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The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the forced sale of Merrill Lynch which took shape over the weekend of 13-14 September 2008 have confirmed the scale and gravity of the global financial crisis. The difficulties at the insurance company AIG are a glimpse that there is more to come. But the extent of the wreckage makes it ever more important to analyse correctly what has gone wrong. For just as a faulty medical diagnosis can harm the patient, so a flawed economic diagnosis can lead to wrong conclusions and bad solutions.

Ann Pettifor is executive director of Advocacy International. In the 1990s she helped design and lead the international campaign Jubilee 2000. She is editor of The Real World Economic Outlook (Palgrave, 2003) and author of The Coming First World Debt Crisis (Palgrave, 2006)
Also by Ann Pettifor on openDemocracy:
"The coming first world debt crisis" (1 September 2003)
"Ethiopia: the price of indifference" (19 February 2004)
"Gleneagles, 7/7 and Africa" (4 July 2006)
"Debtonation: how globalisation dies" (15 August 2007)
"Globalisation: sleepwalking to disaster" (11 December 2007)
"The G8 in a global mess: 1920s and 1980s lessons" (7 July 2008)In this respect, orthodox economists continue to be part of the problem that Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch (and, before them, Northern Rock, Bear Stearns, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) represent. For so long they turned a blind eye to the finance sector, to privatised credit-creation and its role in fuelling asset-bubbles. In so doing they revealed their inability to predict, understand or offer solutions to a consuming crisis.

This article looks at how such failures took hold in the context of the deregulated global financial system of the 2000s, and why the predicted collapse of this system begins in the United States.

The deregulated economy

The former chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States, Alan Greenspan, has himself said that what is happening to Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch is a "once-in-a-century" event. Yet the way many orthodox economists characterise Greenspan's own role in the global "debtonation" of the post-9 August 2007 era reveals how far they remain trapped in the rituals of evasion (see "Debtonation: how globalisation dies", 15 August 2007).

The key argument these economists make here is that the current crisis has been caused by the low interest-rate monetary policy Greenspan presided over after 2001. This case permits a twofold diversion - for it pins the blame for the crisis on interest rates (not deregulation of credit-creation) and on central bankers (not the private-finance sector). The policy implications of this focus neatly avoid proposals for what is clearly and urgently required: re-regulation of the finance sector.

But the argument that makes interest-rates a fundamental cause of the crisis is wrong even in its own terms - not least as it can lead to a recommendation that higher interest-rates are a way out of the mess. The crisis facing banks and individuals - indeed whole economies - buried under mountains of debt and threatened by an intractable deflation makes this a truly deranged proposal.

The phenomenon of "deleveraging" as a way of managing these mountains of debt helps explain why. Deleveraging means paying off (or more accurately writing off) the crazy amounts borrowed on the back of tiny amounts of real money - say the $1 million borrowed (or leveraged) on the back of $1,000 of sound collateral; deleveraging that debt would entail paying off / writing off $999,000. The inevitable result in many cases is bankruptcy, part of a wider deflationary momentum in the economy.

Debtors of all kinds - official, corporate, individual -  are already struggling to repay at the current high real rates of interest. That is the core element of the debt crisis (or "credit-crunch"). To prescribe higher interest-rates would turn crisis for many individuals, companies and banks into catastrophe.

Also in openDemocracy on the global financial crisis of 2007-08:
Saskia Sassen, "Globalisation, the state and the democratic deficit" (18 July 2007)
Christopher Harvie, "Gordon Brown vs Scotland: the balance-sheet" (17 September 2007)
Tony Curzon Price, "Gordon Brown: between rock and hard place" (18 September 2007)
Robert Wade, "The financial crisis: burst bubble, frayed model" (1 October 2007)
Avinash D Persaud, "The dollar standard: (only the) beginning of the end" (5 December 2007)
Fred Halliday, "Sovereign Wealth Funds: power vs principle" (5 March 2008)
Tony Curzon Price, "Lehman: technocrats' endgame" (15 September 2008)Here, the context of Alan Greenspan's post-2001 role is relevant in understanding the global economy then and now. For his policy of lowering interest-rates was a reaction to the bursting of the dot.com-bubble - which, like the property-bubble which burst in 2007, was fuelled and inflated by easy, unregulated and privatised credit-creation. Moreover, these low interest-rates in the early years of the 21st century were more a function of the new global capital markets than of the powers of central bankers to set low rates.

The result of deregulation (i.e. "globalisation") in the 2000s was and is that capital can flow free and untrammelled  around the world. The accompanying collapse of the Bretton Woods system (which contained mechanisms for curtailing the growth of imbalances between nations) meant also the growth of large balance-sheet contrasts (massive deficits in the United States and Britain, huge surpluses in China and Japan, for example). The countries in surplus - China most of all -  exported their excess capital to the US.

This flood of capital lowered rates of interest in the US - to the chagrin of Alan Greenspan, who by this time was trying to raise rates. Greenspan could have done this by erecting barriers to the movement of capital - capital controls - thereby preventing China's surplus capital from having an impact on US interest-rates. Instead, he preferred to pretend that he was impotent in the face of a mysterious "conundrum".

An Alan Greenspan or any other central banker armed with controls over the movement of capital would be able to switch a key lever of the economy: the rate of interest. That is, not just the "policy rate" or the "official rate" (often known as the "bank rate") but all rates - safe and risky, short and long. Where central bankers abandon such controls, and delegate powers over interest-rates to private bankers, they are impotent in the face of capital movements that affect the yields on bonds, and therefore of interest-rates within their domains.

The sharecropper society

The momentous news of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch - part of the larger process unfolding since "debtonation day", 9 August 2007 - brings all the failings of the seven years that preceded it into even sharper focus.

In 2003, as part of a team at the new economics foundation, I edited a book intended to "shadow" the International Monetary Fund's "world economic outlook", which we believed was based on the delusions of orthodox economics (see The Real World Economic Outlook, Palgrave, 2003). An article in openDemocracy at that time - five years ago almost to the day - heralded the "provocative new research ... which argues that the ‘first world' is approaching a major debt crisis... The reckless financial policies of leading western powers in the last two decades make it likely that the next seismic debt crisis will be in America, not Argentina" (see "The coming first world debt crisis", 1 September 2008).

The book and article explained that the current, post-Bretton Woods international financial architecture ("globalisation") was so structured as to enable the United States to "hoover up" money from the rest of the world, and use these resources to live beyond its means. I wrote then: "It is this financial system which makes US financiers so confident that the rest of the world will continue to finance their nation's extravagant spending binge. In the words of David Goldman, head of debt research at Bank of America Securities: ‘America is at little risk for the foreseeable future, simply because the world's capital has nowhere else to go' (Wall Street Journal, 13 August 2003)".

The fall of Lehman Brothers is final confirmation that the world's capital does now have somewhere else to go. This event thus marks the beginning of the collapse of today's international financial architecture, which has rested on very shaky foundations since Richard Nixon's administration unilaterally dismantled the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and began to shape the new.

