world who also harbor economic and political grievances against the U.S. They oppose its lop-sided share of the world's wealth, the manner in which its wealth has been acquired through unregulated, globalized free markets, practices, and its stinginess in contributing foreign aid to countries and peoples in need. Despite the religious garb in which al Qaeda and its allies clothe their economic and political grievances, its anti-Western ideology is providing an increasingly diversified tent under which anti-U.S. groups throughout the world are finding common cause. On the American side, while a majority of Americans disapprove of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, and its proven dishonesty in contriving reasons to justify its invasion in the first plan, most Americans embrace the Bush administration's view that the U.S. has no choice but to continue its reliance on using overwhelming force abroad to forestall future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Ignorant of the historical record and of the negotiable demands that al Qaeda has put forward, they also believe that al Qaeda is an enemy that is driven by such incomprehensible and irrational hatred that it cannot be reasoned with, and can only be stopped by military force. These views are unlikely to change unless the American people open a societal dialogue to candidly debate the proven connections among very complex historical events that took place last century in Middle Eastern regions that few Americans know very much about. (See Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, Time to talk to Al Qaeda? Boston Globe, 14 September 2005.).(1) Such an unlikely debate would have to focus on a broad spectrum of economic and political perspectives about the root causes of terrorism that may appear obvious to people living outside the U.S., but fall well outside the purview of most Americans. The reasons such a debate is not on the horizon are numerous. With respect to economic causes, the American public is proud of the free enterprise system and the opportunities it provides. Few Americans are interested in looking beyond the positive contributions of American capitalism to identify negative effects, such as exacerbating the growing gap between rich and poor at home and abroad, and the concentration of wealth in an increasingly smaller percentage of the world's population, most of whom enjoy the protections of the American flag. Per the insights of analysts Kevin Phillips and Gar Alperovitz described above, most Americans are unaware of the enormous transfers of wealth that have taken place inside and outside the U.S. Nor are they aware of the manner in which U.S.-controlled corporations, banks, special interest groups and lobbyists have "rigged" the game via legislation, policies enforced by the U.S. government, and business practices at home and abroad that enable them to end up holding all the wealth. Most importantly, the majority of Americans are unfamiliar with the political history of the Middle East, or U.S. policies, alliances and actions in the region. They see themselves and their country in the positive light of the heroic role the U.S. played in liberating Europe from Nazi Germany, and have little understanding of the complex relationships that gave rise to the anti-Western insurgencies in Middle East countries that sparked the rise of the al Qaeda movement. What preoccupies them are the murderous attacks of 9/11 and the threat of future attacks on the U.S. mainland, growing terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuing violence in the conflict between the PLO and Israel. It is this stalemate that directs attention on alternative solutions and global civil society. While the majority of Americans belonging to the "first camp" of world public opinion, the smaller of the two camps described above, may be wedded to a military solution to terrorism, the people who belong to the far larger "second camp"are likely to take action to implement nonviolent alternatives,if given concrete opportunities to do so. While it may be difficult for some insular Americans to connect the dots among the consequences of U.S. economic and foreign policies in the Middle East and elsewhere, adverse economic and political conditions in the region, and the anti-Western jihadic movement that arose to combat these adverse conditions and the nation-states they held responsible for the conditions, surveys of world public opinion show that people living outside the U.S. grasp these connections rather easily. They are also more readily able to perceive the counterproductive consequences of U.S. use of overwhelming force in Muslim countries. While Americans have come to rely on U.S. military strength and superiority in the past, people living outside the U.S. more easily acknowledge the new dangers that modern biological, chemical and nuclear weapons pose to the survival of mankind, if they are used by either of the two protagonist groups engaged in the "war on terrorism". Taking nonviolent action to redress the adverse economic and political conditions to which the al Qaeda group is objecting seems a far smaller price to pay than running the risk of annihilation now posed by the escalating use of force by both sides in this global conflict. In stark contrast to the stalemate described above, the global civil society movement and its nation-state allies committed to human rights and security are far better positioned to extricate civilians from the crossfire of this conflict than the U.S.-led group and the nation-states that presided over the defining events that led up to the conflict. Above all, the movement's organizational members possess the impartiality, flexibility, grassroots know-how and global reach that are needed to prevent terrorism from spreading any further by building sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies, and democratic communities. By impartially interceding to improve the economic and political conditions that are fueling the growth of terrorist networks and cells, they can prevent them from acquiring new sympathizers, supporters and recruits. As the current situation in Iraq is demonstrating, terrorists have developed strategies, tactics and weaponry that can prevent the translation of U.S. military force deployed in hostile Muslim regions into secure territorial control, or decisive political and economic reforms. While military force can remove rulers and regimes, its use by the U.S. in densely-populated areas causes so many civilian casualties and abuses that anti-U.S. resentment and resistance on the part of the local populace provides fertile ground for terrorists to gain footholds from which they can deny the U.S. the fruits of its military victories. What is needed is the intervention of impartial, nongovernmental, civilian-based conflict mediators, peacekeepers and economic reconstruction specialists, with track records of accomplishments demonstrating their capacity to build sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies in self-governing communities. The chapters that follow outline the steps by which the members of the largest of the two camps of world opinion described above can become part of the global civil society movement and join civil society constituents, activists and their allies to create nonaligned multinational forces that can stop terrorism by eradicating its economic and political roots. of terrorism. By negotiating cease-fires in terrorist conflicts, providing emergency humanitarian assistance, enforcing international laws that protect human rights and security, restoring basic services and building sustainable grassroots economies in war-torn regions, they will be able to stop the spread of insurgencies by rejuvenating indigenous economies and bringing them into the global economy through "globalization from below". By creating locally-owned, community-based and community-supported businesses that generate local jobs and capital, they will be able to offer alternatives to potential terrorist recruits that enable them to earn a living and support their families instead of joining suicide squads. These same strategies will ultimately close the global gap between rich and poor by more equitably distributing wealth, ownership and decision-making opportunities in a manner that empowers previously disenfranchised populations to participate in democratic processes at all levels of society, in both the public and private spheres. How these options can be exercised is the subject of the chapters that follow. Note: (1) Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, Time to talk to Al Qaeda? Boston Globe, 14 September 2005. Building a Third Force 10. The nation-state system in the crossfire: Human security versus national security Although social critics have long warned that the greatest threat to world peace is the gap between rich and poor, most nation-states have traditionally sought to assure their national security by working with domestic economic interests and institutions to create economic systems that would accumulate more wealth and generate more government tax revenues than their neighbors and rival states. Even though inequities in wealth and income have long been known to produce conflict between the "haves' and the "have-nots', both within countries and between countries, this knowledge has typically had little effect on the drive by a minority to accumulate far greater wealth than the majority. When conflicts arose, or aggressive leaders started wars with their neighbors, the nations that were economically and militarily stronger knew they could easily subdue nations that were weaker. Doubts about this conventional wisdom have been raised by the advent of global, non-state terrorist networks like al Qaeda, and their success in using suicide attackers to kill civilians in densely populated areas at will with impunity. Defense experts outside the Bush administration are adamant in their insistence that an invading force like that of the U.S. in Iraq has never been able to defeat a broad-based insurgency, no matter how superior its forces. One of them is the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jessica T. Mathews.(1) In an editorial in the Washington Post, Match Iraq Policy to Reality, Mathews argues that U.S. use of military force in Iraq has not only created its current insurgency, but that history has taught us that there can be no military solution to politically-inspired violence by local insurgents against foreigners. She cites the lessons learned by the French in Algeria and the British in Northern Ireland, as well as the lessons the Russians are now learning in Chechnya, and the Israelis are learning in the West Bank. Undeterred by these warnings, mounting casualties and billions of dollars in expenditures, the U.S. government under the Bush administration perseveres in its unsuccessful efforts to use military force to secure Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor has it been successful in securing its own borders, issuing constant warnings that U.S. citizens must prepare for future attacks that are certain to occur. Given intelligence estimates that there are at least 60,000 al Qaeda operatives and freelance recruits deployed around the world, plus untold numbers of supporters and sympathizers, there appears to be common agreement that there will be future attacks in the U.S. and abroad. The only question is when and where. The primary responsibility of a sovereign state has traditionally been that of protecting citizens by securing its borders and those of states over which it is seeking to establish influence. In light of the fact that the Bush administration has acknowledged its inability to discharge these obligations, it might be expected to pursue other options than the use of military force, such as opening cease-fire negotiations and peace talks with representatives of al Qaeda and insurgent forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. When a nation that has chosen to go to war and invade another country is unable to secure the territory, and finds that it cannot generate enough revenues through taxation to meet the costs of that war - and has to to borrow money from other nations to cover its deficits - it might br expected to quickly cease hostilities. Yet the Bush administration does not appear to have considered these options, to the dismay of the second camp of world opinion, its own citizens who are members of this camp and oppose the war, and of course the unarmed civilians around the world who are caught in the crossfire. This puzzling behavior is worth examining in the larger context of the crisis confronting the nation-state system, and the power shifts that have occurred among the first, second and third forces over the past 50 years. Although the majority of nation-states have recognized that the best way to defend themselves is through collective security, the world's sole remaining "superpower", the U.S., has decided that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 warrant unilateral pre-emptive strikes against any nation that it suspects of hostile intent and the capabilities to carry it out. It will be argued below that this is because the first and second forces in the U.S. have become so intertwined, and the second force, the market economy, has gained such a dominant position in the American political system, that it can now pursue without restraint its global economic agenda. This agenda can be advanced through war as profitably as it can be in peace, even if the interests of civil society, the rule of law, and painstakingly developed doctrines and practices of collectively security are severely compromised in the process. (See Naomi Klein, "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", 2005.(2) While this agenda now faces insignificant opposition either inside or outside the U.S., primarily because of the ability of the second force to use economic power to buy political influence, its assaults against the very foundations of civil society itself are so severe that it is creating a 21st century global backlash against itself. This backlash will ultimately roll back its power and transform civil society into a third force powerful enough to subordinate the second and first forces to its control. For this backlash is prompting civil society constituents, activists, NGOs and their allies to rally together to create a common global front to protect themselves against the second force, a long-term battle that they will ultimately win. Here are the reasons why. In the light of the massive changes that have occurred in the past 50 years, thoughtful observers and analysts have concluded that national borders have become so permeable that they have lost much of their traditional significance. Modern telecommunications and travel have enabled such a free flow of ideas and information, and scientific and technological discoveries, that opportunities to learn and invent new ways of doing things can be created anywhere. People have migrated from their places of birth to all corners of the world, creating cultural diasporas and human networks that span the globe. Businesses operate on a global scale, flooding markets with exotic goods and services. On the downside, diseases and environmental hazards can cross borders at the blink of an eye. So can the ingredients of weapons of mass destruction. Aggrieved groups can smuggle weapons across borders and get them into the hands of those who would use them. What these changes mean in military terms is that conventional military defenses that once focussed on defending or attacking national borders and relied on well-demarcated battlelines, are a thing of the past. "National security" can no longer be attained by fortifying one's geographical frontiers or by attacking enemies behind their frontiers. In the case of non-state terrorist networks like al Qaeda and its growing diaspora of recruits, supporters and sympathizers, the capacity to conduct surprize attacks that claim hundreds and thousands of lives is here to stay. While the U.S. could deem al Qaeda's threats and attacks prior to 9/11 has neglible, its attacks of 9/11 proved that it is a formidable adversary that can inflict unacceptable damage, an adversary that can not be vanquished even by the overwhelming military force of the nation's sole remaining superpower. What these new realities mean is that all conflicts must be resolved nonviolently, and their generic causes - like economic injustices and adverse economic and political conditions, must be eliminated. Since economic, political and social inequities that create inter-group animosities are the primary causes of conflicts, elimination of these inequities must be the first order of business of any sovereign nation that wishes to discharge its obligation to protect its citizens and defend its frontiers. Human security must come before national security. A nation that creates or tolerates human insecurity, of whatever origin, will not be able to protect its citizens and frontiers from attacks by those motivated by human insecurity and the animosity, rage and hatred that grows out of one group's oppression by other groups. The European Union has led the way in showing how this new focus shifts attention from national security to the human security of all peoples - especially those who find themselves in desperate economic straits. (An analysis of this focus on human security is provided by recent work of the European Union in its document A Human Security Doctrine for Europe, formulated under the auspices of the European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana Barcelona,15 September 2004.) (3). To understand why the U.S. government under the Bush administration has not only ignored the need for this refocusing but contributed to the 21st century backlash that is sparking it, it is necessary to review "regime changes" that have been occurring inside the U.S. political and economic system for the past 35 years. While the changes are the result of generic processes that can derail any democracy - processes that can ultimately be overcome by politically-mobilized civil society, in the U.S. they have been taken to an extreme. They have mushroomed the power of the first and second forces while dwarfing the power of civil society. They have enabled conservative economic and political forces not only to obtain the lion's share of wealth and income, but to divide the U.S. voting public into warring camps focussed on artificially contrived, retrograde issues that had been resolved decades ago in both the U.S. and other post-industrialized Western nation-states. The current manifestation of these regime changes in the U.S. can be seen in the divisive issues that are now roiling U.S. politics, in areas like the relationship between church and state, and the role of government in protecting civil society and the well-being of its citizens through programs like social security and Medicaid. While these changes and issues were brought to the fore by many transforming events, one of the major causes was recently pinpointed by the legendary American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who flatly stated that the U.S. government is now being run by U.S. corporations. (4) (One striking example of his thesis is that the U.S. is the only major industrialized country in the Western world that does not have a goverment regulated, universally available, affordable health insurance system, and there are no plans before the U.S. Congress to develop one. This is because corporations who provide private insurance plans to those individuals and businesses that can afford to purchase them oppose the creation of such a system, because it would compete with them. In addition, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in the Western world whose government does not protect all its citizens against financial ruin and bankruptcy as a result of catastrophic illness. Recent changes in U.S. bankruptcy laws entitle American health care providers to force clients bankrupted by medical costs to pay their medical bills for the rest of their lives even after they have legally been determined to be bankrupt. (See David Swanson, "Debt Slavery: What The Bankruptcy Bill Could Do To You, 2005.) (5) Ordinary working people can now be forced into impoverished circumstances for the rest of their lives by enormously profitable, government-backed economic interests in the healthcare industry whose pursuit of gain is undiminished by moral concern for those whose financial health has been destroyed by illness. These mean-spirited laws place the second-force dominated U.S. government in a class by itself, since all other Western industrialized countries protect their citizens from the financial consequences of catastrophic illness. This same mean-spiritedness would be reflected in the policies and practices employed by the second force in its economic and financial relationships with developing countries.) As a result of the second force's pivotal influence in the U.S. federal government under the Bush administration, it also exercises a pivotal influence over the U.S. federal government's foreign policy - and foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This influence is so strong that the administration appears to be undaunted by the fact that these wars are bankrupting the federal treasury, increasing worldwide anti-U.S. animosity and strengthening terrorist forces. While non-U.S. residents around the world are recoiling in horror when confronted with evidence that U.S. forces have laid waste to a whole city in Iraq, Falluja, and videos showing U.S. forces taunting and torturing Muslim prisoners, the U.S. public, its courts and elected representatives are arguing about whether a clinically brain-dead individual should be kept alive artificially, whether the world was created by a deity or evolved according to laws of nature and which individuals should be allowed to marry each other. Chronologically, these relationships were created by a complex, well-orchestrated power shift inside the U.S. that was designed and executed by a small group of neoconservatives. They wedded an electoral base of Evangelical Christians to the Republican Party, which was dominated by wealthy economic and financial interests whose numbers and appeal were far too limited to win elections in the political climate of the 1960's. As this political alignment increased its electoral strength and gained influence over judicial, legislative and executive enactments, they transformed American capitalism from a constructive system to a predatory system, from one that created wealth and developed sustainable lifelihoods and grassroots economies that raised average standards of living to one that compromised them - both inside and outside the U.S. According to recent books and studies, as well as the BBC documentary cited earlier, the neoconservatives set about "reforming" an America torn by race and social class conflict in the 1960's into a country whose citizens would be politically united by a common moral and global purpose - that of believing that America was the sole force for good in the world. (6) This theme would echo ever more loudly until it reached a new crescendo with the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and his crusade against the "axis of evil" which his administration launched early in his first term in office. In the context of the Cold War, America's unique and vital mission would be to defeat one particular source of evil in the world - namely, the evil represented by the Soviet Union, an atheist and communist regime. At the core of the neoconservatives' agenda to mobilize the American people into a potent neoconservative political force was the political use of religion. They would create a common front with