The reason why the Lehman Brothers collapse is historic is that this institution expected until a very late stage to be saved by the state-run Korea Development Bank (KDP). But Seoul looked at the books and had other ideas: on 9 September 2008 - to the astonishment of Lehman's shareholders and investors - this ever-so-reliable ally of Washington refused to fund a bail-out.

The fact that such sovereign wealth funds as the KDP are no longer willing to finance reckless US institutions is of itself of the greatest significance. It implies a lack of confidence in the solvency of US financial institutions, and indeed of the United States as a whole. This will lead to a fall in the dollar, which will have profound economic implications for the global economy, and for globalisation as a whole.

The billionaire investor Warren Buffett wrote a letter to shareholders in March 2005, in which he predicted that by 2015 the net ownership of the US by outsiders would amount to $11 trillion. "Americans ... would chafe at the idea of perpetually paying tribute to their creditors and owners abroad. A country that is now aspiring to an ‘ownership society' will not find happiness in - and I'll use hyperbole here for emphasis - a 'sharecropper's society'."

Buffett was and is right. The collapse of banks and investment funds, and of the international financial system - a consequence of the unpardonable folly of the powerful - is serious and dangerous enough. But what is even more to be feared is the emergence of a sharecropper society, angry at its downfall. Thus will America's problem become the world's.

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China was shaken on 1 July 2008 by a rare attack on its police force. Yang Jia, a man from Beijing single-handedly stormed a police station in the Zhabei area of Shanghai, stabbing six officers to death and seriously wounding three others and a security-guard. This was an unprecedented attack on the police by a citizen, which left the nation shocked. There was extensive media coverage, which included tens of thousands of online postings. The deluge of reportage and comment can be compared with the case of the former American football star OJ Simpson in the United States in 1995.

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Li Datong is a Chinese journalist and a former editor of Bingdian (Freezing Point), a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily newspaper Among Li Datong's recent articles in openDemocracy:

"China: after the quake, the debate" (16 June 2008)

"China's leaders, the media, and the internet" (4 July 2008)

"China's digital nationalism: Kung Fu Panda under fire" (16 July 2008)

"The Weng'an model: China's fix-it governance" (30 July 2008)

"The Olympics: was China ready?" (22 August 2008)

"The Beijing Olympics: the last award" (29 August 2008)

72 544x376 Normal 0 false false false Both the media and internet users were soon asking the same questions. Yang was effectively committing suicide. Why; what were his motives; was he mentally ill? The initial results of the investigation were surprising. Yang was quite normal. He was born in 1980, in a Beijing courtyard near Nanluoguxiang, a street that is now a popular haunt of foreign tourists. After his parents divorced when he was 14, he stayed with his mother. He graduated from elementary school, then junior middle school, then technical school - a normal education for a child from an average family.

But after leaving school he never found stable work. Perhaps surprisingly, as a child he was known for sticking to the rules - he never cheated at games, put his father's discarded cigarette-butts in the bin, and told his mother off if she ignored a "keep off the grass" sign. Chinese netizens found his weblog, which revealed  that he liked to read and would "often sit in the library all day"' He enjoyed hiking and savoured the feeling of exhaustion after a long day's walk. He wrote of a wish to meet more people and make friends, to find a beautiful girlfriend. He might not have been rich or happy, but there were no signs of anti-social tendencies.

A dark road

So media attention turned to a "minor" confrontation that took place on 15 October 2007. Yang had taken a trip to Shanghai and rented a bicycle. As he waited at traffic-lights in the evening, a policeman called him over. His bike was unlicensed, and Yang was asked for his identity-card. There were thirty or more bikes at the lights - why was Yang stopped? The policeman was not able to confirm that all the other bikes were licensed. From a four-minute recording of the event released by the police, Yang can be seen refusing to provide identification and demanding to know why he had been singled out. At 9pm he was taken to the local police station, where it was quickly determined that the bike was indeed rented. Normally Yang should have been released immediately, but he was detained until 2am. What occurred in those five hours?

Whatever happened, it was something that Yang could not accept, something that he considered illegal. It was not his first experience of this nature. While waiting for a train during a 2006 trip to Datong, he suffered a broken front tooth after an encounter with police. Yang complained, ultimately receiving an apology and 30,000 renminbi (RMB) in compensation. After the incident in Shanghai he returned to Beijing and complained in writing and by email to the city's public-security bureau and the ministry of public security, making numerous phone-calls to the Shanghai police. The Shanghai public-security bureau twice sent staff to Beijing to discuss compensation, but Yang refused the offered amount. It may be asked why the police, who have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, would agree to pay compensation.

In any case, the police eventually lost patience. A month before Yang's attack an official at the Zhabei public-security bureau reportedly said that if he caused further trouble he would be arrested, and that not a penny of compensation would be paid. With that, the legal channels that Yang had been pursuing for nine months were cut off. But Yang's personal convictions would not let him leave the matter at that. A month later, the attack took place.

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Among openDemocracy's articles on China in 2008:

James A Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "China's political colours: from monochrome to palette" (14 May 2008)

Susan Brownell, "The Olympics' ‘civilising' legacy: St Louis to Beijing" (23 May 2008)

Emily Lau, "Tiananmen, 1989-2008" (4 June 2008)

Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "Tiananamen's shifting legacy" (26 June 2008)

Kerry Brown, "China on Olympic eve: a globalisation of sentiment" (11 July 2008)

Kerry Brown, "China changes itself: an Olympics report" (20 August 2008)

An open question

I draw parallels with the OJ Simpson case not just because of the media attention both incidents received, but also because the earlier drama in the United States was subject to detailed reports and interpretation in the Chinese media. This indeed was when the Chinese public became aware of the idea of "procedural justice";  and since that time the concept has become progressively stronger. It is said the majority of Americans believe that Simpson was guilty. But in America evidence not obtained legally is inadmissible in court; even the integrity of those who collect the evidence will be examined. Simpson's defence team used this angle of attack to obtain a not-guilty verdict. A strict adherence to legal processes may result in some criminals escaping justice; but if those safeguards are not in place, the legitimate rights of the majority will suffer. All cases of wrongful conviction which have been seen in China for many years have been the result of the police ignoring proper processes, or even forcing confessions.

But because of that awareness, China's lawyers, media and public have been raising questions about Yang's case. Why haven't his letters of complaint been made public? Why aren't the recording of his five hours of interrogation available? Why did his mother disappear just after the attack? Why was a legal consultant to the Zhabei authorities a pointed as Yang's lawyer? With the Shanghai public-security bureau a party to the case, why wasn't it handled outside of Shanghai - as, legally, it should have been? Why was the Beijing lawyer employed by Yang's father not able to see the defendant, instead receiving a "written" rejection? Why did the lawyer employed by Yang's mother in Shanghai just happen to be the one chosen by Shanghai police? Why was the hearing held in private, with neither media nor public allowed to attend?

With so many questions, who can believe that Yang received a fair trial? It is notable that the Chinese public, usually supporters of the death penalty for murder, have in this case raised voices of disagreement - with some online even proclaiming him a hero, a warrior who fought violence with violence. What does this all mean?