the religious right, which had previously stayed out of politics, by building on their grievances (like opposition to abortion rights) and amplifying them through opposition to domestic and foreign "enemies" that included not only atheists and communists but "liberals", "socialists" and "tax-and-spend Democrats". Using the classic tactics of political leaders throughout history who have gained influence and control over others by championing and pitting one group against another, the neoconservatives deliberately started the moral and religious "culture wars" four decades ago that now dominate 21st century American politics. (See Richard Viguerie's and David Franke's book cited earlier, America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power, 2004.) (7) By creating a "Christian Coalition" and using these "hot buttons" issues, the neoconservative economic and financial interests that formed the core of the Republican Party in the 60's would be able to develop an electoral base sufficiently large to enable them to take control of U.S. politics on the basis of divisive religious, social and political issues that ostensibly had nothing to do with the underlying economic and political issues that were their driving concerns. Twenty years later, the neoconservative project would prove so successful that it would play a key role in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and open the doors of the White House to an influx of neoconservatives whose ideologies would bear their full fruit in the election of George W. Bush in 2000. It gave the financial and economic interests that dominated the party the leverage they needed to begin dismantling the "New Deal" social programs, and the laws and regulations that protected the livelihoods and well-being of working Americans. It would enable them to prevent working Americans' real income from rising above 1960's standards, and create profit margins that would concentrate an extraordinary amount of wealth in their own hands. With these levers and capital, as Robert Cox explains, second force interests proceeded to transform capitalism into a predatory form whose sole aim is the accumulation of more wealth as quickly as possible, irrespective of the human or environmental costs. (8) While the original form of capitalism was to promote the development of viable, enduring enterprises that produce needed goods and services, and pay employees "living wages" that provide sustainable livelihoods covering basic needs, the goal of this new predatory form of capitalism is to extract the highest possible return on a capital investment in the shortest period of time. In many respects, this form of capitalism is a new business, unique and distinct from creating viable enterprises, indigenous economies, and sustainable livelihoods. As a result, most enterprises are controlled not by their founders, CEOs or public stockholders, but by their principal investors who occupy a key number of seats on their boards of directors that increases with every new round of financing. They watch vigilantly to protect their investments and move to take control of the enterprise if interest and principal payments on their investments are not made on time. These changes have made it commonplace for investors to force into bankruptcy and strip the assets of slow-growing but viable enterprises that could have become profitable in a 5-10 year time frame, but could not do so in the shorter time frame of 2-3 or 3-5 years that investors arbitrarily required to obtain optimum returns on their investments. In the developing world, these practices have obstructed the growth of indigenous enterprises and worked against the growth of profitable economies owned and controlled by indigenous entrepreneurs and workers. As in the U.S., it is typical for 90% or more of the working population to be employees rather than entrepreneurs or owners of the enterprises in which they work, and for government to be the largest employer in the country after corporations. By the 1980's, the "regime changes" driven by Republican neoconservatives began to enable second force interests and institutions to move in earnest to tighten their grip on foreign economies, just as they had on the U.S. economy - with equally devasting effects on livelihoods and the equitable distribution of income and wealth. Like Civicus Secretary General Kumi Naidoo cited above, Chalmers Johnson points out that the "neo-liberal Washington consensus" led the U.S. government to take aggressive action in instructing the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to collect as much money from defaulting debtor nations as could be squeezed out of them, from any and all sectors, including vital social programs providing education, health care and vocational training. (9) These policies transfer hundreds of millions of dollars out of struggling developing nations annually, obstructing the development of livelihoods and indigenous economies, and creating social unrest and even armed conflicts no less serious in their potential magnitude than those that led to the attacks of 9/11. What is most significant about these power shifts is the pre-eminance that the second force, the market economy, has attained over the first force, the governments of nation-states. As economist Peter Drucker observed several decades ago, the pre-eminent position of nation-state governments in the Western world, and popular control of these governments, began to be eroded in the 1960's as the neoconservative agenda was being implemented. Nation-states began to lose control of their ability to regulate global capital to protect the interests of their citizens as capital began flowing freely around the world via the unfettered marketplaces of the global economy. With this loss of regulatory control over investors, multinational corporations and capital came a shift of investment capital away from slower-growing enterprises to faster-growing enterprises from which investors could extract the highest rate of return in the shortest possible time. These practices, and their consequences, have brought forward a growing chorus of opposition. While the methods that opposition groups use to challenge the status quo are often unjustifiably and intolerably violent, as in the case of the attacks of 9/11, and the means they use do not justify the ends they seek to obtain, the challenges they are addressing against accumlating inequities in the distribution of economic and political power, wealth and opportunity, cannot be dismissed or ignored. More seriously, with respect to the protection of civil society, it does not appear that nation-states are in the position to rectify these consequences and excesses even if a majority of citizens favor such a shift. The underlying "regime changes" that occurred in the U.S. and the way the U.S. political system works, have catapulted the second force into the upper echelons of government decision-making. These changes make it doubtful whether even a majority of citizens could turn the Bush administration or its immediate successors away from the present course in its "war on terrorism", or force changes in the wealth gap and the practices that have led to it over the past 25 years. The state, the first force, no longer has the ability to regulate the financial institutions that control the global marketplace because, as some observers believe, the state appears to be more under the control of financial interests than financial interests are under the control of the state. In the U.S., for example, not only has the neoconservative strategy given the Republican Party the electoral base it needs to win the last two presidential elections, but studies like those conducted by Steven Hill and Sifray and Watzman show that special interest financial groups and institutions have gained a decisive influence over federal legislative, executive and judicial decision-making, by making decisively large campaign contributions to candidates of both parties. (See Steven Hill Fixing Elections (2002), and Sifray & Watzman, Do You Have a Politician in Your Pocket?2004) (10) (11). They and their well-funded lobbyists have used the elected officials they have put "in their pockets" to gain oversight of all aspects of governmental decision-making processes in all three branches of the federal government that affect their interests. The refusal of Congress to raise the minimum wage to a "living wage" and pass universal health care insurance, while it passes legislation that drastically reduces Medicaid funding and subjects citizens to "debt slavery" to medical creditors for their entire lives, provides compelling examples of the manner in which the second force has take over the first force to the detriment of the needs and interests of civil society. More evidence of this role reversal between the first and second forces is provided by statistics showing that the Republican Party receives a far greater share of its overall contributions from financial interests than do the Democrats. Further fuel has been provided by gerrymandering. According to Steven Hill, the two parties have been working together and separately for many decades to re-draw U.S. electoral district lines for the express purpose of transforming electoral districts into single party districts dominated by electoral majorities of either of the two parties. As a result, the U.S. is now divided into two single-party regions, according to Hill, and few of the two parties' candidates and incumbents are ever challenged in the districts they control. The Democrats control most of the electoral districts in the states on the east and west coasts of the country, and the Republicans control most of the disticts in the "heartland" between the coasts. This single party dominance has stifled opposing views, and contributed to the ideological polarization of the country along party lines. When this re-drawing of electoral district boundaries is combined with the U.S. "winner-take-all" electoral system, the result is that only the party in power in a given electoral district can get its candidates nominated and elected. Few insurgent parties or candidates have any chance of getting nominated, or winning contested primaries, or raising enough money to run winning campaigns. As a result, U.S. democracy has increasingly been "hollowed out" and divorced from genuine popular control. Instead, those who have not been incorporated into the Republican Party's religious electoral base are finding themselves trapped in an artificially-contrived, evenly-divided electorate whose members have little choice but to espouse the increasingly uncompromising views of the party that dominates their electoral districts. With special interest money flowing into the pockets of the candidates of the two major parties, voters vote to ratify the candidate choices of the party that is dominant in their electoral district, and the special interests that fund the party and the candidate. Not too surprisingly, the voting patterns of the candidates who are elected in such districts typically reflect the preferences of the parties who nominated them, and the special interests that funded their campaigns. In summary, the "regime changes" that have occurred inside the U.S. political system as a result of the neoconservative "regime change" and the ascendancy of the second force over the first force, have so seriously eroded popular control that many observers believe the U.S. is no longer a democracy but a plutocracy, a government controlled by and for the wealthy. These changes have not only put the U.S. in a crossfire with non-state terrorist networks but the entire nation-state system as well. Pivotal economic and political power shifts inside the U.S. have caused equally pivotal shifts outside the U.S., which have in turn created such adverse economic and political conditions in whole regions of the world like the Middle East that they have contributed directly to the creation of terrorist networks capable of perpetrating attacks like those of 9/11. So powerful are these forces that even though the majority of opinion outside the U.S. believes that U.S. foreign policies are to blame for the attacks of 9/11, and that post-9/11 U.S. doctrines of unilateral pre-emptive strikes are proving counter-productive, the Bush administration appears to be unaffected and undeterred. Despite growing threats to human security inside and outside the U.S., the administration continues to adhere to the neoconservative global strategy that it unfurled when it first took office. Despite U.S. failure to secure either Afghanistan or Iraq, and mounting civilian casualties, the financial and economic interests in the Bush administration appear to have vested interests in continuing U.S. military actions in its "war on terrorism" despite their costs. They are working to transform the peacetime economy the U.S. had prior to 9/11 into a wartime economy, so that they can continue their military operations abroad for the foreseeable future. Proof of the presence of these interests can be found in the administration's close ties to private contractors who have received no-bid contracts to carry out core military operations at home and abroad. The work of U.S. vice president Cheney's former firm, Halliburton, is a case in point, a firm that has continued to maintain Cheney on its payroll to receive "deferred compensation" at the same time that he is on the payroll of the U.S. government to receive compensation for his services as vice president. As will be seen below, U.S. policies in Iraq have been designed to privatize Iraq's state-owned businesses by selling off 100% ownership in them to the top foreign bidders, in clear violation of international laws governing the conduct of foreign powers who invade and occupy sovereign countries. The U.S. has paid millions of dollars to politicians of Iraqi origin, like Ahmed Chalabi who now heads Iraq's oil ministry, to work with U.S. forces in establishing a post-invasion Iraqi government that agrees to sell off Iraqi businesses to foreigners and open up Iraqi oil reserves to exploitation by foreign companies. These revelations are coming to light at the same time that recent investigative research is demonstrating that the Bush administration had already decided to invade Iraq well before the attacks of September, 2001. Its 2003 claims alleging Iraq had close ties to terrorist organizations and possessed weapons of mass destruction, which were later proved to be false, were knowingly contrived to obtain Congressional approval for the attack. To implement the Bush administration's neoconservative strategy for transforming the Middle East economically and politically, massive amounts of resources and taxpayer dollars in the U.S. are now being shifted from the civilian sector to the war effort. These shifts are likely to result in a substantial deterioration of living standards in the U.S. and abroad, and exacerbate the adverse economic and political conditions in regions prone to violence that originally sparked the terrorist attacks of 9/11. To the extent that a majority of the American people continue to elect officials who support the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policies, the conditions that sparked terrorism abroad are likely to worsen and spread. The Bush administration's conception of "national security" is likely to prevail over that of countries who see the protection of "human security" as the best strategy for protecting national security, and simultaneously eradicating the adverse economic and political conditions that spawn terrorism. In the light of these foreign policy goals and precedents, the Bush administration's intransigeance in defending U.S. "national security" while jeopardizing the "human security" of civil society constituents everywhere will fuel the global backlash that is now emerging against U.S. It will crystalize growing worldwide opposition to U.S. use of its overwhelming economic and military power to win conflicts in the Middle East, whose seeds the U.S. has been sowing for nearly a century since it intervened in the region on the side of Western powers seeking to carve out and protect spheres of influence, and obtain favorable trading advantages for natural resources like oil at the expense of indigenous populations. That global backlash will prompt increasing numbers of civil society constituents, activists, NGOs and their allies to realize that they must create a third force in world affairs that can challenge the power of the world's sole remaining superpower, and the first and second forces that now threaten human security throughout the world.
Notes
11. The legal and political building blocks of the third force, and the "boomerang" strategy It does not appear that ordinary citizens can quickly undo the damage that has already been done by the neoconservative ascendancy in U.S. politics, and the control by U.S. economic and financial interests of U.S. foreign policy and the Bush administration's "war on terrorism". However, a powerful "third force" option that has yet to be leveraged has been created by the steadily growing "second camp" of world public opinion opposed to the use of force to fight terrorism, which now includes a growing number of nonaligned nation-state governments that are openly opposing U.S. moves abroad. If these opponents of U.S. actions join forces with the politically-influential transnational civil society advocacy organizations and networks that have arisen to defend civil society over the past 40 years, the means are at hand to createa a common front, a third force that can stop terrorism nonviolently and eradicate its economic and political roots. As this white paper argues below, the global civil society movement has matured to the point where its constituent organizations can now take the initiative to replace U.S. forces in Iraq with nonaligned multinational forces, in concert with nonaligned nation-states committed to protecting human security and human rights. By creating multinational forces with nation-state allies, nongovernmental civil society organizations can play a key role in brokering and enforcing ceasefires and peace accords in Iraq and anywhere else in the world. Through such forces, they can provide humanitarian relief and long-term policing, and help build sustainable livelihoods, grassroots economies and democratic governance processes. (For a review of the status of the movement in early 2004, see the synopsis by London School of Economics' Marlies Glasius in her article "Can global civil society build a 'global justice movement'?", 2004.) (1) The members of this self-organizing global civil society movement, which does not have or need a governing structure, have played an increasingly pivotal role in protecting human rights and security since the end of the Cold War. Their number now includes more than 50,000 NGOs that work transnationally and millions of NGOs that work domestically in every country in the world. They are so numberous that they employ an estimated 7% of the labor force. Conservative figures indicate that the combined operating budgets of transnational NGOs alone exceed $12 billion per year. The Third Force Network is dedicated to quadrupling this amount by 2020. By putting the capabilities of state-of-the-art Internet tools to work on behalf of the movement's supporters and civil society constituents, activists and allies among the Internet's 750,000,000 users, the Network will accelerate its transformation into a third force that is powerful enough to contest the hegemony of the first and second forces that now dominate civil society in the U.S. and much of the world. Global civil society organizations have developed their capacity to intervene in 21st century terrorist conflicts because of the successes of the strategies they have honed over the past four decades intervening in 20th century conflicts affecting civil society constituents. The results of these successes are two-fold. First, they have established an internationally-recognized and increasingly enforceable legal framework of human rights and humanitarian laws. (See the compendium of International Human Rights and Human Security Laws below, which has been adapted from the website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2) Although there are still many gaps that need to be filled, the framework is increasingly comprehensive and robust, as demonstrated by the arrest and trial of war criminals by the International Criminal Court and nations like Span and Chile that are committed to human rights and global justice. Second, they have heigthened the global influence of transnational NGOs and civil society advocacy networks, and reduced even further the steadily diminishing importance of national boundaries and authorities. (See the pioneering analyses by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink in Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998; and Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War , 2003.) (3). They have won major battles affecting the right to intervene in emergencies to protect human life, human rights, nuclear nonproliferation, third world debt, sustainable development, environmental degradation and hazards, corporate corruption, unfair business practices and trading policies, and consumer fraud. Through these victories, civil society activists and NGOs have shown that they can force national authorities and economic interests who oppose civil society initiatives to yield to pressure from outside their frontiers. In the process, they have perfected, intensified and expanded the reach of global pressure group tactics and bargaining processes by which a civil society organization anywhere can join up with other NGOs to induce local, national and international institutions to adopt and enforce policies and practices that protect human economic, political and social security. As these tactics and processes have attained important emancipatory laws, and the power to enforce them, they have in turn expanded the legitimacy and scope of civil society organizations' interventions at ground level aimed at protecting civilians and combatants from physical harm by sovereign nations and non-state aggressors - even in the more formidable 21st century terrorist conflicts. These promising developments have been chronicle by Keck and Sinkkink, as well as Mary Kaldor, who have also recognized some of the notable failures and obstacles that surround them. Although Kaldor warns that global civil society may be overwhelmed by the destructiveness and human rights encroachments of new types of warfare undertaken by extremist transnational networks like al Qaeda, and nation-states like the U.S. after 9/11, she believes that civil society can offer a nonviolent answer to such warfare if civil society organizations vigorously apply to these conflicts the successful strategies and tactics they have used to advantage in the past. Her five-point plan for doing so is discussed in the next chapter. The "boomerang" strategy. A key component of transnational civil society's strategic arsenal is the deliberate creation of what Keck and Sinkkink have referred to as "boomerang" effects by NGOs facing resistance in one country, such as blockage of their demands by government authorities who are violating human rights. The NGOs temporarily bypass the recalcitrant authorities and search out allies internationally who can bring pressure to bear on these authorities. These allies can include powerful officials in other countries, key influentials, political groupings like labor unions, peace activists or political parties; power blocs; other civil society activists and NGOs outside the country; transnational advocacy networks; and intergovernmental organizations. Once this pressure on recalcitrant authorities from outside the country becomes