Several media reports indicate that in the run-up to the Olympic games, the Chinese government employed a number of overseas public-relations firms to create a positive international image. The generally favourable coverage of the event reflects the success of this strategy. But the Chinese government should be aware that a genuinely positive international image will come from protecting human rights, preventing interference in the legal process and ensuring transparency and freedom of reporting. That would improve China's international image no end - but no public-relations firm can do it for us.

Yang Jia was sentenced to death on 1 September 2008. He has been allowed to appeal, and the death penalty must then be confirmed by the supreme court. Is there any chance the truth will come out in time? The public have little hope. But if and when Yang is executed, when the truth is finally known it will be the government itself that suffers most.

Iain Gray faces a daunting set of challenges as the new leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament. In an OurKingdom essay, Gerry Hassan asks whether the party could yet find a way forward, in Scotland and beyond, in challenging an unravelling global order.  Read the rest of this post...

read more

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The headlines in Poland's main daily newspapers were unanimous. Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to Moscow and Tbilisi on 8 September 2008 to seek assurances from the Russians that they would withdraw their troops to the positions they held before the outbreak of war with Georgia on 7-8 August was a failure. "Sarkozy failed to take the Kremlin", declared one; "Russia dictates to Europe", proclaimed another; "Sarkozy defeated. Peace with Georgia possible only on Russia's terms", shouted a third.

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Krzysztof Bobiński is the president of Unia & Polska, a pro-European think-tank in Warsaw. He was the Financial Times's Warsaw correspondent (1976-2000) and later published Unia & Polska magazine. He writes for European Voice and is an associate editor on the Europe section of Europe's World

Among Krzysztof Bobinski's articles in openDemocracy:

"Democracy in the European Union, more or less" (27 July 2005)

"The European Union's Turkish dilemma" (2 December 2005)

"Belarus's message to Europe" (22 March 2006)

"Poland's populist caravan" (14 July 2006)

"Hungary's 1956, central Europe's 2006: beyond illusion" (27 October 2006)

"European unity: reality and myth" (21 March 2007)

"The Polish confusion" (22 June 2007)

"Europe's coal-mine, Ireland's canary" (20 June 2008)

The reaction ran counter to Mikheil Saakashvili's obvious relief at his press conference with Sarkozy and José Manuel Barroso (president of the European commission) that evening at the result the French president had managed to achieve (see Paul Gillespie, "The European Union and Russia after Georgia", 10 September 2008). A pledge of withdrawal by 1 October and the insertion of observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) into the space between the Russians, their South Ossetian and Abkhazian supporters and the Georgians was obviously welcome to Georgia's pressurised president. 

But just as attitudes throughout Europe towards Russia are beginning to stiffen, so stereotypes in Poland (and most probably throughout the new European Union member-states and elsewhere in the post-Soviet space) remain strong. Indeed they include more than a touch of Schadenfreude at the dilemmas Sarkozy faces. The local newspapers, the radio and the television talk-show hosts all almost palpably yearn for more evidence of western weakness and gullibility in the face of Russian might and brutal deception. They all seem to want the EU to fail to resolve the crisis, to be seen to be fragile and craven. "We knew all along what they, the Russians, are like and you are still unwilling to believe us", is the near-universal underlying sentiment. 

A region moves

This reaction shows that there is still a gulf between the western European way of doing things and perceptions in new member-states such as Poland. But if truth be told, Poland's government (which is not to be confused with the country's president, Lech Kaczynski) has remained remarkably calm and indeed is ready - despite what has happened in Georgia - to continue a dialogue with the Russians.

Indeed, that is only one of the pigs which, quite unexpectedly, has flown across the skies in the five weeks since the end of the major hostilities in Georgia on 12 August. The aftermath of the brutal conflict promises both to be long and to bring significant changes to the EU's relationship with Russia. The most difficult question to answer is whether Moscow will decide that it wants a fruitful relationship with the west or choose a not-so-splendid isolation (see Ivan Krastev, "Russia and the Georgia war: the great-power trap", 19 August 2008).

The signals remain mixed. But there are at least four other developments since the Caucasus events which overturn settled views of what is occurring, and suggest that the Georgia crisis has jolted governments into becoming more imaginative in revising longstanding and seemingly intractable positions.

First, the visit by the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to Warsaw on 11 September 2008, so soon after the Russians had threatened to punish Poland for President Kaczynski's foray to Tbilisi and his public promise to fight for a free Georgia; and indeed, after growls by Russian military leaders that Poland would become a nuclear target if the American anti-missile base was installed there.

Second, who would have expected that Poland would be one of the first to call on the European Union to lift sanctions against Alexander Lukashenko's regime in Belarus? After all, it is Polish NGOs and members of the European parliament (MEPs) who have been most strident in their condemnation of one of Europe's last authoritarians. Not long ago, any mention of detente with Minsk brought instant criticism.

Third, the remarks made almost in passing by the Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb in a speech to Finnish ambassadors and an interview with Die Presse (Austria) to the effect that his country might consider joining Nato. True, Finland's president and prime minister almost immediately scorned the suggestion; but the fact is that Stubb (who played a significant mediating role alongside Sarkozy in the Georgia-Russia conflict) said it and thus challenged an enduring consensus in Helsinki on keeping an equal distance in military terms between Russia and the west.

Fourth, and most amazing of all, Turkey's President Abdullah Gul travelled to Yerevan on the occasion of an Armenia-Turkey football match and met his Armenia counterpart Serzh Sarkisian. The unprecedented visit to Armenia by a Turkish head of state, against the background of the bitter controversy over the issue of the 1915 genocide and the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries, has great political as well as symbolic significance. It reflects how keen Turkey is to help stabilise the situation in the Black Sea, resolve the crisis in the Caucasus and keep Nato warships (its own excepted) at a safe distance in the Mediterranean.

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Among openDemocracy's articles on the fallout of the Georgia-Russia war of August 2008:

Donald Rayfield, "The Georgia-Russia conflict: lost territory, found nation" (13 August 2008)

Neal Ascherson, "After the war: recognising reality in Abkhazia and Georgia" (15 August 2008)

George Hewitt, "Abkhazia and South Ossetia: heart of conflict, key to solution" (18 August 2008)

Ivan Krastev, "Russia and the Georgia war: the great-power trap" (19 August 2008)

Ghia Nodia, "Russian war and Georgian democracy" (22 August 2008)

Fred Halliday, "The miscalculation of small nations" (24 August 2008)

Robert Parsons, "Georgia after war: the political landscape" (26 August 2008)

Vicken Cheterian, "Georgia's forgotten legacy" (3 September 2008)

Rein Müllerson, "The world after the Russia-Georgia war" (5 September 2008)

Paul Gillespie, ""The European Union and Russia after Georgia" (10 September 2008)

The Turkish decision over Armenia was taken within the context of Istanbul's wider "Caucasus platform" initiative - which would bring Georgia, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey into an organisation promoting regional cooperation and reconciliation. If this were to succeed, it might help in the search for a solution to the problem of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as well as the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.