strong enough to induce them to accept the NGOs original demands, it can be said that their original opposition has boomeranged back on them. These victories and strategies have transformed transnational NGO-based advocacy networks into pivotal political forces on the global stage. They can use them to leapfrog horizontally from one nation to another across national boundaries, and move up and down vertically within a single country from one governmental level to another, until they have built overwhelming support for their cause. It is this horizontal and vertical flexibility, dexterity and fluidity that has brought key players in the global civil society movement success after success in solving problems that nation-states have failed to solve, neglected or created in the first place. It is these successes which have prompted the rise of global civil society to be recognized as the most important power shift of the past 50 years. An impressive example of the effectiveness of the boomerang strategy is provided by Amnesty International, and its twenty year crusade against torture that began in the late 60s and culminated in the UN General Assembly's passage of the Anti-Torture Convention in the mid-80s. Soon after Amnesty International accused the Greek colonels' regime of torture and human rights violations in 1967, it brought its case to the European Human Rights Convention, and launched parallel global and national campaigns. (See "The Power of Norms versus the Norms of Power: Transnational Civil Society and Human Rights", a case study authored by Thomas Risse in the The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society, 2000.) (4) This victory was achieved through a multi-faceted transnational campaign after many years of perseverance. Amnesty started a global petitioning drive in 1972 through its national affiliates around the world, in cooperation with other transnational NGOs. The petitions mobilized public opinion in each country to put pressure on their governments to support the antitorture convention. Although the governments of Australia, France and the Netherlands initially opposed the conventions as interfering with their sovereignty, the Dutch government was eventually induced to change its position by key individuals and officials in other countries. The other two countries followed suit. The UN General Assembly then passed the Anti-Torture Convention, which went into effect in 1987. Today, Amnesty International is one of the largest membership-based transnational NGOs with an annual budget of nearly $30 million. It is one of the most visible and outspoken critics of the human casualties and abuse that are occurring in Iraq. Another European NGO, the Switzerland-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), also played a major role in expanding the scope of civil society interventions in armed conflicts. In the late 60s, the organization took action to obtain more points of entry through which NGOs can provide emergency assistance to civilian populations and combatants caught up in violent conflicts. In 1969, the severity of the genocidal conflict in Nigeria prompted the ICRC to organize an airlift to Biafra without the consent of the Nigerian authorities. This action, and subsequent conflicts elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, contributed to growing appreciation of the necessity for NGOs to intervene and work without permission from national authorities in war zones where human lives are at risk. The ICRC's pioneering work and related developments paved the way for broadening the scope and legal frameworks of humanitarian interventions. By gaining recognition of the legitimacy and need for establishing 'safe havens' and 'humanitarian corridors' to protect those providing and receiving relief, the ICRC's work expanded internationally-agreed upon rules and procedures by which civil society organizations can intervene in a broader range of conflicts. After 9/11 and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, ICRC prison visits and reports played a dramatic role in calling worldwide attention to the human rights abuses committed by U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison. Although these reports are usually provided only to the national governments involved on a confidential basis, ICRC officials were so upset by what they saw that their reports were made public. Their courageous actions sparked worldwide condemnation of these practices, and provided the American people with information that had previously been withheld from them. These actions and events have spurred investigations in the U.S. that are ongoing and have yet to bear fruit. While the abuses reportedly committed by U.S. forces engaged in the Bush administration's "war on terrorism" are a far cry from the atrocities reportedly committed by the al Qaeda terrorist network, such as beheadings, mutilations and suicide attacks on unarmed civilians, both are egregious transgressions against the moral and legal foundations of civil society that demand aggressive condemnation and intervention by global civil society. Kaldor provides another example of a significant contribution to the legal building blocks of the third force provided by the actions of a French national, Bernard Kouchner, who worked for the ICRC in Nigeria during the Biafran conflict. After the conflict, he proceeded to found the transnational organization, Doctors without Borders. His actions would set in motion the consensus-building processes that would later formalize the principle that the international community has a responsibility to intervene to protect human life in emergency situations in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 43/131 Resolution 43/131. (5) While reaffirming the sovereignty of states, the resolution stressed the important role that nongovernmental and intergovernmental humanitarian organizations must play when life and human dignity are threatened, even if delivering emergency assistance requires the sovereign authority of nation-states to be temporarily over-ridden. The importance of the legal and political building blocks outlined above, and the effectiveness of the boomerang strategy as exemplified by the successes of Amnesty International and the ICRC, is that they attest to the leverage global civil society has obtained over nation-state authorities and actors who violate human rights and jeopardize human security.They also exemplify the growing arsenal of levers they can use to stop conflicts of any magnitude, including the post-9/11 conflicts that are taking the lives of so many civilians and combatants around the world. Not only do they know how to galvanize public support and exert pressure on nation-state authorities wherever it is needed, but they also know how to use a solid body of international law to take direct action on the ground anywhere their help is needed to protect human rights and human security. While they have had their share of failures in developing this arsenal, by aligning themselves with nation-states that are committed to human rights to create multinational forces, they can act without obtaining the permission of any of the perpetrators of the violence, or any of the states on whose territory they conduct operations. Not only have they demonstrated that they can take on sovereign state authorities belonging to the first force, but they have also shown that they can take on second force economic interests and actors who jeopardize the safety and well-being of civil society constituents. Keck and Sinkkink cite the internationally-orchestrated boycott of the Switzerland-based Nestle Company by a transnational network of NGOs that objected to the company's efforts to market powdered baby milk to women as a substitute for breast milk in regions that had no potable drinking water to mix with the powder. Since Nestle is a transnational business, NGOs organized a successful transnational campaign. Global civil society's clout will expand dramatically as it increases its use of pressure tactics like boycotts that target economic interests that work to the detriment of civil society's well-being. Although these second force interests now enjoy the protection of first force governmental authorities, they both suffer from the same achilles heel: the eternal specter of taxpayer and consumer revolt. What brought down South Africa's oppressive apartheid regime was not internal political pressure but external political pressure from civil society groups outside the country. The regime succumbed to U.S. based civil rights groups that pressured U.S. banks, via their stockholders and depositors, to threaten to withdraw their investments from South African companies if the apartheid regime did not end. A major opportunity awaits global civil society that can easily be harvested by the organization of transnational boycotts against companies who harm civil society by not paying their employees adequate "living wages", use harmful substances in their products and services, or damage the environment. U.S.-based Wal-Mart is drawing increasing fire from local governments and citizens who do not want Wal-Mart opening stores in their communities because they object both to the low wages it pays its employees, and to the manner in which it uses these low wages to lower the prices of its goods and services in order to destroy competing companies who do pay reasonable wages. (6) The first and second forces can join forces in myriad ways that compromise the well-being of civil society constituents, but what they cannot do is remove their vulnerability to revolts by these constituents as taxpayers and consumers who oppose unfair business practices. While first force groups like the U.S. neoconservatives who transformed the U.S. democracy into a one-party government have figured out how to hollow out democratic processes through social and political engineering, neither first nor second force interests can maintain their preeminent political and economic positions once civil society starts to wield all the tools in its arsenal, from boycotts to massive demonstrations and ultimately to all the legal forms of nonviolent resistance that ejected the British from India. All that civil society needs to do, in order to fully flex its political and economic muscles, is to ensure that its organizational vanguard - its nongovernmental organizations - have adequate resources, staffing, protection and funding from independent sources. These include civil society constituents, activists and their allies with whom the Third Force Network will be working to mobilize the financial resources that will be needed for transnational NGOs to act autonomously in stopping conflicts and eradicating the roots of terrorism. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind the fact that the number of these potential contributors, and the amount of their potential contributions, is more than adequate to galvanize public opinion and provide the financial support NGO operations require to protect human security. Since the operations they conduct on the ground will be aimed at negotiating and enforcing ceasefires, and building sustainable livelihoods, economies and democratic processes, civil society organizations will always be able to build grassroots support from the people they are there to assist, no matter how formidable the perpetrators of the violence may appear to be.
Notes 12. Beyond "network warfare" and "spectacle warfare": Working around the sole remaining superpower, a paralyzed United Nations and predatory capitalism In addition to her analysis of the strategic advantages of the boomerang process conceptualized by Keck and Sinkkink, Mary Kaldor offers a five-point agenda of concrete steps that she believes will enable global civil society organizations to address the challenges to civil society that grow out of the attacks of 9/11 and the U.S. response to these attacks with its declaration of a "war on terrorism". (1) She views the terrorist attacks and the U.S. response to them as prime examples of the generic types of warfare that have emerged since the end of the Cold War, all of which threaten to overwhelm civil society. The first of these generic types is network warfare, which includes transnational terrorist organizations. The second type is spectacle warfare, such as that being conducted by the U.S. in its "war on terrorism". The third is neo-modern warfare, which involves limited inter-state warfare or counter-insurgency conflicts such as those occurring in Kashmir and Chechnya. A key thesis of this white paper is that only civil society can stop these types of warfare. Kaldor's five steps focus attention on pivotal strategies and tactics they can leverage to do so.
Common characteristics shared by all three types of warfare are that they tend to cause large-scale civilian casualties, weaken moderates and strengthen extremists on all sides. They also have a tendency to produce not merely stalemates but perpetual war, since the weaponry and tactics they use do not permit any of them to vanquish their adversaries. The reasons they dramatically increase civilian casualties are two-fold. The first is that in contrast to prior types of warfare, transnational extremists conducting network warfare deliberately target civilians as their modus operandi, as al Qaeda did when it attacked the U.S. mainland on 9/11. The second is that nation-states like the U.S., whose citizens have been attacked, retaliate by using spectacle warfare that employs high-tech, air-born weaponry to ferret out extremists and insurgents in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. This type of warfare, despite its precision, kills large numbers of civilians. The perverse boomerang effect. These new types of warfare also have a more far-reaching negative impact on human rights, humanitarian laws and the influence of civil society organizations, which Kaldor refers to as a "perverse boomerang effect". The conflict between the al Qaeda network and the U.S., and their use of network and spectacle warfare, not only strengthens extremism and causes large-scale civilian casualties, but blurs the distinction between what transpires "inside" and "outside" the protagonists' territorial boundaries. Ultimately, military action abroad by the U.S. to root out network terrorists perversely boomerangs back to the U.S. mainland. When the U.S. retaliates against terrorists abroad and causes civilian casualties in ways that violate international law and sparks public disapproval, it actually increases popular sympathy and support for terrorists. This increased support enables them to expand their resources, recruit new operatives, and move into new terrority to commit further terrorist acts - quite possibly inside the U.S. Moreover, when U.S. military forces commit acts abroad that violate human rights and decrease human security, these acts also perversely boomerang back to the U.S. in other ways, such as by violating Americans' human rights and subjecting Americans to acts of aggression by their own government. The Bush administration has claimed that in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland, it must pass and enforce laws like the Patriot Act and formulate regulations and policies that violate internationally established human rights. It imprisons American citizens its suspects of terrorist involvement and holds them incommunicado without charge or trial for years. It also refuses to turn over information that defendants could use to exculpate themselves. More seriously, it takes custody of suspect individuals inside and outside U.S. territory without due process of law and turns them over without trial to foreign governments that torture them. In addition, U.S. government officials spy on Americans without following traditional procedures for obtaining authorization, and retaliate against "whistleblowers" in the federal government by dismissing them and trying their charges in secret. In light of these threats to civil society, Kaldor outlines five generic steps that civil society can take to address the challenges posed by network warfare and spectacle warfare, which are particularly salient after the attacks of 9/11 and the U.S. declaration of its "war on terrorism". Taken as a whole they provide a cogent and practical rationale for the creation of nonaligned multinational forces, a core focus of the Third Force Network. They equip global civil society constituents, activists, organizations and their allies with a blueprint for developing multilateral forces with enough clout to stop the network warfare and spectacle warfare in which the al Qaeda network and the Bush administration are now engaged.
An emerging global consensus about what must be done. In contrast to an increasingly anachronistic, top-down, nation-state approach based on a U.S.-controlled formula, Kaldor's five step model shows that global civil society organizations have acquired a far more effective legal, organizational and political arsenal that they can use in concert with their allies to act more effectively at the grassroots where terrorist conflicts originate and unfold. In fact, the more the conflict between al Qaeda and the Bush administration escalates and spreads around the world, the more evident it becomes that only civil society can stop it. Kaldor's views and analysis of the role that the rule of law and nonviolent strategies can and should play in stopping terrorism are supported by those of key world leaders like United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Brazil's President Lula da Silva, who spoke at the opening of the General Assembly's 59th Session in New York in September, 2004. What their speeches indicate is that neither the nation-state system nor the United Nations are as capable as the global civil society movement of stopping the conflict between al Qaeda and the Bush administration, containing the U.S., or tackling the adverse economic and political conditions that spawned terrorism. What they also show is that the international community is now addressing the real challenges to equitable economic development and the spread of democracy that are presented by the pre-eminent position in the world's sole remaining superpower now occupied by the economic and political interests belonging to the first and second forces. What these leaders succeed in doing is to give voice to growing worldwide opinion condemning U.S. policies and actions, and encourage and legitimize moves to isolate and contain the U.S. (See Opening Statement to the UN General Assembly 59th Session and Address to the United Nations General Assembly 59th Session".) (6) (7) The Secretary General extended remarks he had made several days earlier in a BBC interview in which he called the U.S. invasion of Iraq illegal, and a violation of the UN Charter and the Security Council. He asserted that the rule of law is at risk around the world because of the actions of UN members who disregard the framework of law that the UN has developed. In places like Iraq, he said, civilians, relief workers, journalists and non-combatants are put to death in barbarous fashion, and Iraqi prisoners held by U.S. forces are disgracefully abused. In Israel, civilians are deliberately targeted by Palestinian suicide bombers, and in Palestine needless civilian deaths result from Israel's "excessive use of force". He made a pointed reference to U.S. invasion of Iraq without authorization from the Security Council, on the pretext that Iraq had violated Security Council resolutions on weapons inspections. In this regard, he cited the principles that have guided and legitimized the work of the global civil society movement's efforts to use international human rights laws, and humanitarian laws, as wedges to outmaneuver nation-states that purport to respect human rights at home, but violate them abroad when they attack other nations:
Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it; and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it. To do so, we must start from the principle that no one is above the law, and no one should be denied its protection. Every nation that proclaims the rule of law at home must respect it abroad; and every nation that insists on it abroad must enforce it at home. He noted that although the impressive framework of norms and laws the UN has created is one of its proudest achievements, which can and must be used to protect innocent civilians from genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, these laws are being flouted by its own member nations. These laws are more than adequate to provide the necessary legal framework for enforcing these protections, since they extend from trade to terrorism, and the law of the sea to weapons of mass destruction, Yet those who most vigorously invoke the rule of law, in arenas like the Commission on Human Rights, do not always "practise what they preach". In this regard, he acknowledged that the UN's enforcement capacity can be compromised by what many perceive is the unfair manner in which the Security Council functions (its unanimity rules enable any one of the Council's five permanent members, who were given permanent membership at the end of World War II, to prevent the UN from acting, by vetoing any Council proposals with which they disagree). All too often, the Secretary noted, the vulnerable lack legal recourse, while the powerful manipulate laws to keep and accumulate wealth. He deplored the encroachment on civil liberties as a result of the "necessary fight" against terrorism. In reference to weapons of mass destruction and the threat of nuclear proliferation, which many regard as a greater danger than terrorism, the Secretary General, in yet another oblique criticism of the U.S., asserted that the best way to defend against proliferation is to strengthen and implement disarmament treaties, including their verification provisions. In closing, Annan again stressed that it is international law and Security Council resolutions that offer the best foundation for "resolving prolonged conflicts -- in the Middle East, in Iraq, and around the world". Accordingly, he affirmed his intention to spend the remainder of his tenure working to strengthen the rule of law and "transitional" justice in conflict and post-conflict societies. He also promised to develop measures to improve the security of United Nations staff who voluntarily put themselves in harm's way to assist others. Despite his spirited defense of the UN's progress in formulating a broad legal framework of human rights and humanitarian laws, however, and a courageous reiteration of the UN's willingness to send its own staff to enforce these rights in dangerous conflicts like that in Iraq (which cost the life of the Secretary General's deputy, Sergio de Melho), the Annan nonetheless had to acknowledge the UN's inability to compel its own member states to comply with these laws, as well as the UN's current inability to protect the lives of its own humanitarian workers. In contrast to Annan's focus on deteriorating political conditions and weakening of the rule of law, Brazilian President Lula da Silva focused on economic conditions. In his address to the General Assembly, da Silva made equally pointed remarks to dramatize the economic precariousness of more than half of the UN's member nations. He stressed the fact that 125 of the UN's 191 members had suffered from colonization by foreign countries that originally occupied less than 2% of the globe. Even after these colonized countries attained their political independence from their colonizers, da Silva asserted that they have become perpetual debtors in the international economic system, in which the rich have grown richer, and the poor poorer. Whereas the per capita income of the richest nation in the world was 5 times greater than the poorest in 1820, today it is 