A time to look

The Turkish dimension of the Georgia-Russia fallout may have deeper reverberations. Turkey won credit for its bold gesture from both Nicolas Sarkozy (current holder of the European Union presidency) and Olli Rehn (the EU's enlargement commissioner). This raises the possibility that relations between Turkey and the EU might soon emerge from their present doldrums; indeed, given the above shifts in policy and attitude in the past five weeks, is it unthinkable that the French president might begin to reconsider his opposition to Turkey's membership of the EU?

The crisis has also brought Ukraine and its EU membership aspirations into the spotlight. Who would have expected even in early summer 2008 that a British foreign minister would fly urgently to Kyiv (Kiev) and deliver a strident call of support for Ukraine's right to chose its own path, as David Miliband did on 27 August? But the new concern that Russia might pose a risk to Ukraine's independence has seen the EU edging closer to a commitment to the country's eventual membership.

Here, the Turkey and Ukraine situations come together. For it is notable that Turkey's Caucasus platform does not include Ukraine. Since the early 1990s, Ankara has preferred to improve relations with Moscow (the devil the Turks know) rather than with Kyiv (which is more of an unknown quantity). But Turkey knows full well that Ukraine is a major potential source of tension in the Black Sea with its de facto dispute over the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, which erupted during the blessedly short Georgian war. The lease for the port runs out in 2017 when Ukraine looks set to ask the fleet to go.

There is undoubtedly a role for European Union policy in the Black Sea. Romania and Bulgaria are, after all, now EU members and a Black Sea regional-cooperation formula bringing in all the littoral states including Russia could be a useful complement to the Caucasus platform. The EU's regional neighbourhood initiative, the Black Sea Basin Joint Operational Programme, could offer a framework for shared action here (see Neal Ascherson, "After the war: recognising reality in Abkhazia and Georgia", 15 September 2008).

The crisis has also given a much needed lease of life to the search for a common EU energy policy. Here, if anywhere, Poland should be taking advantage of the apparent change of heart towards Russia by public opinion in France and Germany, and growing concern in Germany in particular over a dependency on Russian energy supplies.

Thus, the Georgian push into South Ossetia on the night of 7-8 August 2008 and the Russian military response has set in motion a number of processes in Europe, the Black Sea region and even central Asia. A number of long neglected problems (such as Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenia-Turkey dispute, as well as South Ossetia and Abkhazia themselves) have come into sharp focus.

Across Europe, attitudes towards Russia have hardened. Any further delays in   the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia proper will compound tensions. The European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on 15 September 2008 who confirmed the despatch of 200 EU observers to Georgia under the terms of the 8 September agreement are well aware that this is a stage in a longer process.

But under the surface, the changes which have happened in the month since the height of the Georgia-Russia conflict have been missed by Polish newspapers editors at least. They may also be underestimating Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel's resolve in the face of Russian intransigence over Georgia. Europe since the armed confrontation of August 2008 ended become a more interesting place. Clear eyes and open minds will be needed if it is to become a safer place too. Clinging to stereotypes does the latter aim no good at all.

Tim Duy has a great analysis of what the week-end teaches us about where we are with Lehman, Merrill, AIG etc. I think he is right that this is a signal from the US authorities that the socialisation of losses is over; that any taking-over of dud assets by the public will now go through Congress, and not through a technocratic nod-and-wink. The danger, as it has been for a year, is contagion to the real economy---when do firms providing real value find that either a) demand has fallen such that they have to cut back operations or b) that their own credit lines for working capital and investment programs are closed, and so have to cut back?

That danger still exists. Certainly, as banks find it harder and harder to satisfy regulators that they have enough capital to guarantee the loans they have made, they will cut back their lending. So far, the Fed has become banker-of-last-resort by allowing bonds and now even shares  to be put up as guarantees for cash loans. 

In any case, the week-end moves by the Fed mean that the music of time is picking up again. After 1 year of waiting, time-haltingly hoping, that the crisis would resolve itself, the regulator has called time-up. There may yet need to be large-scale public cash injections into the corporate sector to avoid deep depression. But this week-end shows the regulator has, at last, given up on hopes of self-repair. So adopt the pose of the surfer caught between breaking waves: take a deep breath and hope the turbulence of the breaking behemoth does not keep our economies trapped under for too long.

When we re-emerge, expect to see JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs still standing, but not much else in the financial firmament. Expect a divided world of finance---hyper-regulated standard products on one side, and a pool of crazy, gambling sharks on the other. Think twice about risk-reward before surfing in the sharky waters again.

 

st1\:* { BEHAVIOR: url(#ieooui) }

Russia's isolation by the international community in August-September 2008 was to a great extent determined by objective circumstances. However, one subjective factor played an important role too. That was the character of Vladimir Putin, who despite his change of role from President to Prime Minister remains the dominant political figure in the country.

The economic growth of the last decade, based as it is on oil and gas, is the most important of these objective factors. This gives the Kremlin considerable room for political manoeuvre. Europe's dependence on Russia's energy resources mitigates the foreign policy consequences of drastic military steps. Consumers of our energy resources are wary of falling out with Russia without very good reason.

The considerable growth in real income of the Russian population has also served to distract people from politics. It gives them the illusion that everything is going well in the country, and that the deterioration of our relationship with the outside world will not affect their wallets.

Putin's hard-line policy has also been popular in Russia, as we have seen in recent years. Many citizens feel that the country has ‘got up from its knees' after the difficult years of the 1990s. They believe that the country's standing is enhanced by its ability to stand up for its national interests and to lash out at an enemy now and then. It is hardly surprising that the Kremlin plays up to this to strengthen its own position. ‘A small, victorious war' has been considered good for public opinion since the late 1990s, when Putin set out to establish his power in Chechnya. The invasion of Georgia in August 2008 also went down well. Especially as the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basaev and the Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili are regarded by many Russians as aggressors.

The effect of US policy

US policy in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf region has also played a significant part in changing Russians' ideas about good and evil in the sphere of international relations. In the late 1980s- early 1990s the democratic West had a kind of moral authority for many citizens of Russia who supported reforms. That authority has been lost. People associate the invasion of Georgia with the invasion of Iraq and the threats against Iran. They compare our support for the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with the recognition of Kosovo's independence by many western countries.

I myself work a lot with students, and do a good deal of public speaking to middle-aged and elderly audiences. I can say from experience that even at the very beginning of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, it was far easier to convince audiences of the need for constructive cooperation with western countries than it is today, after Kosovo and Iraq.

The Putin factor

Economic, domestic and international political factors have thus all combined to encourage Putin to take the drastic action which has led to increased international isolation. However, Russia's foreign policy decisions have also been informed by personal characteristics that go back to the Prime Minister's childhood. In a country with a real division of power, with a system of political checks and balances, these personal characteristics would not have such major consequences. But in Russia today, where Putin's authority is extremely high and where the authority of the government and leading political party are determined almost exclusively by public support for the so-called national leader, these personal qualities play a most important part in determining political policy.

When explaining his position on an issue, Russia's Prime Minister has recourse more and more often these days to arguments of the ‘it takes one to know one' kind. Take his response in an interview on the ARD television channel after the war when a German journalist criticised the bombing of a residential building in the Georgian city of Gori. He referred with heavy irony to the Americans, who in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan killed hundreds of peaceful civilians. The same goes for Russia's recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The main Russian argument is that western countries behaved exactly the same in Kosovo.

Events in Afghanistan and the Balkans are, of course, objective factors in international politics. But in his speeches, Putin characteristically puts much less emphasis on standing up for Russian interests than on the fact that Russia is not behaving any worse than anyone else.

Putin the street fighter

So what characteristics are we talking about? Putin's own stories of his childhood and reports by several people who knew him at the time are very telling. Commentators tend to be misled by the fact that Putin comes from Petersburg, often called the cultural capital of Russia, as also by the fact that he graduated from the second best university of the country, and speaks German fluently. While taking all this into account, we should not ignore other important aspects.

Putin is the first of his family to belong to the intelligentsia. His father worked at a factory. His grandfather was a cook, and his great-grandfather was a serf in the provinces. Putin may have spent his childhood in Petersburg (Leningrad as was), but it was not an elite intellectual environment. He lived in a ‘kommunalka', a communal apartment, where several families who are not related live in the same apartment because they cannot afford one of their own. There are ‘kommunalkas' in Petersburg to this day. Like many children those days, he spent his free time outside in the yard, with boys of a pretty rough kind.

Volodya Putin was clearly a boy not lacking in noble instincts. Almost everyone who knew him as a child remembers that he stood up for the weak, and that although he was short and puny, he was brave enough to fight boys stronger and heavier than him. But commentators have studiously overlooked another very striking and important fact. Conflicts did not so much seek Putin out, as Putin seek them out. Do I see a fight? Can I join in? And when he did join in, he always threw the first punch.

In drawing a psychological portrait of Putin, some Russian writers have observed that people like him are not aggressively inclined. But so many tales of fights involving the young Vladimir have surfaced that they sound more like scenes from a Hollywood thriller about gangs from Chicago or the Bronx than the accounts of eyewitnesses from Leningrad in the 1960s-1970s. Life in Petersburg was certainly no idyll at the time. Yet no Petersburg boy of that generation (and the author of this article is one of them) could really say that there were fights going on on every street corner.

Actually, Putin himself has been quite open with journalists about what he was like in Leningrad in the 60s:

‘...I was a hooligan, not a pioneer.'

‘Are you joking?'

‘Absolutely not. I was a real hood.'

Political analysts usually ignore this self-assessment, or treat it as a joke. But they're wrong. Boys like young Volodya were rare in those days. Very few boys in the 1960s-70s were not included in the so-called pioneers, the mass children's communist organisation named after Lenin. There were probably not more than one or two in a class. And how many were summoned to a ‘comrades' court' by their neighbors? This really was unusual.

Putin really was hauled up in front of one of these. Although he was a bright little fellow, who didn't work badly and got Bs and Cs, he really was not admitted to the pioneers until he was 12, as opposed to the normal age of 9. Hoolignism was the only reason why he was not allowed to join the ranks of the ‘young Leninists'.

‘Growing up in the yard was like living in the jungle,' Putin once said himself. ‘Very much so. Oh yes!" And Vladimir's life soon began to develop according to the laws of the jungle. Theatres, museums and concert halls - was it that kind of Petersburg childhood? Well, not exactly.

To be top dog out there in the yard, you had to smash your opponent in the mug and ‘work him over' (this is the expression Putin once used about terrorists, when he was already president). What's more, you had to fight desperately ‘to the last drop of blood', without backing down. There are lots of stories about him as a fighter. And they all say the same thing, what words they use. Some say Volodya would work himself into a frenzy. Some say he was like a tiger, some that he was like a panther. What they're getting at is that this was the boy's way of expressing himself. It was character-forming.

Later on, when he was studying at the KGB intelligence school, he was described as having ‘very little sense of danger'. Perhaps this is an inborn characteristic. But it is more likely that it is the result of a childhood spent fighting in the yard, having to hit your opponent first, and leave the thinking till later. Isn't this the quality we see in Putin later, when the Russian authorities began the second Chechen war? Isn't this what distinguishes his actions today, what is leading to Russia's isolation?

The well-known Russian publicist Andrei Piontkovsky wrote in March 2000: ‘The Petersburg yard where a boy from a poor family living in a ‘kommunalka' spent all his time - this is where he really learned about life. An ordinary yard of the 1950s-60s, with brutal fights, the power of the street gangs and the cult of force. To survive in this environment, weedy little Vovochka had to be cunning and brutal, to appear strong and never experience moral doubts and suffering.'

The crucible of Putin's morality

While Piontkovsky has put his finger on the factors that formed Putin's character, the conclusion is still somewhat one-sided. Putin's personality is more complex, and it cannot all be explained by cunning, brutality and lack of moral norms. But what it does explain is the very particular notion of morality that underpins the Russian president's character.

There is the desire to punish the bad guys without really thinking about the political consequences. The desire to fight uncompromisingly, because bad guys only understand force. The desire to take things to their logical conclusion, as boys do in the yard, where a good fight is the norm, where a bad peace is nothing more than a temporary hiatus, an accidental exception to the rule.

Putin's love of martial arts - initially boxing, then sambo (unarmed self-defence) and later judo - all this goes back to the days when he lived by the laws of the jungle. And it also explains his genuine desire to serve in the KGB. He was still a schoolboy when he went to the Leningrad office of the KGB on Liteiny Prospekt to ask how he could get a job there.

Putin the communicator

And the KGB taught him another very important thing. When talking about what he did in the KGB, Putin has said himself that they made him a specialist in communicating with people. And he does indeed communicate extremely professionally in public, as well as with individuals on whom he wants to make a good impression. Almost everyone he talks to says that when they leave the president, they are quite sure that they've managed to persuade him. But none of the highest ranking officials in Russia can say today that they have been able to persuade Putin to follow their policy on fundamental issues.

Perhaps this is what happened to President Bush, who said after one of his first meetings with Putin that he was able to get a sense of his soul. Yet despite this Bush has not been able to establish a good working relationship with the Russian leader.

Today Putin acts on the international stage in more or less the same way that he fought boys in the yard. He acts with flair, trying to achieve personal self-affirmation, rather than a rational, positive result. But at the same time he is extremely good at concealing his aims, at finding an individual approach to everyone he deals with. The leaders of western countries were clearly not able to understand this strategy, and as a result they lost out to Russia.

 

The other September 11th, the Chilean coup of 1973, may offer a clue
to the current malaise of Britain's Labour Party.

Hassan Akram (Cambridge): Gordon Brown is in serious trouble. Behind the scenes people are no longer talking about whether he should be replaced but when. But if Brown is to be replaced we need to understand what's gone wrong with his government. And to understand what's gone wrong for Brown we could do well by starting with September 11th.