80 times greater. De Silva criticized this international economic system as running like an "invisible cogwheel" that shrivels the sovereignty of states, and imposes its own economic and financial policies and programs over those of elected governments. In the last ten years alone, he claimed, this system has presided over a steadily increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, at the same time that per capital income has been lowered in 54 countries, life expectancy has decreased in 34 countries, and the starvation rate of children has increased in 14. More children have been killed by inadequate sanitation, he claimed, than the number of soldiers who have been killed since the end of World War II. He warned against conceiving the necessary fight against terrorism strictly in military terms. To eliminate violence, its deep-rooted origins must be addressed with the same resolve that is now being employed against the agents of violence and hatred. This will require a new "political and economic international order" that extends real opportunities for economic and social development to all countries. It will also require reform of the global development model, and the establishment of international institutions that are democratic, based on multilateralism and acknowledge the rights and aspirations of all peoples. He singled out for even more pointed criticism the global financial institutions that are supposed to be helping developing countries. In particular, he advocated a major shift in financial flows from multilateral international organizations like the International Monetary Fund, with a decrease in the "excessive rigor" that sometimes becomes part of the problem that the Fund is trying to solve. In contrast to these relationships, he drew attention to a number of initiatives that countries like his own have undertaken to improve their prospects for development, such as that of India, South Africa and Brazil in starting the IBSA Fund for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation, whose first project will be implemented in Guinea Bissau. He also alluded to the steps that developing countries have taken at the World Trade Organization's last meeting to eliminate abusive restrictions that hamper rather than help developing countries. In closing, like the UN's Secretary General, the Brazilian president raised questions about the representativeness of the UN Security Council. He noted that the composition of the Security Council, whose members enjoy a "pre-eminent position" in terms of legitimate action in the area of international peace and security, is in need of reform to increase the number of permanent members. Speaking after the Secretary General and the Brazilian president, U.S. President George W. Bush defended U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and reiterated U.S. determination to use force to destroy terror networks around the world, seize terrorist assets, and track down and disrupt their plans. He also emphasized U.S. determination to end state sponsorship of terror. (Statement to the UN General Assembly 59th Session.) (8) He annnounced that since the last meeting of the General Assembly, the Iraqi people have "regained sovereignty" and a new prime minister has been appointed to head its Interim Government. He asked UN member nations to respond to the prime minister's requests for help to build an Iraq that is "secure, democratic, federal, and free". He emphasized that Iraq has "ruthless" terrorist enemies, of which al Qaeda is one of the main groups, who are killing innocent civilians in Iraq. (He did not provide any statistics relating to the number of civilians killed in Iraq, whether by al Qaeda, insurgents or the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. officials claim they do not maintain such figures.) Bush affirmed that U.S. coalition forces are confronting Iraq's "terrorist enemies" and foreign fighters on Iraqi soil so that they will not have to face them inside their own borders. He praised the growing Iraqi security force, to which the NATO Alliance is providing vital training. He said that the Iraqi Interim Government was moving towards national elections, and UN officials were helping build an infrastructure of democracy in the country. The U.S. president reiterated U.S. determination to stand with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to provide a model for a "broader Middle East". Interestingly, he acknowledged that basic human rights have been denied for too long in the region, although he gave no indication that he views these violations as having any connection to factors that spawn terrorism. Admitting that the U.S. bore some responsibility for adverse political conditions in the Middle East, he acknowledged that many nations, including the U.S., had "tolerated, even excused oppression in the Middle East", hoping for stability that never arrived. He did not address the possibility of U.S. involvement in the political and economic relationships in the Middle East that al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden has publicly deplored, namely what he considered the unfair exploitation by the U.S. of Middle Eastern oil, the stationing of U.S. troops in Muslim holy lands, especially Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and U.S. support of Israel. Bush gave no indication of being aware of these three reasons that Osama bin Laden has cited repeatedly in his public statements explaining why al Qaeda is trying to expulse the U.S. from the Middle East, why it attacked the U.S. on its own soil 9/11, and why it continues to threaten further attacks on the U.S. mainland. With respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Bush focused most of his remarks on criticism of Palestinian rulers, especially those who "maintain ties to terrorist groups". He urged Arab states to "end incitement in their own media", cease public and private funding for terrorism, and establish normal relations with Israel. With respect to Israel, he urged the country to freeze settlements, dismantle outposts that are unauthorized, stop "daily humiliation" of the Palestinian people, and avoid any actions that prejudice final negotiations. Last but not least, he urged world leaders to withdraw all support from any Palestinian leader who "fails his people and betrays their cause". Bush does chart new ground in addressing the topic of the new demands placed upon peacekeeping in the 21st century. He stated that "permanent capabilities to respond to future crises" must be created to provide more effective means to "stabilize regions in turmoil", and "halt religious violence and ethnic cleansing". To that end, he announced that the United States and Italy have proposed a Global Peace Operations Initiative, which would involve G-8 countries in training 75,000 peacekeepers, and providing help with deployment and logistical needs. In light of Mary Kaldor's finding that countries that rely on "spectacle warfare" also prefer to work through "proxy" forces on the ground, it may well be that this initiative is designed more to support U.S. foreign policy goals than to strengthen international peace-keeping. Interestingly, this U.S. "peace-keeping initiative is being implemented not by the United Nations but by G-8 nation-states. Also significant were Bush's statements relating to aid to developing nations that "expand economic freedom" and invest in the education and health of their own people. Addressing concerns raised by Brazilian President da Silva, the U.S. president announced that the U.S. is joining with other nations to "lift the crushing burden of debt" that inhibits the growth of developing economies, and keeps millions of people in poverty. He noted that poor countries with the heaviest debts have been granted 30 billion dollars of debt relief since 1996. Bush also noted that the U.S. and other nations have agreed that international financial institutions should increase the amount of new aid that is in the form of grants rather than loans. Not only did world leaders like Secretary General Annan and Brazilian President da Silva take exception to Bush's optimistic views of the current success and future prospects of U.S. policies in the Middle East, but so did U.S. critics like the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a centrist defense policy research institution based in Washington, D.C. Two days after Bush's UN speech, Jessica T. Mathews expressed views that appear to be diametrically to those of the U.S. president. (See" Match Iraq Policy to Reality"). (9) In contrast to the explanation Bush has always presented to the American public of the causes of the attacks of 9/11, namely that it was a small radical group of people who hate American freedoms, Matthews' analysis of what has gone wrong with U.S. policy in Iraq opens the door to a host of more plausible explanations. These focus on economic and political motivations behind U.S. actions in the Middle East that differ quite dramatically from those espoused by Bush. Her analysis also provides compelling reasons why neither the U.S. nor the UN may be able to play as decisive a role as the global civil society movement in resolving the conflict between the U.S. and al Qaeda. In an editorial published in the Washington Post, Matthews asserts that U.S. use of military force in Iraq has created a "full-blown insurgency" that the U.S. cannot use its full power (presumably high-tech weaponry and airpower) to put down because to do so would cause so many Iraqi casualties that it would defeat "our purpose". (Note that this statement was made before U.S. forces laid seige to Fallulja.) Nor can the U.S. secure the country through an overwhelming presence on the ground because it does not have enough additional troops to send to accomplish such a task. As for Iraqi security forces, they are in no position to assume this task, and will not be able to do so for "a long time". Given these military obstacles, Mathews believes the U.S. must make a radical change of course politically to remove the primary causes of the insurgency that is defeating U.S. efforts in Iraq. This radical change will be credible only if it is announced by the U.S. president in a formal public statement. The statement must disavow the intentions that Iraqis attribute to the U.S., and the actions the U.S. has taken, which lead Iraqis to believe that the U.S. started the war to "get its hands on Iraq's oil" and bolster Israel's security by establishing a "puppet government and a permanent military presence" through which it could control Iraq and the rest of the region. Playing the role of devil's advocate, Matthews puts herself in the shoes of Iraqis when she voices the following complaints:
To dispel these perceptions, Matthews recommends that U.S. President Bush state unequivocally that the United States will not maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq. Construction of the permanent military bases should be halted, and a "transparent mechanism" should be created to guarantee that no Iraqi oil revenue will "touch American fingers". A definitive explanation should immediately be provided as to what happened to oil revenue over the past year. Continuing on the economic front, Matthews focuses on economic interests influencing U.S. policies in Iraq. She urges the U.S. to attack the Iraqi unemployment rate of 60 percent by reversing its reliance on outside contractors and its "usual practice" of using U.S. foreign aid to produce economic benefits "at home" in the U.S. All U.S. deals with non-Iraqi contractors that can be rescinded should be rescinded, and the jobs and salaries that become available should be offered to Iraqis. Significantly, Iraq's debt should be "forgiven" by its nation-state creditors in Europe and Russia. Matthews' critique of U.S. policies and actions in Iraq after the invasion is supported by first hand, onsite observations by investigative reporters like Naomi Klein of the manner in which they aggravated many of the adverse economic and political conditions that already prevailed in the country. (See Naomi Klein, "Baghdad Year Zero", 2004.) (10) While few contest the desirability of Saddam Hussein's removal from power, instead of restoring basic government services and getting Iraq's economy moving after its invasion of the country, the U.S. took immediate action that shut down both. As soon as U.S. troops reached Baghdad and the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established, its head, Paul Bremer, took immediate steps to implement an economic privatization plan that had been developed by the Bush administration. He peremptorily fired 500,000 government workers, ministry officials and staff, doctors, lawyers and teachers, and all the members of Iraq's armed forces. He also immediately put up for sale the 200 state-owned companies that produced everything from cement to washing machines. According to Klein, his actions forced many of these enterprises into a state of paralysis where few could produce any of the vitally-needed goods and services they were accustomed to providing the government and the people of Iraq. By firing the government workers, the government-owned infrastructure could no longer provide services like running water and electricity, which were needed by the state-owned industries and enterprises to produce their goods and services. Once these services and relationships were disrupted, the work horses of the economy came to a grinding halt. The CPA then stepped in and offered contracts to foreign firms to perform the work they had been doing. These actions substantiate the argument that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was driven by U.S. economic as well as neoconservative political forces associated with the Bush administration, and that their influence would work to the detriment of the Iraqi people. The CPA head passed a spate of orders "liberalizing" Iraq's economy and "deregulating" its business and tax laws. He authorized unrestricted imports into the country by removing all tariffs, duties, inspections, and taxes. He authorized foreigners to own 100% of Iraqi corporations, take their earnings out of the country without paying any taxes, and replace Iraqi workers with foreign workers. In an apparent violation of United Nations resolutions, the only law the CPA retained from Saddam Hussein's regime was that probiting labor unions. (See Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 [No. 87] and Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 [No. 98].) Klein believes that it was the CPA's policies aimed at privatizing the state-owned companies, and "outsourcing" the jobs of those who had worked in them to foreign contractors, that struck the raw nerves of Iraqi citizens and drove them into the arms of the insurgents. It may well explain why the insurgents attack contractors who are there to rebuild the country, instead of just targeting U.S. troops. Her case study of Iraq's cement industry provides a dramatic "inside story" showing how and why the U.S. sows seeds of hatred and conflict when it injects self-serving economic and political interests into its foreign policies. Despite the fact that Iraq was known as a major manufacturer of cement and had 17 state-owned cement factories across the country when it was invaded by the U.S., not one of them received any of the contracts given out by U.S. authorities to help with Iraq's reconstruction. This is especially striking in light of the fact that most of the factories were either not working at all, or were working under capacity. Instead of using indigenous enterprises and workers, Klein reports that the CPA imports the ubiquitous 10 foot high slabs of reinforced concrete that are used for protection everywhere. It pays $1,000 to import each slab into the country despite the fact that Iraqi cement factories could make each one for $100. One of the reasons for such politically and economically faulty decisions, Klein says, is that no one on the American side believes in the public sector. (She notes in passing that the ubiquitous protection slabs that are now found all around Baghdad have been give a popular nickname: "Bremer Walls") Klein points out that U.S. privatization policies in Iraq are typical of the policies that U.S.-backed financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund impose on developing countries. Per the criticisms of the "international economic system" voiced by Brazilian President da Silva in his UN speech, and Jessica Matthews' objections to U.S. policies in Iraq, indigenous people perceive these policies and actions to be injurious and unfair. In the case of Iraq, Klein believes that U.S. privatization policies and foreign contractors have provoked more anger than anything else the U.S. has done. They have driven Iraqis who have lost their jobs under the occupation and could have held jobs filled by foreign contractors into the ranks of radical religious leaders like Moqtada al Sadr. From Baghdad to Basra, al Sadr's centers coordinate "shadow" indigenous reconstruction efforts that fix power and phone lines, provide emegency generators, run blood drives, direct traffic when the lights go out -- and organize militias. Klein believes that al Sadr took the CPA's economic casualties, clad them in black, and gave them weapons. Had U.S. reconstruction policies made certain that Iraqis were provided jobs, security and basic services, there would probably have been no need or opportunity for the radical cleric to step into the breach. "Democracy and Free Markets". The key point these world leaders, analysts and critics are driving home is that U.S. foreign policies have been guided by economic and political ideals and goals of building free market economies and democracies that provide a broad range of benefits to many constituencies well before any make their way, if they ever do, to the grassroots to build sustainable livelihoods, economies, and democratic governance processes. As exemplified by the policies the U.S. implemented after it invaded Iraq, they are capable of actually destroying livelihoods and economies, and impelling indigenous groups to take up arms against foreign invaders. Although American officials like former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell are fond of stating that U.S. foreign policy goals are designed to spread democracy and (on behalf of private economic interests) spread free markets as well, these policies have been implemented so unsuccessfully in the Middle East that they have transformed the people they were supposedly designed to help into enemies. US Cash for Middle East Democracy: The United States has launched a new initiative designed to spread democracy, education and open markets across the Middle East"). (11) In Iraq, their attacks have become so numerous and deadly that they are now preventing the U.S. from securing the country and reconstructing its damaged facilities and infrastructure. In the process, thousands of unarmed civililans have become trapped in the crossfires of violent confrontations between the U.S. and its enemies, from which they will not be able to escape as long as the conflict continues. The dangers posed by the "network warfare" that transnational terrorists are employing, and the "spectacle warfare" in which the U.S. is engaged, are so unique and potentially overwhelming that ordinary people have no choice but to pursue options that do not depend on the U.S. and the nation-state system that presided over the emergence of terrorism. Nor can they depend on international organizations like the United Nations which can be paralyzed by anachronistic structures like the Secure Council when one of its members exercises its veto power. While Matthews' analysis provides heartening evidence that mainstream American leaders are beginning to focus on the underlying roots of the conflict, and Bush's UN speech to the UN's 59th Session offers a few hopeful signs that his administration is beginning to take account of the underlying economic and political factors that lead to terrorism, it is unlikely that the Bush administration will be forced to deviate from it pursuit of the interests of the neoconservative political and economic forces that brought it to power. U.S. foreign policy will continue to focus on achieving U.S. "national security" at the expense of "human security" in Iraq and elsewhere. Politically, the Bush administration can afford to incur the costs in human lives, on the U.S. and Iraqi side, and extraordinary financial outlays, because they have built a winning, rock-solid electoral base of "red state" conservatives and fundamentalist Christians whose attention they have riveted to divisive domestic religious issues they have pushed to the forefront of public concern. By championing their home-grown electoral blocks on these polarizing "wedge" issues, the Republican Party has secured enough votes to win the past two presidential elections, victories that gave them the levers of power they need to implement their economic and political agendas at home and abroad. By focusing public attention on the likelihood of future domestic terrorist attacks like those of 9/11, the Bush administration dramatically strenthened their electoral support and grip on the American political system to establish what is increasingly viewed as one party rule of the federal government by the Republican Party, and a growing number of state governments. While Bush's overall public support is waning on issues like his administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, public opinion in this area will have little overall impact on how it conducts its foreign policy for the remaining three and a half years of its second term in office. While the adminstration's aggressive domestic agenda may create cleavages in the ranks of its Republican supporters in Congress, these trivial defections will have virtually no effect on the way second force economic interests dominate the global economy, contribute to growing inequities and poverty, and support U.S. military offensives abroad. Given the likelihood, therefore, that U.S. foreign policies and military actions abroad will continue to incite Muslim animosities and spark terrorist attacks around the world, civil society constituents and unarmed civilians will continue to be caught in the crossfire. (See Paul Rogers Al Qaida's new generation, 14 July 2005.) (12) In addition, it is also likely that the United Nations will not be able to undertake collective peacekeeping operations to stop terrorism and eradicate its causes. With the world's sole remaining superpower and the world's most dangerous terrorist network locked in a stalemate, and the nation-state system unable to work through a paralyzed UN, only the global civil society movement possesses the shared values, moral and legal foundations, and strategic and tactical organizational potential, to step into the breach. Only civil society can create a force powerful enough to challenge the world's sole remaining superpower, and the first and second forces that brought the Bush administration to power. By using the international legal and political building blocks that transnational civil society organizations have crafted over the past 50 years, and their proven political mobilization tactics like the "boomerang strategy", they can galvanize the members of the second camp of world public opinion to join with them. Together they can join forces with nonaligned nation-states and create multinational forces that can broker and enforce ceasefires in terrorist conflicts in Aghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They can simultaneously provide humanitarian relief, and help build democratic communities that create and protect sustainable livelihoods and local/regional economies that generate and retain wealth, and reduce inequality.
Notes 13. Rapidly expanding roles for global civil society in eradicating the economic and political roots of poverty and terrorism: Nonaligned multinational forces, livelihood development, wealth creation and democracy building Opportunities for global civil society to end terrorism, and the adverse economic and political conditions that breed it, have been multiplying over the past 50 years. These opportunities enable civil society organizations to address simultaneously the multifaceted causes of local and regional conflicts and terrorism, on the one hand, and the excesses of globalized free markets and predatory capitalism, on the other. In the process, as CSOs become a stronger transnational political force and develop their capacity to intervene in terrorist conflicts, they can use these same capacities elsewhere to help build sustainable livelihoods and flourishing democracies where these have faltered under the influence of predatory first and second force interests and institutions. While observers like Canada's Robert W. Cox were gravely alarmed in the early 90's by the increasig pre-eminence of unregulated, globalized free market forces and their seemingly irreversible ascendancy over nation-state governments, optimism about the rise of countervailing institutions is growing as Cox's alarm spreads and galvanizes opposing forces. (1) This paper argues that these institutions will be capable of putting first and second force institutions and interests in their proper place serving the needs of civil society constituents instead of compromising them, either by threatening their livelihoods or by putting them in the crossfires of terrorist conflicts. First and foremost among these institutions are civil society organizations and financially autonomous NGOs, political parties, labor organizations and environmental groups. They also include educational institutions and independent media that expand people's understanding of complex issues and the ways in which political and economic forces and interests affect the flow of money, and what alterable factors determine who ends up with how much of it. Greater political and economic sophistication will also enable civil society constituents to focus attention on how to support and promote institutions that ensure fairness, equity, and social and economic justice. As discussed below, the synergies among these countervailing institutions, which will be greatly enhanced by the Internet, will also increase popular determination and capability to use political processes to ensure that the first and second forces serve civil society interests, particularly in the economic sphere. Reflecting the work of economists like India's Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and political scientists and economists like Peter Evans of the University of California/Berkeley and Gar Alperovitz of the University of Maryland (College Park), these synergies will strengthen the historically symbiotic relationship between democratic government and economic development during the 21st century in ways that ensure economic development enhances the benefits, freedom and capabilities of the majority, and not just the few, to live the lives they choose. Unlike the U.S., where doctrines and practices promoting unfettered free market capitalism are largely uncontested - even in the face of growing poverty, inequality, political apathy and anti-democratic single party rule by the Republican party in the opening years of the 21st century, international researchers like Sen continue to document and reiterate their obvious defects and the need for a multi-institutional approach to correct them. Invoking Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Sen points out that free markets alone fail to achieve their full range of benefits when they are not supported by governmental and societal institutions that enhance the capacity of the poor and those of modest means to effectively participate in markets that are both fair and free. Well-documented research has shown unequivocally that famines, malnutrition and hunger in developing as well as developed countries are causally linked to the failures of pivotal economic and political institutions, and lack of popular control of these institutions. Where economic facilities and opportunities, democratic freedoms and responsive, transparent governments are provided to indigenous populations, catastrophes such as famines and conflicts have been avoided. (2) Where they are absent and governments unresponsive to human needs prevail, famines and conflicts occur, often in conjunction with communal and ethnic strife like that which has occurred in the subcontinent among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, strife that Sen believes can offten be attributed to opportunistic interferences by sectarian politicians. What is important in Sen's findings that authoritarian states lacking openness and transparency are most likely to have famines, is that it recognizes the positive role that states can and must play in protecting the livelihoods of their citizens. Significantly, his cross-national comparative research demonstrated that famines were more likely to occur in China under the more despotic regimes, and that Indian famines occurred throughout the British occupation but largely ceased once it was ended. Interestingly, it is researchers like Sen and his Asian colleagues who have identified the Achilles heels of unnecessarily predatory economic development models devised in the West, and also provided corrective options such as those described below. While these approaches were eagerly embraced by leading agencies in the international development community, such as the United Nations Development Program and the International Labor Organization (ILO), they have been largely ignored by free market ideologues and the key economic interests and players in the West. The latter continue to conduct business as usual with their political and governmental allies, with those in the U.S. pursuing the traditional twin U.S. foreign policy goals of "democracy and free markets", while ignoring the increase of poverty-related conflict and terrorism, and barely noticing the emergence of powerful competitors in other regions. Had they been less focused on their own interests, they might have paid more attention to the rise of competitors and anti-Western antagonists around the world, and what Sen believes is one of the most remarkable transformations in the 20th century - the shift from Western economic dominance to a new balance "much more dominated by Japan and East and Southeast Asia". The Bush administration has rapidly accelerated this shift after declaring its "war on terrorism" by cuttig taxes paid by the wealthy and constantly borrowing money from China and Japan to cover its budget deficits, while trade imbalances escalate. Chinese first and second force interests, in direct competition with the U.S. and with large surpluses of U.S. dollars in their coffers, have unfurled an aggressive strategy to compete with the U.S. for dwindling oil and gas reserves around the world. (Significantly, in June, 2005, a Chinese state-controlled oil company offered $18.5 billion to purchase U.S.-owned UNOCAL, one of the oldest of all the U.S.-based oil companies with major oil and natural gas reserves in Asia.) This shift of economic and political power from West to East detected by Sen, when combined with the equally significant power shift created by the rise of transnational civil society detected by Carnegie Endowment president, Jessica T. Mathews, translate into unprecedented opportunities for a civil society-driven third force to redress economic and political inequities created by the first and second forces. (3) These shifts, when combined with continuing terrorist attacks on Western assets and cities (New York, Madrid and London) and the inability of U.S. military forces to secure and protect either Afghanistan or Iraq from escalating terrorist attacks, presage a pivotal role for global civil society on multiple fronts. These include working within nonaligned multinational forces to stop terrorism and end poverty, and empowering working people all over the world to build sustainable livelihoods, create and retain wealth, and exercise inalienable political and civil rights. What follows is a brief summary of the accumulating evidence showing why and how global civil society can assume these new roles. Case studies in political economy and conflict resolution/prevention. Detailed investigations have demonstrated that armed conflicts typically arise out of economic and political inequities among groups whose members believe that they lack options for reducing these inequities. Examples of such investigations and their findings can be found in Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, 1998; Sarah Collinson, Editor, Power, Livelihoods and Conflict: Case studies in Political Economy Analysis for Humanitarian Action, 2003; and Joanna Macrae, Editor, The New Humanitarianisms: A Review of Trends in International Humanitarian Action, 2002a. (4) In addition, conflicts among these groups are more likely to occur when opportunistic leaders fan the flames of inter-group animosities in order to gain influence and control over military, political and economic assets. In cases where armed conflict has broken out, they use a variety of tactics to gain followers and recruits to carry out covert and overt operations. One of the main reasons they succeed is the destitute economic circumstances in which their prospective recruits find themselves, especially in failed and failing states with underground economies that deal in contrabande arms, drugs and consumer goods. (It is estimated that more than 2 billion of the world's 6.5 billion people find themselves in failed or failing states.) A pivotal role in stopping these conflicts can be played by NGOs operating within nonaligned multinational forces capable of providing police protection, safe havens and protective corridors - provided they have the time, resources and expertise to investigate the political economy of these localities and regions, and identify the groups that are most lacking political and economic power and influence. Interventions that bring new resources to the groups that perceive they lack options can quell these conflicts with very small amounts of financial aid and development resources, provided they do not introduce new inequities. Not making matters worse is a delicate balancing act for outsiders who intervene. As the tragic Rwandan genocide illustrates, according to Peter Uvin, well-meaning aid groups, whose interventions and assistance exacerbate inequities among groups, can spark violence rather than quell it. As the pain-staking work of the United Kingdom-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) shows from case studies conducted in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierre Leone and Senegal, violence and conflict can be stopped by combining humanitarian assistance with appropriate economic development assistance. Simultaneously, the process of building sustainable livelihoods and democratic communities can be set in motion by means of finely-tuned interventions of adequately financed and trained civil society organizations working within the framework of nonaligned multilateral forces. If their assistance is supported by the following: a) non-predatory forms of capitalism that do not extract exorbitant short and long-term returns on investments that cripple the sources of the returns, b) fair as well as free markets, and c) cooperative, community-based approaches to asset-building and wealth-sharing described below, on-going conflicts can be stopped and conflicts-in-the-making can be prevented. Conflicts in which non-state terrorists are engaged are no exception, provided that a) nonaligned intermediaries step forward to sponsor cease-fire negotiations, b) all the protagonists are eventually brought to the table, and c) appropriately structured and adequately financed nonaligned multinational forces can provide long-term policing, humanitarian relief, livelihood support and assistance in building sustainable economies and democratic communities. These insights into ways to stop violence and conflict support those cited above by U.S.-based researcher James Gilligan regarding the micro- and macro-economic and political causes and remedies of individual and collective violence. (5) The work of ODI's Collinson and Macrae are particularly salient in supporting the argument that first and second force interests are threatening civil society because they are creating adverse economic and political conditions that breed terrorism by foreclosing all the options destitute groups perceive are open to them, except the resort to violence. In the work cited above, Collinson comes to the same conclusion as Gilligan and Uvin:
Political economy analysis is concerned with the interaction of political and economic processes in a society: the distribution of power and wealth between different groups and individuals, and the processes that create, sustain and transform these relationships over time. When applied to situations of conflict and crisis, political economy analysis seeks to understand both the political and the economic aspects of conflict, and how these combine to affect patterns of power and vulnerability. According to a political economy approach, vulnerability should be understood in terms of powerlessness rather than simply material need. This broadened approach linking conflicts and poverty to adverse economic and political conditions that deprive indigenous people of democratic and economic freedoms (to use Sen's terms), but which can be overcome even in the midst of armed conflicts, greatly enlarges the window of opportunity open to civil society organizations and their allies. They can simultaneously stop conflicts and help build the economic and political foundations of democratic communities by supporting livelihood development and the exercise of political and civil rights by the members of groups caught up in conflicts. When civil society organizations translate these insights into programms and practices, the roles of NGOs are substantially broadened and deepened, blurring the neat lines that once demarcated the various types of intervenors and interventions surrounding peace-keeping, humanitarian relief and development assistance. In the process, the power and global reach of the "third force" and the civil society constituents, activists and organizations of which it is comprised, is vastly expanded into political and economic areas in which counter-vailing force is desperately needed. What is needed to leverage these opportunities, however, goes well beyond merely redefining the roles of the intervenors. It requires the political mobilization of civil society constituents and activists within individual countries and across national boundaries in every country in the world to eradicate the economic and political roots of poverty and terrorism through a civil society-based approach to conflict resolution, human security and economic development. Global civil society must mobilize its political and financial resources to ensure the success of these efforts, as well as convince public opinion and governmental leaders around the world to bring to an end the influence of predatory economic and political interests and actors whose actions compromise livelihoods and engender poverty, conflicts and terrorism. As Uvin points out in his analysis of the opportunities provided by a rights-based approach (RBA) to development, what is really involved are "political struggles" with power structures in developed and developing countries within the aid community, including the Word Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as within the growing number of donor countries that directly fund development projects. These political struggles will redefine conventional wisdom about the causes of poverty and conflict. They will also redefine their solutions and the roles of the institutions and actors who will be on the frontlines with the victims to implement these solutions in developing countries, developed countries and post-industrialized countries. This includes the U.S. where first and second forces have been steadily pulling the rug out from under working people, whose real income has not kept pace with the cost of living for the past 30 years, and shredding the safety net of government-funded programs for the poor who are increasingly left to fend for themselves. Livelihoods and democracy: East meets West at the crossroads of economics and politics. As the extensive case studies of micro-finance show, livelihoods can be created even in the midst of armed conflicts through very small amounts of capital that is even-handedly distributed in the form of micro-loans and credit and to non-combatants - and combatants who agree to lay down their arms. An excellent overview of these opportunities and challenges can be found in Stacy Heen, Microfinance and conflict: toward a conflict-sensitive approach, 2004. (6) The success stories of civil society organizations that have been able to induce combatants to lay down their arms, in exchange for small sums of money and the chance to build livelihoods, demonstrates the role of economic hardship and destitution in fueling conflicts - and the ease with which the participation in armed conflicts by those suffering from these hardships can be ended by nonaligned NGOs acting as intermediaries. These interventions, and their even-handedness, require in-depth knowledge of the political economics of the communities involved, and long-term relationship building. Nonaligned intermediaries must be able to build trusting relationships with indigenous groups so they can assist them in establishing effective, transactional economic relationships within and across ethnic groups and the whole spectrum of private and public sector actors involved in the economic and political development processes. The work of Sen's colleague from Bangladesh, Rehnman Sobhan, is particularly astute and insightful in this regard, as is that of Ashok Khosla. (See Rehnman Sobhan"Ensuring sustainable livelihoods: challenges for governments, corporates, and civil society at Rio+10", 2002; and Ashok Khosla, The Social Enterprise: The Role of Civil Society in Creating National Wealth, 2004. (7) An example of how these relationships and partnerships can be developed in at-risk areas among Western civil society organizations, NGOs and indigenous peoples is provided by the Poorest Areas Civil Society Programme (PACS) funded by the government of the United Kingdom through its Department for International Development (DFID). As development experts like Sobhan, Khosla and Sen point out, these transactional relationships must be supported by an array of instititions that empower people and groups developing livelihoods and enterprises at the grassroots with opportunities and latitude to evaluate and choose among various financial, economic and political options, and make informed, independent decisions, individually and collectively, that lead to sustainable livelihoods and economies. Instead of "hand-outs", charity or "poverty-reduction" programs administered by the bureacracies of international aid agencies and financial institutions, what they need is economic and political power that gives them the same access to capital, resources and entrepreneurial supports and inputs that have enabled the West's free enterprise system to become the most productive and wealth-generating in the world - minus its excesses. They must be able to pick and choose the "best practices" from the model and leave behind those that have proved to be the worst. As political economists like U.S.-based Gar Alperovitz appear to see this challenge as it has emerged inside the U.S. over the past 30 years, enough has been learned about the virtues and vices of capitalism to show that the time has come to go beyond the forms of capitalism that generate gross inequities in income and wealth, and that weaken communities and democracy in the process by gaining a dominant influence over political processes. After a lifetime of activism and investigation of alternative forms of owndership and economic activity that leverage community-based assets and resources, Alperovitz concludes that civil society constituents have the means and the motivation to broaden the ownership of wealth to benefit the vast majority, from the ground up. He shares with Amartya Sen a vivid appreciation of the intricate and symbiotic connection between economics and politics, and the abuses that can occur when the wealthy dominate both the economy and the polity. Just as Sen believes that popularly-exercised democratic and economic freedoms must go hand in hand, even in a globalized free market economy, Alperovitz believes that working people can and must re-build their communities, economies and democracies from the ground up using community-based assets and cooperative, democratic strategies that benefit the majority rather than the few. (See Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism : Reclaiming our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy, 2004 and "The Progressive Tax Revolt - and the Possibility of a Progressive Ownership Society", 2005.) (8) In implementing such "bottom up" economic and political development strategies, care must be take to protect from predatory influences the autonomous transactional relationships on which livelihoods and economic development depends, while still maintaining the competitive environments that foster innovation. In order to flourish and grow, these local livelihoods and economies must mature to the point they they can be integrated into market-based regional and global economies. But this must occur in ways that provide access to non-predatory capital and credit, and free markets that foster fair competition, but do not wipe out nascent livelihoods and local/regional economies. This is the tricky part where real ingenuity is required, given the pervasiveness of the practices associated with predatory capitalism, and the seemingly invincible leverage that predatory capitalists exercise over those seeking capital from them. It is where a blending of East and West, and the insights of analysts like Sen and Alperovitz, provide renewed hope and opportunities to those seeking to protect civil society, and reverse the adverse economic and political conditions that breed poverty and terrorism. To protect this type of "bottom up" development, grassroots livelihood builders must see to it that they elect responsive local and regional authorities and exert enough political pressure to ensure that these officials work on behalf of all those who require livelihoods, including not only the working class, but the impoverished and those with special needs. Economic development that confers fair and equitable benefits upon the majority, so that its members can live the lives they choose, requires at the outset publicly-financed education and democratic freedoms that include freedom of expression and the right to organize and participate in political decision-making. This participation and the public policies that ensue must ensure that all have employment, remuneration and benefits that provide enough food, medical care, shelter, clothing and physical security to prevent unnecessary physical or mental anguish, illness or premature death. Such employment, compensation and benefits must come from private sector, community-based, local and regional economic activities that are popularly controlled through responsive public and private governance mechanisms, as described below. Where necessary, citizens and civil society advocates must press governments to pass legislation mandating "living" wages, affordable health care and pensions, especially where conservative financial and economic forces oppose them. Moreover, they should also pass laws prohibiting predatory and unfair trading and business practices, rules and policies that unfairly compete with, and threaten the survival of local livelihoods, enterprises, industries