September 11th marked a horrific terrorist outrage. In the English speaking world people think automatically of the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers. But in Chile September 11th was the date, in 1973, of a very different type of terrorist attack: the bombing of the Chilean Presidential Palace (La Moneda) by rebel officers in Chile's own Armed Forces. Unlike the Al Qaeda attack these rebels were actually successful in overthrowing the democratically elected government, unsurprising given that the Chilean terrorists enjoyed the support and funding of the USA. The death of the left-wing Chilean President, Salvador Allende thus marked a clear victory for American power in the world. Read the rest of this post...

read more

In the immediate aftermath of the skybombing of the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001, anyone with a minimum of human sympathy will be overwhelmed by feelings of rage and despair. Politicians, responding to the public mood, declare a “war on terrorism”. The airline industry goes into the proverbial nosedive. The stock markets tumble and experts predict that to the cost in human sorrow will be added the pain of economic recession. Muslim statesmen and spokesmen, fearful of the consequences of America’s ire, denounce the attack as contrary to everything that Islam stands for. But Palestinian Muslims are shown on TV dancing in the streets and in Pakistan, Islamic militants are shown demanding jihad (“holy war”) against the United States in the event of an attack on Afghanistan.

Pakistan, pressured by the United States, agrees to join the “coalition against terrorism” despite fears that collaboration with the US will meet resistance from the Taliban and their Pakistani supporters. Yet a US attack on Afghanistan could trigger the overthrow of the moderate, pro-western government headed by General (and now President) Pervez Musharraf, placing Islamist fingers on the nuclear button long before President George W Bush’s "national missile defence" initiative is ready for action. An American attack on Afghanistan could well precipitate the overthrow of pro-western regimes not only in Pakistan, but in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Egypt, Jordan and north Africa. Should this occur the attack on New York and Washington will no longer be seen as acts of “nihilistic” violence as some commentators maintain. Seen from the terrorists’ perspective it was an act of provocation aimed at unleashing a global conflict between a revitalised “Islam” and “the west”.

Whether or not George W Bush’s “war against terrorism” will generate such direful consequences remains to be seen. The dust has to settle and the debris cleared, with its hideous burden of human remains, before the international ramifications become fully apparent. Yet certain patterns are already beginning to emerge.

Contrary to the rhetoric of politicians, the attack was far from being “cowardly” or “mindless”. A brilliantly executed feat of planning, coordination and execution backed by an astonishing degree of courage, the attack exemplifies something that has come to characterise the modern (or "post-modern") world: the union of the symbolic with the actual, the mythical with the material, in a single act of destruction shown live on television.

Solidarities of tribe and faith

Using the language of a Texan sheriff the US president has announced Osama bin Laden is “wanted dead or alive” for mass murder in New York City and Washington. The evidence linking the Saudi dissident with the atrocity appears to be largely circumstantial and it is doubtful if, on present reckoning, it would stand up in a court of law.

One should, of course, be cautious before drawing firm conclusions. But if press reports fed by leaks from the FBI are accurate, the finger points directly to Osama bin Laden. Although the networks over which he presides are loosely structured – he does not apparently use his own satellite phone in case the calls are traced to him – the fact that the hijackers are thought to be Saudis and Yemenis from the same region as his own family suggests that the inner circle of al-Qa’ida, its Praetorian guard, may have been directly involved.

There are precedents. Throughout Islamic history rebels and reformers – or, to be more precise, rebels against the established order who present themselves as mujaddids (“renovators”) – have allied themselves with closely-knit tribal communities (often their own) with a view to achieve power and purge the state of corruption. The 14th-century philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun (d 1406) who lived in Spain and north Africa before moving to Egypt, used the word ‘asabiya (group-feeling or solidarity) to describe the tight human bonds that held these movements together. In Ibn Khaldun’s historical theory, the ‘asabiya of groups moving from the periphery to the centre under the banner of reformed or revitalised Islam was the motor of historic and dynastic change. The ‘asabiya of the group that planned and executed the hijackings, which may have involved hundreds of individuals in different countries communicating via coded emails and mobile phones, appears to have been formidable: not only was nothing leaked, but some people with foreknowledge of the attack appear to have made fortunes in airline stocks, possibly for use in future operations.

Many hundreds of Muslims may be numbered among the victims of the attack on the World Trade Centre. In their “war against America” the terrorists do not distinguish between their co-religionists and others. Most westerners find it paradoxical that people who have demonstrated a remarkable degree of technical proficiency in their operations – training as pilots, coordinating a highly complex logistical operation involving the coordination of airline schedules with carefully worked-out dummy runs, should hold “fanatical” or “fundamentalist” religious views. Newspaper accounts focus on the rewards of martyrdom promised for those “who die in the path of Allah”, which include the ministrations of seventy-two virgins in paradise. The political passions that motivate terrorists in other traditions (such as Irish republicanism) are not usually linked so directly to a belief in the carnal pleasures of immortality. Yet no successful movement of this kind, whether religious, political or a combination of both, has ever lacked for martyrs willing to kill and be killed for the “cause”.

Modernising the war on unbelief

There is, however, a substantial body of research which indicates that fundamentalist movements in the Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) are particularly attractive to graduates in the applied sciences (such as engineering, computer programming and other highly technical trades). Graduates in the arts and humanities who are trained to read texts critically may be less susceptible to the simplistic religious messages put forward by such movements. Technical specialisations discourage critical thinking. It may be that technicians from “pre-Enlightenment” cultures operate on separate epistemological tracks. The cultural, emotional and spiritual knowledge embedded in the religious tradition they inherit has not been integrated with the technical knowledge they acquire by training and by rote.

Their understanding of paradise may be a case in point. Traditional Muslim exegesis – which the fundamentalists by-pass – takes a sophisticated view of the heavenly rewards promised to the believer: the imam Ghazali (d 1111), the greatest of the medieval theologians, saw the sexual imagery in the Qur'anic descriptions of paradise as inducements to righteousness: “It is a foretaste of the delights secured for men in paradise, because to make a promise to men of delights they have not tasted would be ineffective…”

Similarly, traditionally-trained scholars take a more nuanced view of duty of jihad (“holy war” or “struggle in the path of Allah”) than today’s fundamentalists. In classical jurisprudence jihad is a collective duty which is only valid if a sufficient number of people take part in it. War against the unbelievers may not be mounted without summoning them to Islam or submission before the attack. Clearly a terrorist raid conducted without warning satisfies neither of these conditions. Mainstream Islamic doctrine would deny the rewards of martyrdom to the takers of innocent life.

The issue revolves around a theological question which has caused considerable controversy within the Islamic movement in recent decades. The Qur'anic discourse on jihad was based on the duty to fight the unbelievers – Mohammed’s Meccan opponents who rejected his message. Their condition was one of ignorance – jahiliya: a word which also carries connotations of paganism, arrogance and pig-headedness. Although revival movements throughout Islamic history invariably characterised their opponents as “infidels”, for most authors up to modern times the jahiliya remained the “period of ignorance” before the coming of Mohammed. Modern Islamic ideologues have given it a new definition: for them it refers not to the past condition of the pre-Islamic Arabs, but to the present condition of Islam, in which the people are ignorant and the rulers have effectively apostasised.