and economies. They should induce governmental officials to prevent, instead of facilitate, the privatization of natural resources, publicly-owned assets and utilities, and operations that increase consumer prices above the minimum costs required to manage, maintain and upgrade them. Intransigeant government officials and officials of financial institutions that invest and lend public money who refuse to discharge these responsibilities to protect livelihoods and democratic practices should be removed from office. Global civil society constituents, advocates, NGOs and their allies should make common cause everywhere in the world to oust such authorities. While economic and financial conservatives will erroneously challenge the exercise of this necessary authority as a form of "socialism" or "state planning", it is neither. It is within the legitimate realm of non-predatory capitalism and provides the same protections to developing livelihoods, industries and economies that Western capitalists and their governmental protectors have always used - and continue to use - to protect their advanced economies and enterprises. That these advanced economies have been able to use these protective practices to develop products and services and the financial wherewithal that allow them to snuff out indigenous livelihoods and enterprises in at-risk communities and regions more than justifies intervention to prohibit such practices. (See the New York Times Editorial, "The Rigged Trade Game" 20 July 2003.) (9) As ODI's work emphasizes, economic changes and predatory practices at local, regional or global level can wipe out livelihoods in a very short period of time. As a case in point, Sen calls attention to the Bengal famine of 1943, which was due to the fact that food prices were rising in Calcutta while the wages paid to farm labourers had not kept up with the food prices. Sens's extensive studies of familes shod that people starve not because there is not enough food but because they can not afford to buy the food that is available. Although most people believe that everyone is entitled to obtain the minimal amount of calories they need to survive, in the Bengal case the so-called "invisible hand", which conservative economists invoke to justify prohibiting government regulation of "free markets", dealt a death blow to thousands of Indian farmers and their families in the early 1940's. (The premise of these classical economists is that free markets are guided by an "invisible hand" that naturally and automatically serves the interests of all by balancing supply, demand and prices. They argue that this "invisible hand" makes it unnecessary for governments to regulate such markets.) In contrast, outside the circles of political economists like Sen and Alperovitz, scant attention has been paid in the U.S. to the failure of major corporations like Wal-Mart to provide all full-time workers with livelihoods, or the failure of the second force-dominated U.S. Congress to raise the minimum wage to livelihood levels. This is because both the first and second forces that dominate U.S. politics and economics support the conservative economic doctrine that government should not interfere with unfettered free markets, which should prevail everywhere irrespective of their human economic and political costs. Maximizing profits by minimizing costs (e.g. wages and benefits like health insurance) is part and parcel of the vaunted American free enterprise ideology, even when it drives full time workers in the largest corporations in the world and the U.S. to beg for food at local soup kitchens. (See Paul Krugman, "Always Low Wages. Always.", 13 May 2005; Richard Manning, "The Economy of Hunger, 23 February 2005. (10) Similarly, when U.S. oil companies take advantage of diminishing supplies of oil and global price increases from $27 a barrel to $57 a barrel, and boost their profits by $131 billion per year, no one raises an ideological hue and cry against a predatory economic system that prides itself on such extraordinary profit-taking. (11). If the ensuing hike in automobile gas prices causes workers to lose their livelihoods because they are no longer able to drive to work and no public transporation is available, the combined political and economic forces and interests that led to this price hike and job loss are nonetheless praised for the profitability of the free enterprise system. Since workers who are victimized by such practices, or work full-time for wages so inadequate that they must beg for food, cannot turn to governments or private sectors dominated by free market ideologies for relief from their dire straits, the time has clearly come for global civil society to mobilize its forces to protect them. What is demonstrated by these contrasting examples from West and East, and the work of Amartya Sen on the symbiotic relationship that must exist between politics and economics, is that global civil society must focus its efforts in all parts of the world on providing working people the economic and democratic freedoms that are indispensable to the development of sustainable livelihoods. Only in this way can they lead the lives they choose, escape poverty and avoid entrapment into criminal networks and possibly terrorist organizations in failed and failing states. Focusing the political and economic struggles of global civil society on developing and protecting livelihoods and democratic freedoms in all countries. To correct the obvious defects of the unfettered free market model that dominates the global economy and root out the economic and political causes of poverty and terrorism, the seminal work of practitioners, investigators and theoreticians like the UK's Overseas Development Institute, India's Amartya Sen and America's Gar Alperovitz can be synthesized into a unifying action agenda for global civil society. That agenda focuses on mobilizing civil society's economic and political resources for developing and protecting in all countries the livelihoods and the democratic freedoms and capabilities that civil society constituents everywhere must possess to attain sustainable livelihoods and live the lives they choose. This agenda has a dual focus. The first focus is on developing and protecting livelihoods within the framework of unfettered free markets and a global economy that remains largely unchanged, following Sen's lines of analysis The second focus, reflecting Alperovitz's work, is on devising new, community-based economic activities and democratic governance processes that leverage market forces and the advantages of competition within a more cooperative, community-based framework. While the approach utilizes the non-predatory aspects of the free enterprise system, it seeks to eliminate the practices of predatory capitalism. Its goal is to empower livelihood builders and enterpreneurial groups to leverage community-owned assets and resources to establish for-profit businesses, create jobs, generate wealth, and more equitably distribute ownership and assets at the local and regional levels so that it benefits the majority rather than the minority. Implementing the agenda. The first focus of the agenda is on assisting indigenous populations at local and regional levels become as adept as ODI at conducting political economy analyses of their own environments. The goal of such analyses is to identify how political and economic processes interact to affect the distribution of power and wealth among different groups and individuals, and whether they engender powerlessness among economically and political disenfranchised groups that leads to individual and collective violence. The analyses will focus on all the interacting economic, political, social and cultural factors, from the grassroots to the global level, that threaten livelihoods, democratic freedoms and peace. The Third Force Network will work with civil society organizations to facilitate the efforts of interested groups at all levels to become proficient at objectively scrutinizing the interacting factors that prevent people from exercising the human capabilities identified by Sen in his studies of poverty and famine as indispensable to developing and protecting their livelihoods and democratic freedoms. These analyses, which should be conducted on a continuous basis, should be published periodically in the form of a livelihood index which depicts the gains and losses of diverse groups and individuals on various dimensions of their well-being, capabilities and freedoms. Critical dimensions include changes in employment and per capita income, indebtedness, access to capital, asset ownership and non-employment related revenue, prices and tax rates, health, access to insurance, access to education, etc. Civil society constituents and organizations at local, regional, national and transnational levels can use livelihood indices to judge the performance of governmental officials and the impact of public policies, as well as the policies and practices of private sector institutions such as banks and corporations. Civil society should use livelihood indices to rouse public opinion and spark debate about the causes of livelihood gains and losses, and build consensus about corrective actions that need to be undertaken by public and private actors and institutions to reverse losses, mitigate inequities, stop unfair practices and leverage opportunities. Once threats and predatory influences are identified, civil society constituents, activists, organizations and their allies can use livelihood indices as rallying tools to mobilize their constituents and supporters behind political and economic action campaigns. As discussed in the next chapter, they can create common fronts to overcome these threats and influences using all legal, nonviolent political and economic tools, including political campaigns to oust governments and transnational economic boycotts to end unfair policies and practices, like those that helped end the apartheid regime in South Africa. As a recent South African study demonstates, a livelihood index can be constructed to show how predatory economic policies pursued by aid agencies and financial institutions that impose "structural adjustments" on developing countries can wipe out livelihoods and push people into poverty by unfairly denying access to capital and livelihoods to those who need them the most. (See Michael Carter, Sequencing Micro and Macro Reforms for Pro-Poor Growth: Forward-Looking Reflections on the South African Experience, 2004.) (12) Livelihood indices that demonstrate the defects of unfettered free market doctrines and practices can be used to devise innovative and locally-determined policies and practices to rectify their shortcomings. Measuing progress via capabilities, freedoms and livelihoods versus traditional economic indicators. A key component of this dual focussed agenda proposed above are the core capabilities identified by Sen as indispensable for developing livelihoods. He also emphasizes the pivotal roles that a broad array of societal institutions must play in making it possible for working people to develop the capabilities they need to attain livelihoods. In the process, Sen also explains why focusing on capability indicators and institutions responsible for fostering capabilities are more useful than the traditional income indicators and models used by development agencies and financial institutions. In this emphasis, he joins welfare economists around the world in their criticism of the sterility of models that simplistically construe poverty as lack of income or motivation (in the U.S., poverty victims receiving public assistance are widely referred to as "welfare cheats"), or simplistically attribute famine to the lack of food, despite contrary research demonstrating that famines are usually caused by unresponsive governments that fail to provide mechanisms for distributing the adequate food supplies that exist. A major objection to these models is that they put the burden of responsibility on the victims of those suffering from lack of livelihoods or famine, rather than on the governments and societal institutions that should have provided the victims the capabilities and freedoms they needed to attain and maintain livelihoods in the first place. As discussed below, the capabilities Sen identifies, which he also refers to as "substantive human freedoms", include political freedom, economic and social facilities and opportunities; guarantees of governmental transparency, and protective security. Since these capabilities are instrumental to livelihood development, those seeking livelihoods must have these capabilities before as well as during their efforts to develop them. In addition to viewing capabilities as "inputs" to the development process and the creation of livelihoods, he also views them as "outputs" of both. Capabilities should be strengthened by sustainable livelihoods and economic development, and serve as a measure the effectiveness of economic models, governments and societal institutions. In focusing on this dual significance of capabities and freedoms, Sen harks back to Adam Smith. Livelihoods, economic development and wealth creation are not ends in themselves to be assessed merely by indicators of income and assets. For those are only the means to the end of enabling the majority of the people to live the lives they choose. He chides economic development models that restrict attention to how much wealth is created while overlooking the more important question of whether society is providing ordinary people the capabilities they need to develop livelihoods that enable them to get enough of this wealth to live the lives they choose. Instead of focusing on the inherently complex and costly challenges of making sure that societal institutions enable the majority to benefit in an equitable fashion, they focus on how rich the rich are getting, and how a small minority of initially modest means manage to join their ranks. In the meantime, the struggling working classes and poor are pushed out of their rosy picture into the arms of underfunded welfare bureaucracies, aid agencies, charitable organizations and "poverty reduction" programs that largely function outside the free enterprise system. To help remedy this oversight, the capabilities-based livelihood index proposed in this paper is designed to bring the eclipsed working classes and poor back into the fold by means of solid facts and "third force" economic and political mobilization strategies that put the first and second forces under the control of civil society. In a 2004 interview, Sen laments the fact that "inequalities are monumental" in the world today in terms of economic affluence and political power. (Nermeen Shaikh. President's Forum with Amartya Sen at the Asia Society, 2004.) (13). He regrets that economic globalization is not the major source of advancement of living conditions that it could be if it were used to maximize the benefits for poorer people. Most significantly, Sen believes it could be used in this way if it were governed differently so that it moves in the direction of a better division of benefits. In his view, this requires national and local policies that enhance the fundamental capabilities and freedoms people need to develop sustainable livelihoods and economies, which in turn strengthen these capabilities and freedoms. In addition, Sen volunteered the view that more equitable trading and economic relationships must be established that give developing countries better access to the markets of the more developed, richer countries, which he believes must be more "welcoming" of commodities coming from poorer countries. Sen served as honorary president of Oxfam, an NGO that is playing a major role in fighting world poverty and changing the protectionist trade policies of Western nations. Such policies hinder developing countries' goods from entering their markets at the same time that these Western nations insist that the markets of the developing countries be entirely open to their products without any domestic protections, even for nascent industries. (See "European Commission presents its new GSP scheme: EU trade measures could go much further, says Oxfam" 22 June 2005.) (14) Sen's capabilities concepts, which are reflected in the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index, and the efforts of a number of activists and scholars to apply them more directly to development strategies and programs, merit examination as a guide to the opportunity before civil society organizations to use livelihood indices as political and economic levers to mobilize support for developing and protecting livelihoods and freedoms. They are also a guide to the strategies that can be used to implement Alperovitz's blueprint for broadening the ownership of wealth through community-based alternatives that develop sustainable livelihoods, enterprises, economies and locally-owned assets in a more cooperative, egalitarian fashion within a competitive, free market framework. What Sen advocates is an integrated analysis of a variety of interacting economic, social and political activities conducted through an array of interdependent public and private institutions. The goal is to determine to what extent they contribute to providing and enhancing the capabilities and substantive freedoms of individuals and groups so that they can function as active agents of their own well-being rather than the passive recipients of "dispensed benefits". (Democracy and Development, 1999, xii-xiii.) These institutions include the state, the market, the legal system, political parties (and, presumably, political organizations like labor unions), the media, public and special interest groups, and open public forums in which opinions and proposals can be exchanged by civil society constituents and others whose interests are at stake. Each and every one of these institutions bears responsibility for ensuring that ordinary people have the capabilities they need to attain livelihoods that enable them to live the lives they choose. By breaking out of the sterile economic models that trivialize economic and political challenges into simplistic, quantifiable factors like income and assets, Sen follows in Adam Smith's footsteps in putting attention on the more far-reaching and fundamental goals and objectives of all societies that go well beyond the creation of wealth. He also shifts the focus to the societal need to orchestrate all of these institutions and resources so that they provide the capabilities people require in order to attain livelihoods and freedoms that allow them to live the lives they choose. Of the capabilities Sen identifies, political freedoms, often called civil rights, deserve special mention because of their pivotal influence on economic opportunities and the freedoms and capabilities that engender them. Political freedoms refer to the indispensable capabilities that people must have to decide what should be the principles and policies of their governments, and which individuals should be elected and appointed to represent them. The freedom to exercise political and civil rights is especially critical to those whose livelihood needs are neglected by current economic practices, or jeopardized by governments that allow predatory economic practices. Sen's research has shown that where these rights are exercised, calamities like famines and poverty can be avoided. Political freedoms are closely related to economic opportunities, and both are closely related to physicial security and protection from violence. When livelihoods are threatened or absent, as in cases where one group benefits from economic arrangements that cause other groups to become destitute, research cited earlier show that the latter may driven to violence if they perceive that no other options are open to them. If governmental authorities intervene to quell the violence in cruel and inhuman ways, but do not work with economic institutions and interests to provide sustainable livelihoods, they are in effect taking the side of the exploitive economic interests. First and second force interests are joining forces at the expense of civil society and its legal foundations. Their interventions often violate not only human entitlement to livelihoods but human rights when those who are protesting the absence of livelihoods and the exploitive practices of self-serving economic interests are not given due process of law in adjudicating their grievances, and neither economic justice nor social justice is served. As argued above, such first and second force alignments have prevailed and been perpetuated into the 21st century throughout the Middle East as a result of Western colonialism, in South Africa as a result of apartheid. and in the U.S. as a result of the enslavement of Africans and its aftermath. A case in point is revealed by the continued obstruction throughout the 20th century and early 21st century of the political rights of African Americans, who constitute the most numerous group among those who are impoverished and imprisoned in the U.S. African Americans been murdered, coerced, harrassed and intimidated by organized Caucasian groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Their civil rights, particularly voting rights, have been routinely violated by legal and extra-legal means, even as recently as 1964 with the murder of civil rights workers attempting to register African Americans to vote in Southern states. In addition, a number of prominent African American political leaders have been assassinated, including the Reverend Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Moreover, credible evidence has been provided that election officials in the state of Ohio deliberately obstructed the voting rights of African-Americans in the 2004 presidential election, according to the report issued by U.S. Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee. The officially tallied votes in that state tipped the 2004 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush. (See Conyers' 2005 report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, which is corroborated by academic researchers Peter Phillips and Dennis Loo (2005) in "Election Fraud Continues in the US: New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004".) (15) These investigations strengthen the evidence that has been gathered from the state of Florida indicating that during the 2000 presidential election, in which Bush was elected to his first term by a few hundred votes, tens of thousands of African Americans were prevented from voting because their names were deleted from the voting lists. Unsurprisingly, their enslavement combined with persistent interferences with the exercise of African Americans' political capabilities has contributed to equally glaring deficits in economic capabilities. African Americans exhibit patterns of unemployment, poverty, low income, lack of access to capital, education, health insurance and medical care that result in infant and adult mortality rates higher than those in developing countries. Added to the willful failure of election officials in Ohio and other states to provide federally-mandated "paper trails" that could be used to verify the results of electronic voting machines, such denials of democratic freedoms and capabilities raise doubts about whether the U.S. is truly a fully-functioning democracy when judged by current, 21st century voting practices and their outcomes. Now that electronic voting machines are being installed throughout the world, vote rigging by corrupted electronic voting machines must be considered an ominous threat to civil society and its democratic legal foundations. To preclude it, civil society must take on vital democracy-building tasks in every country to ensure that civil society constituents can freely exercise the political freedoms that preserve the electoral foundations of democracy, so that it can provide civil society constituents the leverage they need to build sustainable livelihoods and democracies. As the Conyers and Carter reports cited above demonstrate, the long-standing political and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans and South Africans under apartheid were the result of deliberate policies and practices pursued by first and second force institutions, interests and actors in both countries. Even though free market ideologues and even Sen himself assert that disadvantaged groups can acquire livelihoods and an equitable share of the benefits of the unfettered free markets of the global economy, experience does not support these claims. Sen believes that it is because these institutions are badly governed, and that changes in governance could bring about changes in the distribution of benefits. However, the first and second force interests that are the primary beneficiaries of the predatory practices that prevent their inclusion continue to press for the continuation of the same policies. The only change appears to be a rhetorical one, in the form of "poverty reduction" programs and funds which, even if adequate to the tasks and effectively implemented, would sidetrack the poor and declining working classes into programs that are intended to operate well outside the free enterprise system that is controlled by first and second forces interests so that it operates to their advantage. The most ominous consequence of their intransigeance is the continued growth in the wealth gap and global poverty, accompanied by the escalation of individual and collective violence on the part of increasingly destitute populations in developing as well as developed countries. In the former, many of these individuals and groups are being drawn into the shadowy networks in which terrorist organizations like al Qaeda recruit their foot soldiers for deployment in Iraq and around the world. Even the diplomatic Sen could not refrain from noting the virulent anti-Westernism that has grown out of colonialism and Western economic and political domination of the world for more than one hundred years. (See his 2004 Asia Society interview cited above.) He observes that this has led "activist Arab-Muslims" to want to "settle scores with the West". Noting that Muslim kingdoms were once the centers of civilization and learning, from the Mediterranean to India and Indonesia, the anti-Western mindsets that grew out of colonialism make it impossible to separate colonialism from the violence seen today. Turning the tide. With the war on terrorism aggravating all these animosities and swelling the ranks of terrorist organizations, and the Bush administration constantly reaffirming its intention to continue its occupation of Iraq indefinitely while privatizing economies everywhere, it is abundantly clear that only global civil society has the motivation and potential resources needed to turn the tide. For the writing on the wall appears to be getting clearer all the time to an increasing number of analysts who believe that the war on terrorism abroad is the political means to the economic end of transferring as much wealth as possible to the wealthy. (See Thom Hartmann, "They Died So Republicans Could Take the Senate", 2005; and Chuck Collins, "Millionaires and War, 2005.) (16) According to their logic, the false claims made by George W. Bush that the U.S. was threatened by Saddam Hussein, and that Hussein was conniving with 9/11 terrorists, appear to have been fabricated to enable the Republican Party to use popular fears of terrorist attacks to get Republican Congressional candidates elected so that the Republicans could obtain secure control of both houses of Congress. By making misleading claims to Congress so that it would authorize him to attack Iraq, Bush galvanized public support not only for war but for electing a majority of Republicans to take control of Congress. Once in control, the Bush administration then proceeded to attack Iraq and have Congress practically rubber-stamp legislation authorizing the most extraordinary transfer of wealth to the wealthy in the history of the world. The $300 billion price tag of the administration's "war on terrorism" pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars transferred to the wealthy through government policies enacted under the Bush administration. That this transfer is occurring during war-time when the U.S. is borrowing tens of billions of dollars from traditional adversaries like China to cover a growing budget deficit shows the extent to which the combined first and second forces that dominate U.S. politics and foreign policy are unconcerned by the national interest or the interest of future generations of civil society constituents who are going to have to shoulder the burden of the Bush administration's debt. As Collins points out, it is simply unprecedented in U.S. history for a presidential administration to pass tax cuts for the wealthy during a war and a budget deficit, especially after turning a projected budget surplus of $5.2 trillion into an actual $5.2 trillion deficit within five years of taking office. In its first year in office, the Bush administration passed $1.35 trillion in tax cuts for multi-millionairs, moved to enact $330 billion in additional cuts as U.S. troops were marching on Baghdad in 2003, and is now proposing cuts of another $1.35 trillion through repeal of the estate tax, which is paid by billionaires and multi-millionaires. While the death toll of American troops was passing 1,000 last summer, it is reported that the Bush administration was aggressively pursuing an additional $140 billion in tax breaks for corporate donors to the Republican Party. Not to be neglected is the transfer of wealth that is taking place inside Iraq. These transfers are the result of the privatization and sale of Iraq's state-owned businesses, the channeling of oil revenues into the pockets of Western corporations involved in the exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves, and the awarding of hundreds of billions of dollars to private defense contractors by the U.S. Department of Defense. (U.S. vice president Dick Cheney's former firm Halliburton was awarded a $5 billion contract in July, 2005, bringing its logistics contracts in Iraq to more than $9.1 billion.) These contracts pay for military, security and reconstruction operations in the country, as well as the construction of dozens of permanent military bases in Iraq and the largest U.S. embassy in the world. As Naomi Klein frames these issues in "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" (2005), post-conflict reconstruction and development along with "democracy-building" have become multi-billion dollar businesses for U.S. companies and investment banks like the World Bank. (17) Not only do U.S. companies like Bearing Point advise foreign governments on "selling off their assets", but they even run privatized government services themselves - for a profit. According to Klein, Bearing Point's revenues quadrupled in five years, with profits of $342 million in 2002 and a profit margin of 35%. Klein's research reveals that the World Bank is now devoting 20-25 percent of its total lending to post-conflict countries, an increase of 800% since 1980. While rapid response to wars and natural disasters has usually been the domain of UN and international aid agencies, now that reconstruction work has become a "lucrative industry", the World Bank and its for-profit development partners are harvesting profit-making opportunities not only in the realm of "poverty reduction" but in that of "disaster capitalism" as well. (Seen in this light, Iraq invasion strategist Paul Wolfowitz's move from the Pentagon to the presidency of the World Bank appears designed to leverage these emerging opportunities on behalf of the first and second force interests and institutions that stand to reap the greatest financial benefits from them.) The Bush administration's use of foreign wars to attain economic ends is not unique. It is well-known that politicians throughout history have created popular fears of foreign enemies to gain internal control of their citizenry and national resources, as well as external control of other country's resources. What is remarkable about the the Bush administration's use of this classic strategy is the precipitous transfer to the wealthy, with popular acquiescence, of so much of the nation's tax base revenues that federal, state and local governments no longer have the funds they need to meet their minimal, traditional obligations. After drastically reducing federal tax revenues , the federal government is now no longer able to meet its obligations for social security entitlements, adequate health care and food security for the disabled, elderly and the poor, comprehensive K-12 education with the full range of offerings and services that have traditionally been provided, and student college tuition grants and loans. In additional to fears of attack, a primary cause of public acquiescence in this transfer of wealth is the fact that many and possibly a majority of U.S. citizens do not yet grasp the magnitude of these complex changes. Another underlying bulwark of the transfer that has already been described is the astounding success of the 30-year campaign by U.S. neo-conservatives and the Republican Party's financial backers to create an electoral base of Evangelical Christians that would give them political control of the three branches of government at the federal level. But the most plausible explanation may well lie in the fact that first and second force interests are natural political and economic bedfellows united by goals of unlimited wealth accumulation via unfettered free market capitalism, and the belief that this is the only system that can be productive and profitable for the few, in the short term, and the many, in the long-term. To realize these goals, they have transformed economic and political institutions throughout the world in ways that have failed to alleviate existing poverty, created poverty where none existed, and sparked violence and conflict. They have then seized on the violence and conflict they have engendered as yet further opportunities to transfer wealth through the conduct of war, such as that which is now taking place in Iraq. That's the downside. The upside is that these inexorable processes have so disenfranchised civil society constituents, economically and politically, that they are provoking a global backlash. The unchecked power of first and second forces combined has so compromised the livelihoods and capabilities - especially political freedoms - that are vital to civil society that it has given them common cause to unite around the world to rise up and join forces to put the first and second forces in their place. This backlash will ultimately be of such a magnitude that it cannot be quashed. Global civil society constituents are too numerous, share too many vital interests that cross borders, and have developed too many powerful transnational strategies for overcoming the resistance of intransigeant nation-states. It is true that the U.S. is in the process of developing a unified domestic and international secret police force supported by high-tech airborn offensive and defensive weaponry, as well as an increasing number of U.S. military bases abroad encircling the globe. But these initiatives too are producing a backlash on the part of national governments that object to U.S. operations on their soil or in their airspace and have begun building defensive regional alliances that exclude U.S. participation. (See Tom Engelhardt, "Winners and Losers: Moving Out of the Superpower Orbit ", 2005; and Stephen Grey and Don Van Natta, "Judge Orders 13 CIA Arrests: Agents are wanted by Italian official for seizing of cleric", 2005.) (18) It will not be an easy task for civil society to turn back this tide, but it has the capabilities of being successful on all fronts everywhere. At the outset, global civil society organizations must work around U.S. forces and their military and economic outposts around the world, but ultimately it will outflank them and oblige them to retreat into their appropriate spheres subservient to the interests of civil society. The first step in this direction, which is already underway, is for civil society to mobilize global popular support for eradiating the economic and political causes of poverty and terrorism through nonaligned multilateral forces along the lines described above. These forces can broker cease-fires of armed conflicts in confrontations like those taking place in Iraq among U.S., insurgent and al Qaeda-linked terrorist forces; provide humanitarian relief and long-term policing, and, most importantly, build sustainable livelihoods and local/regional economies and democracies in impoverished and conflict-prone areas. Second, global civil society must take on the task outlined below of the "bottom up" economic and political restructuring in every country that will broaden the ownership of wealth, individually, collectively and institutionally, so that it benefits the majority rather than the minority only. Building on the harsh lessons being learned from the financial and economic havoc that has been created by the conservative economic and political forces that now dominate the U.S., civil society must support and strengthen nascent 21st century citizen activism and populism that is emerging in U.S. communities and throughtout the world to implement the grassroots community-building and wealth-creating strategies advocated by political economists like Gar Alperovitz. Broadening the ownership of wealth to benefit the majority: the traditional left moves to the center to invent a community-based form of non-predatory capitalism. Though Alperovitz grew up in America, his basic assumptions are quite similar to those of India's Amartya Sen when it comes to the symbiotic relationships that both believe must connect the political and economic freedoms and capabilities to which every citizen must have access if democracy is to flourish and prosperity is to prevail . Like Sen, Alperovitz is an academician. But he is also a political activist who came of age during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements that burst into the spotlight of U.S. politics in the mid-60's. Just as Sen's life was influenced by the subcontinent's famines and ethnic violence that he observed in his youth, Alperovitz was deeply influenced by the political and economic oppression of African Americans in the South, and the imperial overreach of the U.S. government in its foreign wars. Both men focused their professional lives on the intersection of politics and economics, concluding that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of economic and political elites has interfered with the realization of the promises of democracy and the free enterprise system. While both have criticized the negative consequencies of economic globalization, Sen's remedies have tended to focus on the national and international levels, while Alperovitz's focus is on the local community level. (See also his 2002 book, Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era, and his hands-on, institution-building website Community-Wealth.org). (19) His blueprint calls attention to alternative wealth-creating structures and institutions that citizens and local governments can establish at the local level independent of the predatory economic interests and institutions that extract and transfer wealth away from the grassroots. These alternatives benefit the majority and have the potential to spiral outward and upward, Alperovitz argues, until they bring about decentralized, incremental and spontaneous systemic changes in the way the free enterprise system and democratic governments function at all levels in the 21st century. Although many people in the developing world believe that they can create wealth-generating livelihoods, enterprises and industries only if Western capitalists invest in them, Alperovitz' systemic overview of the possibilities for local wealth creation that exist in the U.S., where predatory capitalism has ravaged local communities as savagely as anywhere else, proves otherwise. He synthesizes and conceptually integrates a wealth of examples showing how communities everywhere can use their own resources and alternative structures to spark community-based economic development and competitive ventures that not only survive in the free market system, but confer benefits and wealth that they can own, control and retain locally. Alperovitz's U.S. blueprint, however, does not require the creation of organized political movements, new political parties, or the replacement of the current lineup of elected officials at the federal level. Instead it builds on growing citizen discontent with the steady erosion of their financial security, the steady loss of manufacturing jobs and income that the service sector appears incapable of replacing, and growing threats to public and private pension benefits and medical care that were once taken for granted but are now being put in jeopardy by the elected officials who were once counted on to protect them. Unsurprizingly, this discontent and these experiences have led to widespread cynicism that neither the federal government nor state governments have the will or the means to offer viable remedies. With nearly half the eligible voting population refusing to go to the polls to exercise their voting rights, Alperovitz concludes that the "political and economic arrangements of the current system" can no longer sustain "equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy". (America Beyond Capitalism (2004), pp. 1-3.) The only viable remedy is a local one, because it builds upon the natural resources that are at the fingertips of the people to whom they belong. What Alperovitz proposes is the widespread replication and refinement of successful experiments in new forms of political economy that have been underway for decades in the U.S., and even longer in some countries outside the U.S. These proposals are notable for their ideological eclecticism and avoidance of extremes of either left or right. Not only does he embrace core conservative values of the free market, competition, entrepreneurship and risk-taking, and advocate that workers use these principles to create livelihoods through a whole variety of new ventures. But he also proposes that local governments also take these values seriously and work with its citizens and entrepreneurs to create a whole new variety of public/private partnerships and institutional structures that utilize them. What he does not propose is that these grassroots economic activities be burdened with the unnecessary added costs and debts demanded by aggressive, external investors whose only goal is to extract the highest return on their investment in the shortest period of time. To the contrary. He points out that public/private ventures that are built with community-based assets, such as land, can generally charge lower prices for their products and services, especially housing, because they do not have to pay out large chunks of their revenues to external investors and tend to be managed more efficiently by people wedded to the community. Unlike the privatization doctrines of economic and political conservatives, ventures that truly seek to serve the needs of their customers can and should be financially structured using local resources so that they do not have to gouge their customers - quite a turnabout from the exorbitant profit-seeking behavior of most U.S. corporations and lending institutions, including the World Bank. With such slight but revolutionary changes in how the free enterprise system works at the community level, Alperovitz shows how citizens and workers can build livelihoods and own their own companies; create their own banks, construct affordable housing for local residents, and see to it that their local governments use their own local natural resources to offer them the electricity, water and bandwidth that they already own, at reasonable prices. Not only is it unnecessary for local communities to privatize these resources and the services need to provide them, but they can use them to generate non-tax revenues for local governments that far exceed what they would have received from taxes on privatized services. Natural resources like oil, for example, can be used by states like Alaska to provide all their citizens with dividends from a fund in which oil revenues are invested. (Ideally, this principle should be applied retroactively to confer accumlated dividends on all Iraqi citizens for oil revenues extracted by privatized concerns over the years.) Economic and political conservatives will find very little to find fault with in Alperovitz's remedies. For they do not involve the national government or central planning of the economy. Nor do they do depend on currently out-of-favor redistributive taxation policies at the national level that tax the rich in favor of the poor. There are no centrally-determined price controls. And they do not involve borrowing huge amounts of capital from traditional adversaries like China, such as the Bush administration is now doing. The key to the systemic changes advocated by Alperovitz lies in increased ownership of property and wealth at the local and state level, which he believes can be effected by a host of alternative institutions that are structured quite differently from those financed by predatory capital. The goal of these institutions is not to generate and transfer wealth out of a community into the hands of distant investors, but to use community assets and natural resources like land to enable local residents to build and own businesses and the retain the wealth they create. For example, by enabling local residents to start and own businesses, through such innovative structures as employee stock ownership programs (ESOPS), 8 million workers now own all or part of 10,000 businesses throughout the U.S. By establishing legal structures like "community land trusts' (CLTs), and "community development corporations" (CDCs), of which there are now 4,000 throughout the U.S. controlling over $1 billion in assets, local entrepreneurs and local governments can use city-owned land to build and manage housing, shopping centers and supermarkets, and run vocational training programs, nursing homes, and after-school care. Whereas large corporations have usually been able to capture the lion's share of capital from the large banks and lending institutions, and small start-up businesses have been unable to compete with them in terms of scalability and returns on investment, CLTs and CDCs leverage local relationships and dependencies to raise capital from local foundations, banks, private corporations, and city and state governments to fund their economic activities. An increasing number of local governments themselves are creating venture capital funds to provide start-up capital to local businesses and even to acquire ownership stakes in businesses. (Alperovitz cites the example of the state of Alabama, which has used its state pension fund to acquire a controlling interest in one of the nationÕs major airlines.) These new locally-based assets, financing structures and institutions can then be used to provide start-up capital to local entrepreneurs seeking to create small and medium sized businesses that intend to remain in the region and serve local/regional populations. This attribute is likely to become increasingly popular as large corporations transfer their operations and jobs to developing countries and communities struggle to find alternative employment for local residents who have lost their jobs as a result. Small businesses that are created using community-based assets, including family-owned business and small farms, offer one of the only potential growth sectors in many localities and regions of the U.S. for the unemployed or at-risk who are not drawn to jobs connected to homeland security jobs or the war economy. Politically and economically, the alternative institutional opportunities to which Alperovitz is drawing attention are likely to become increasingly attractive to worried voters. Here are some of the examples Alperovitz provides of successful CLTs and CDCs: In the mid-60's, riots broke out in many impoverished U.S. inner cities, including Newark, New Jersey, which left many dead and more than a thousand people injured. To address the political and economic roots of the riots, the New Community Corporation was founded in Newark. Since that time, it has created economic enterprises that generate $200 million in annual revenues and provide 3,000 units of housing and 2300 jobs for neighborhood residents. NCC now owns an estimated $500 million in real estate and related activities, which include a shopping center and supermarket. Profits from the corporation fund vocation training and after-school programs; medical care facilities, including a nursing home. Another example is Bedford-Stuyvesant, an inner city community in Brooklyn, New York, which was devastated in the 60's by real estate speculators who raised rents way above what local residents could afford, and banks that refused to lend money to local residents and ethnic minority groups. The population consisted primarily of African-Americans and Latinos, who lived on incomes of less than $3,000 a year and had infant mortality rates that were the highest in the country. There was so little corporate activity in the area that public revenues were inadequate to sustain even the most rudimentary social programs. As soon as a CDC called the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC) was founded, start-up capital was provided to 116 new businesses, which helped to create 3,300 jobs. Job training was provided to 7,000 local residents, and 650 new housing units were built. The corporation successfully created and maintained ownership of a major commercial development, a property management company, a construction firm, and two-thirds ownership of a supermarket which had over $28 million in annual sales by 2001. It created a revolving loan fund for local start-up businesses, and, as of 2002, had approximately $26 million in assets. In addition, it had a $10.5 million budget in FY 2002, of which $7 million was derived from rental income and other commercial ventures. (to be continued)