The new definition of jahiliya was formulated by Sayyid Abu Ala al-Mawdudi (1903-79), the influential Indo-Pakistani Islamist ideologue and founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the Pakistani version of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was adopted by the Egyptian revolutionary ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) who saw jahiliya everywhere: “Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts and the mass media! And add to all this the system of usury which fuels man’s voracity for money and engenders vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law…”

“Today we are in the midst of a jahiliya similar to, or even worse than the jahiliya that was ‘squeezed out’ by Islam. Everything about us is jahiliya: the concepts of mankind and their beliefs, their customs and traditions, the sources of their culture, their arts and literature, and their laws and regulations. [This is true] to such an extent that much of what we consider to be Islamic culture and Islamic sources, and Islamic philosophy and Islamic thought… is nevertheless the product of that jahiliya.”

"Born-again" Muslims

Sayyid Qutb, imprisoned and tortured by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s police and executed on what were almost certainly trumped-up charges, concluded that Muslim society in the Arab world and beyond had ceased to be “Islamic”, having reverted to the condition of jahiliya. Just as God had authorised Mohammed to fight the Meccan pagans before they eventually submitted to Islam, so Qutb in his prison writings provided the rationale that would later be used to justify the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat in October 1981, and the Islamist attacks on the Egyptian and other nominally Muslim governments, on western personnel and tourists.

Though Qutb himself never explicitly advocated violence against individuals, the myth of the jahiliya state, supported by the west, sustains Islamist militants from Algeria to the Philippines. Yet before his “conversion” to Islam, Qutb had been a member of the Egyptian intellectual élite. A protegé of the writer Taha Hussein and the poet Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, leading lights in Egypt’s liberal western-oriented intelligentsia, he received government funding to study in America, where he attended universities in Washington DC, Colorado and California. It was exposure to western (particularly American) culture, not ignorance, that led to his revulsion. His is the paradigmatic case of the “born-again” Muslim who having adopted or absorbed many modern or foreign influences makes a show of discarding them in his search for personal identity and cultural authenticity.

The term “fundamentalist” may or may not be appropriate when applied to Muslim radicals, but in Qutb’s case it is problematic. Far from espousing received theological certainties or defending “Muslim society” against foreign encroachments, his understanding of Islam seems almost Kierkegaardian in its individualism: his “authentic” Muslim is one who espouses a very modern kind of revolution “against the deification of men, against injustice, and against political, economic, racial and religious prejudice.”

The Saudi boomerang

It may be too early to say how far the men who hijacked the four American airliners and committed the greatest terrorist atrocity in history were influenced by Qutbist doctrines. Osama bin Laden is reported to have studied with Sayyid Qutb’s brother Mohammed after his “conversion” to Islam. Mohammed initially shared his brother’s radicalism, although in the debate among the militants that followed Sadat’s assassination, Mohammed eventually sided with the moderates who rejected the strategy of pronouncing takfir (declaration of infidelity) against other Muslims. But if press reports are to be believed, at least one of the hi-jackers, the Egyptian-born Mohammed Atta, fits the Qutbist mould in many respects. A brilliant student of architecture and town-planning at the technical university of Harburg (in Germany), he seems to have experienced a dramatic conversion to Islamic fundamentalism shortly before completing his thesis (the equivalent of an MSc in town planning) which earned him a 1.0 – the highest possible mark). After returning from Egypt where he had temporarily grown a thick bushy beard he began shying from any physical contact with women – the hallmark of fundamentalist piety. Thereafter he appears to have led a double life, showing unusual courtesy and consideration to strangers while planning and training for his murderous attack.

Atta’s “schizophrenic” behaviour seems to dramatise the conflict that also occurred in Sayyid Qutb’s mind after he abandoned his love affair with the west and reverted to “Islam”. In both cases, of course, this was far from being the received Islam or what scholars of religion call “cumulative tradition”; rather, it was a brand-new, invented Islam that drew on selected elements of this tradition but also incorporated, without acknowledgment, many “western” ideas – from the revolutionary puritanism of Robespierre to the “propaganda of the deed” advocated by the Baader-Meinhof gang.

The cultural and religious schizophrenia experienced by a man like Mohammed Atta is microcosmic when compared to that of a whole society. Modern Saudi Arabia (where Osama bin Laden’s father, a street-porter from Aden, made a fortune by constructing palaces for princes) exemplifies the paradox of a hi-tech society wedded to a pre-modern conservative theology. The chief religious dignitary, Sheikh bin Baz, still holds a Ptolemaic or geocentric view of the cosmos based on his reading of the Qur'an. Yet Saudi Arabia has bought into the US space programme, sending the first and so far the only Muslim astronaut into orbit.

Oil, the source of Saudi wealth, has been the “fuel of fundamentalism” – ever since the Stewart brothers of southern California used the money they made in the oil business to fund the conservative Christian publications that brought the “f-word” into the English language. Because the extraction process is largely technical and depersonalised, the creation of oil wealth (unlike wealth acquired through manufacturing) has not necessitated the intellectual or social transformations and the evolving relations of production that occurred in older industrialised societies.

Saudi Arabia buys in its technology wholesale and houses its guest-workers and hired technocrats in foreigners-only compounds in order to protect its society and the Wahhabi version of Islam underpinning it from foreign influences. This strategy, however, has failed to insulate it against the radical religio-political currents sweeping through the region. Paradoxically, it has assisted their spread through its sponsorship of such organisations as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim World League. Having assisted in the globalisation of radical Islam Saudi Arabia is now one of its principal targets. What happened in New York and Washington exemplifies the contradictions between Saudi Arabia’s hired technocracy and its religious conservatism.

The Qur’an as training manual

The people of Pharaoh, according to the Qur’an, rejected God’s warnings and were punished for their sins [54: 41-2] as were the people of Thamud, who, rejecting the teaching of the Prophet Salih, were destroyed by a single blast that turned them into “dried-up crumbling twigs” [54:31]. Just as the assassins of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 identified the Egyptian president with the evil figure of Pharaoh in the Qur’an, so it is reasonable to speculate that the perpetrators of the 11 September massacres in New York and Washington may have seen - in their dying moments - the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre as the pillars of Pharaoh’s temple. Although liberal Muslims and concerned western leaders are at pains to deny any connection between American atrocities and the Islamic faith, the “punishment stories” in the Qur’an, understood literally, can be read as operational briefings by those who see themselves as agents of the divine wrath.

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An eighth report from the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics to the al-Qaida Strategic Planning Cell (SPC) on the progress of the campaign

Thank you for inviting us to deliver another report on the progress of your movement. You will recall that our work for your planning cell commenced with an initial assessment in July 2004, a follow-up in January 2005 and further reports in February 2006 and September 2006 and (in light of political developments in the United States) December 2006.