Notes 14. The politics and economics of the Third Force Network livelihood index The purpose of the Livelihood Index is to encourage grassroots communities throughout the world to create, maintain and publicize policy-oriented indices that chronicle increases and decreases in livelihoods and equality over time. The indices will also seek to identify the causes of changes in livelihoods and equality so that they can be used to develop public and private sector policies that favor the development of sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies, and reduce economic, social and political inequality. These indices and analyses will be based on current and emerging indices and instruments for measuring human development and inequality developed and utilized by national and international agencies, including those of the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report. They will depict the gains and losses of diverse groups and individuals as measured by a broad spectrum of variables, including health, employment, income, asset ownership, indebtedness, as well as access to capital, insurance, education, etc. Civil society constituents and organizations at local, regional, national and transnational levels can use livelihood indices to judge the performance of governmental officials and the impact of public policies, as well as the policies and practices of private sector institutions such as banks and corporations. They can use livelihood indices to rouse public opinion and spark debate about the causes of livelihood gains and losses, and build consensus about corrective actions that need to be undertaken by public and private actors and institutions to reverse losses, mitigate inequities, stop unfair practices and leverage employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. Once civil society constituents, activists, organizations and their allies have identified predatory influences and threats to livelihoods and increased equality, they can use livelihood indices as rallying tools to mobilize political support for political and economic action campaigns. They can create common fronts to overcome these threats and influences using all legal, nonviolent political and economic tools, including political campaigns to oust government officials and transnational economic boycotts to end unfair trading policies and practices. The Third Force Network in Action 15. Harnessing the power of the Internet to mobilize civil society constituents, activists and their allies to support and fund NGOs. The Network' strategy for helping NGOs increase popular awareness and financial support is modeled after one of the most successful Internet-based, grassroots mobilization and fund-raising campaigns in history, that of Howard Dean's 2004 U.S. presidential primary campaign. The strategist behind that campaign, technology and political consultant Joe Trippi, outlined the core elements of the model in his recent book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything (2004).(8) 600,000 grassroots supporters contributed $50,000,000 to the campaign over a record-breaking period of less than a year because the campaign gave them an outlet for their anti-war sentiments opposing U.S. invasion of Iraq, a bully pulpit from which to issue a rallying cry to like-minded activists throughout the U.S., and state-of-the art information and communication tools provided by the Internet. These levers empowered them to create a combined online community and political movement that took on a life of its own. Howard Dean's opposition to the war in Iraq, and his campaign website's blog, online newsletters and steady stream of fund-raising solicitations brought hundreds of thousands of people together in a crusade to stop the war by defeating the president who started it. Even though Dean did not become his party's candidate, his campaign organization broke the mold for political mobilization and fund-raising, hand-in-hand with the members of Dean's grassroots community that eventually came to provide most of the momentum behind its own emergence. As Trippi points out, one of the campaign's most important accomplishments was its demonstration of how the Internet will become the primary medium and fulcrum around which future political constituencies will mobilize themselves outside the control of political parties, government, mainstream media and the financial interests that provide the lion's share of the money that underlies their economic and political power not just in the U.S. but throughout the world. The Network will follow the example of the Dean campaign and leverage Internet technologies to strengthen the continuous cross-fertilization of ideas already underway among civil society activists and supporters, and between supporters and the civil society organizations they fund. In this way, the Network will strive to enhance the self-organizing capabilities of the members of the movement as it expands its global influence and becomes increasingly effective in protecting the core interests of civil society, as well as its emerging interests. It is expected that this process will encourage continuous dialogue and bring to the surface diverging as well as converging ideas about where civil society organizations should be headed and what their strategies should be, thereby helping to keep the movement and its organizational members close to the hearts and minds of the people they serve. The Third Force Network will help NGOs increase popular awareness of their accomplishments and potential with respect to preventing and ending conflicts and eliminating inequalities. It will help them mobilize popular political support, increase their funding, and pool their resources by hosting online dialogues, conducting debates and polls, and encouraging face-to-face meetings through Meetup.com technologies among civil society constituents, activists and organizations throughout the world. By encouraging these online and face-to-face interactions, the Network can help them identify like-minded allies, set common goals, develop action plans, pool their resources and use the full panoply of nonviolent political strategies and tactics to mobilize the popular, governmental, nongovernmental and private sector support they need to implement their plans and programs successfully. The Network will also publicize, support, co-sponsor and initiate nonviolent political and economic mobilization and action at all levels, especially at the grassroots, to protect human rights and security, end conflicts, and provide economic justice and inalienable political rights to all. It will help establish mediation processes and peace tables, and conduct petition drives and lobbying campaigns to influence decision-makers. It will develop alliances to support candidates for elective office who champion the creation and protection of sustainable livelihoods, and oppose those who do not. It will also cooperate in efforts to influence corporations and financial institutions to support the creation and protection of sustainable livelihoods, using the full range of pressure tactics, including boycotts. It will support alternative economic development strategies, organizations and capital providers in creating community-based assets and public-private partnerships that build sustainable livelihoods, grassroots economies, and democratic processes. 16. NGOs and Nonaligned Multilateral Forces This initiative is designed to demonstrate the capacity of global civil society constituents, activists, NGOs and their allies to establish, finacially support and deploy nonaligned multilateral forces anywhere in the world where conflicts of any kind are in the making or actually under way. Many conflicts that result in the loss of life and the violation of human rights and the compromise of human economic, political and social security are left to take their toll because nation-states and the inter-governmental agencies they have created do not have vital interests to defend in these conflicts. In contrast, global civil society has interests to defend whenever and wherever human rights and well-being are threatened, compromised or destroyed. Over the past 50 years, global civil society organizations have developed a legal framework of laws that legitimize their intervention, whether or not the sovereign authorities in these countries approve, or nation-states and intergovernmental agencies decide to intervene. The Third Force Network will work with NGOs to closely monitor crises and conflicts and messages received via its Grassroots Hotline reporting on threats and acts that compromise human rights and security. It will work with civil society constituents, activists, NGOs and allies to create task forces comprised of knowledgeable persons and groups at the grassroots where these conflicts are taking place to establish working groups to explore whether nonaligned multinational forces should be formed to intervene. These forces are ideally suited to undertake the following: 1. Negotiate and enforce ceasefires and peace accords that address and reconcile the concerns of all interested parties; 2. Provide long-term policing, in accordance with international law, to protect human rights and human economic, political and social security; 3. Administer short, medium and long-term humanitarian relief; 4. Assist local constituencies, in concert with economic development partners, to create sustainable livelihoods and flourishing fair and free market economies that assure economic justice and protect livelihoods and natural resources from internal and external predators; 5. Assist local constituencies build communities that create democratic governance processes that guarantee inalienable political rights to all citizens.
17. Third Force Network Grassroots Hotline The Hotline will enable civil society constituents, activists and NGOs around the world to post messages on the Third Force Network website reporting violations and threatened violations of human rights, as well as acts and threats that compromise human economic, political and social security. These postings can contain requests for assistance and contact information. 18. NGO Emergency Requests Helpline The Helpline will enable NGO's to post requests for emergency financial, technical, in-kind and organizational assistance, especially for support that enables them to intervene in complex emergencies at the grassroots that threaten human rights and human economic, political and social security. 19. Livelihood Lifeline and Third Force Network Bank Individuals and groups whose livelihoods are threatened or have been lost will be invited to email or phone in their needs and ideas for restoring them, once this feature is activated. These alerts and requests will be publicly posted so that NGOs, individuals and groups who can help them can contact them directly. If, however, the lives of those posting requests may be in danger, they will be able to submit their requests using aliases. In addition, the Third Force Network will forward their requests for livelihood help to NGOs and other resources, organizations and institutions and individuals who may be able to come to their aid. The Network will assist them in their efforts to identify sources of credit, loans and capital that provide financial resources on a fair, non-predatory, long-term basis designed to build sustainable grassroots livelihoods, businesses and economies. The Third Force Network will also establish its own bank and help others establish similar banks that do not engage in predatory investment and lending practices. The goal of the banks will be to enable civil society constituents, activists and allies to invest their money in institutions whose sole purpose is to build sustainable enterprises that create sustainable grassroots livelihoods wherever they are needed -- especially in conflict-prone areas like the Middle East. A related objective is to replace predatory banks whose sole goal is to achieve the greatest and quickest return on their investment without regard to their destructive impact on livelihoods, economies and environments. The Third Force Network Bank will provide consultants to groups, organizations, businesses and individuals who are seeking to build commercial enterprises that provide sustainable livelihoods and leverage community-based assets to build sustainable grassroots economies, particularly in the high-tech field. They will share expertise, "best practices" and proven, innovative models for fostering community-based asset building that generates and retains wealth, jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities at the grassroots level. The expected outcomes include a more equitable distribution of wealth and capital throughout the world, and greater participation of all groups in democratic decision-making at all levels in all sectors. The "Build a Livelihood and Stop Terrorism" Campaign. The Third Force Network will develop programs with the Third Force Network Bank to encourage civil society constituents and their allies around the world to help people without adequate livelihoods build sustainable livelihoods. Along the lines of the "Save the Children" model in which individuals "adopt" children in need, one program under consideration would be for the Third Force Network Bank to invite civil society constituents to help specific individuals build livelihoods by making interest-bearing deposits that will be earmarked for them in the form of loans. Such depositors would be able to contact the individuals who borrow money from the bank, and give them encouragement and advice, as will Bank lending officers. When the individuals repay their loans, the depositors will receive interest on their deposits. While many civil society constituents will be attracted to the campaign because it gives them the opportunity to bypass ineffective, wasteful and predatory "foreign" aid programs, other constituents will be attracted to it because it eradicates one of the primary root causes of terrorism, which is poverty and adverse economic and political conditions. Aggrieved individuals and groups who have acquired a stake in their communities in the form of livelihoods and assets to which livelihoods can provide access, tend to turn away from individual and collective violence and embrace democratic forms of governance once their immediate survival needs are met. The Third Force Network "Build a Livelihood and Stop Terrorism" campaign is designed to empower civil society constituents everywhere to take direct and immediate action to end poverty and stop terrorism simultaneously. 20. Third Force Network Livelihood Index The purpose of the index is to encourage grassroots communities throughout the world to create, maintain and publicize policy-oriented indices that chronicle increases and decreases in livelihoods and equality over time. The indices will also seek to identify the causes of changes in livelihoods and equality so that they can be used to develop public and private sector policies that favor the development of sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies, and reduce economic, social and political inequality. These indices and analyses will be based on current and emerging indices and instruments for measuring human development and inequality developed and utilized by national and international agencies, including those of the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report. They will depict the gains and losses of diverse groups and individuals as measured by a broad spectrum of variables, including health, employment, income, asset ownership, indebtedness, as well as access to capital, insurance, education, etc. Civil society constituents and organizations at local, regional, national and transnational levels can use livelihood indices to judge the performance of governmental officials and the impact of public policies, as well as the policies and practices of private sector institutions such as banks and corporations. They can use livelihood indices to rouse public opinion and spark debate about the causes of livelihood gains and losses, and build consensus about corrective actions that need to be undertaken by public and private actors and institutions to reverse losses, mitigate inequities, stop unfair practices and leverage employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. Once civil society constituents, activists, organizations and their allies have identified predatory influences and threats to livelihoods and increased equality, they can use livelihood indices as rallying tools to mobilize political support for political and economic action campaigns. They can create common fronts to overcome these threats and influences using all legal, nonviolent political and economic tools, including political campaigns to oust government officials and transnational economic boycotts to end unfair trading policies and practices. 21. Global Civil Society News from the Frontlines This online newspaper and newsletter will contain newsfeeds from other organizations and original stories written by professional and grassroots reporters and media, including bloggers. It will also publish featured stories and profiles of NGOs, their leaders, staffs and supporters designed to familiarize the global civil society community and the public at large with their accomplishments, goals and needs. 22. Global Civil Society Directory The Network will compile and maintain on this website a searchable online directory with links to the websites of civil society-related nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as service providers and vendors that offer specialized services to civil society. Civil society constituents and activists who are subscribing members of the Third Force Network will also be listed in the directory, with links to their websites. 23. Third Force Network Founder's Blog The blog provides a center stage and behind-the-scenes look at the movers and shakers whose efforts to protect civil society are transforming the global civil society movement into a politically powerful third force -- one that can end poverty and eradicate the economic and political causes of violence and terrorism. 24. Conclusion: 21st Century International Realignments Shift Power to Global Civil Society On March 11, 2005, at the conclusion of the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security, the comprehensive Madrid Agenda was issued by 55 former presidents of democratic countries who comprise the Club of Madrid. They convened the Summit under the patronage of the King of Spain to commemorate the victims of the Madrid terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004, and identify ways to defend democracy and protect human security while preventing future terrorist attacks. In many respects, the Club of Madrid's Summit and Agenda challenge many of the assumptions, policies and strategies being pursued by the Bush administration in its "war on terrorism". While there was widespread agreement that the attacks of 9/11 represent a crime against humanity, and the U.S. was justified in the retaliatory actions it undertook in Aghanistan, many world leaders and heads of state who spoke at the summit stressed that the roots of terrorism are primarily economic and political in nature. To stop terrorism, poverty and injustice must be overcome. Military efforts to "decapitate" terrorist networks by apprehending their leaders will not suffice to eradicate the causes of terrorism, and military forces that kill civilians, and abuse, terrorize and murder detainees will increase support for terrorists and enable them to recruit new operatives and spread around the world. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan gave a keynote address to the closing plenary of the Summit in which he outlined a Global Strategy for Fighting Terrorism. (to be continued) and Human Security Laws The following list is an abbreviated compendium adapted from the International Law section of the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS: THE INTERNATIONAL BILL OF HUMAN RIGHTS
OTHER INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS
World Conference on Human Rights and Millennium Assembly The Right of Self-Determination
Human Rights in the Administration of Justice: Protection of Persons Subjected to Detention or Imprisonment
Social Welfare, Progress and Development
Promotion and Protection of Human Rights
Right to Work and to Fair Conditions of Employment Freedom of Association
War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, Including Genocide
Humanitarian Law
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Amy Yee, US tourism 'losing billions because of image', Financial Times, 8 May 2005. Dr. N.J. Bordier attended the University of Geneva and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. She was awarded Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the Graduate Faculties of the University of Geneva, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the Department of Public Law and Government, and studied under former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sino-Soviet expert Donald Zagoria and Middle East scholar J.C. Hurewitz. A citizen of Switzerland and the U.S., she has been employed at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, where she conducted studies of economic development and the status of women, and the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Bureau of Research. In addition, she has held faculty, research and administrative positions at the University of Geneva, Fordham University, Columbia University, the New School University and Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she was appointed associate dean. She entered the private sector in 1988 and has served on the launch teams of several Internet-based enterprises and precursors, including the online network, Prodigy Services Company, a joint venture of IBM, Sears and CBS. She was a member of the New York Technology Council Advisory Group convened by the New York Academy of Sciences. The Third Force Network White Paper is a continuously evolving document. Your feedback and input are most welcome.
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