The next analysis was presented in November 2007; but the pace of events in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan - in the context of the evolving United States presidential-election campaign - led to the request for the next report only three months later, in February 2008. This last document clearly signalled to you that this might be the final occasion when our services might be required.

We are then particularly pleased that - even though our February 2008 assessment was somewhat blunt in terms of your movement's overall prospect - you have invited us to deliver one more report. We understand that on this occasion you require a brief updating of our analysis on your main theatres of operation, together with an analysis of the impact of the possible outcomes of the US residential election in November 2008.

Pakistan and Afghanistan

In our last briefing we made three judgments about Pakistan. First. that the country's then general-president Pervez Musharraf had been much weakened by the result of the country's just-held parliamentary election, and that we were not convinced he would survive. Second, that it was doubtful that a stable parliamentary coalition would emerge. Third, that there would be we increased United States military activity within western Pakistan. In all three respects our analysis was accurate: Pervez Musharraf has gone, the domestic governing coalition is in disarray, and the US military is now conducting special-forces operations across the border with Afghanistan.

The assumption of the presidency by Asif Ali Zardari is also an indication that the feudal pattern of Pakistani politics is thriving; though civil-society elements and the legal profession may cause problems for the government. It is likely that President Zardari will be supportive of increased US military action, but this may cause deep unease in sections of the Pakistani military, as well as increasing the more general anti-American mood.

While our predictions seven months ago for Pakistan were reassuringly accurate, we must confess we were less effective in our analysis concerning Afghanistan. There, we were doubtful that the revitalised Taliban would extend their activities to major assaults on coalition forces - in the face of overwhelming firepower we instead expected to see an intense concentration on roadside bombs and martyr attacks. While these have indeed been increased, we also note the effective move towards the targeting of supply-routes, and a willingness, on occasions, to conduct substantial military operations. These have included a successful assault on the main prison in Kandahar and lethal attacks on US and French units.

One outcome of these developments is that the US military now puts a much greater emphasis on the war in Afghanistan and is looking to increase its own military deployments while seeking to persuade its Nato partners to be more supportive.

Iraq

In our February 2008 report, we anticipated that the George W Bush administration, along with neo-conservative commentators, would develop an overall narrative centred on a "probability of victory" in Iraq which would downgrade the significance of the war in that country during the latter months of the presidential campaign. This has indeed been what has happened, with the framers of the narrative placing a great emphasis on Iraq's increased security. It is interesting in this context, however, that the United States military leadership is deeply reluctant to withdraw combat-troops to a level much below that of the pre-surge (that is, pre-February 2007) deployments. In spite of the pressing need for troops in Afghanistan, it now looks as though just one of the fifteen remaining US combat-brigades will be withdrawn in the September 2008 - March 2009 period.

We strongly suspect that many of the more astute military analysts in US Central Command (Centcom) and the Pentagon believe that security in Iraq is far more problematic than their political masters would like their citizens to believe. This is partly due to the hard line now being taken by the Nouri al-Maliki government, especially towards the integration of Sunni militias into the security forces, but also relates to strains in Shi'a / Kurdish relations and the growing influence of Iran.

The al-Maliki government claims to want a total United States military withdrawal by 2010 or 2011, but oil geopolitics makes this nonsensical - the US is in Iraq for the long term. While your associates in Iraq have had major reversals, we suspect these are short-term. We stand by our assessment of seven months ago:

"Although circumstances will not always be as favourable as 2006-07, rest assured that your paramilitary combat-training zone in Iraq will remain viable and of great use to you for the foreseeable future."

In this context, we note recent reports that some of your paramilitary associates from Iraq are now active in Somalia.

The American election campaign

In our last report to you it had become clear that John McCain was likely to be the Republican candidate and that Barack Obama might defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Our overall view was that:

"What is best for you is that the United States remains resolute in its support for Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; fully addicted to oil and therefore determined to remain dominant in the Persian Gulf; and prepared to continue to pursue its war against you with the utmost vigour. In other words, eight more years for George W Bush would have been ideal. Sadly for your movement, that cannot be."

As a whole, we considered McCain to be a far better prospect from your perspective; though we had some concerns that such rightwing incumbents can, on occasions, opt successfully for radical change.

Today, with the Obama/McCain contest fully underway, we indeed believe that a McCain presidency is - by a considerable margin - the more favourable to your movement; not least because the Republican ticket is now supplemented by a vice-presidential nominee who is a Christian fundamentalist as well as a climate-change sceptic from an oil-rich state.

It remains the case that if elected, Barack Obama could be very limited in his security options. His speech to the leading American pro-Israel organisation Aipac in June 2008 was markedly hardline; he supports military reinforcements for Afghanistan; and he has implied that he would be willing to order more direct US military action in Pakistan. Even so, part of the reason for taking such positions relates simply to the realities of electoral politics. What he says now and what he would do in office may be very different, especially if the Democrats have convincing majorities in both houses of Congress.

In any case, whatever his actual policies, we most certainly would expect under an Obama presidency a marked change in style towards a more listening, cooperative and multilaterally-engaged America. That must be of deep concern to you. A more "acceptable" America in global terms is the last thing you want.

In one sense, however, we can reassure you about the outcome; for our associates in our Washington office believe that John McCain will win by a relatively small margin, although Congress is likely to remain Democrat-controlled. Their assessment is based on a prediction that while polls may well give Obama a small margin even up to election-day, a small but significant portion of those voting will be sufficiently influenced by residual prejudice to opt for McCain in the privacy of the polling booth. Their point is that even if only one in fifty voters behaves in this manner, that should help ensure a victory for McCain.

We acknowledge that this is very tentative, and that American politics are currently volatile and unpredictable; and that, after all, our assessment in November 2007 was made in the context of a likely Rudy Giuliani / Hillary Clinton contest!

Your concern must still be with the prospect of an Obama victory, and a key question is whether you should engineer a major attack against US interests shortly before the election. We would advise against this. Whether or not you have the resources to mount a major attack (and we understand why you will not take us into your confidence), the result could be unpredictable.

In the immediate wake of a 9/11-scale attack within the continental United States, Obama's advisers would know that this would benefit their opponent strongly. They might well then take the risk of going on the offensive against McCain, pointing to the folly of George W Bush's policies and the manner in which they have made the United States unsafe. It would be a risky strategy but these would be desperate times for the Obama campaign and it might just come off. The risk to you is too great and for this reason alone we do not advocate such an attack.

Instead, we stand by our recommendation in February 2008 that you seek, in the weeks before the election, to make it known that you favour Barack Obama and believe he would be a president with whom you could do business. This would be combined with strong statements to the effect that you believe a John McCain presidency would be a disaster for the United States and that he would be a leader unto darkness and death. Such a strategy, we believe, would go a long way to ensure he was elected, this being the outcome you should most earnestly desire.

Wana

South Waziristan

10 September 2008

-----------------------------------------------

This is the eleventh report openDemocracy has published from the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics (SWISH). Seven have advised al-Qaida, two the British governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and one the United States state department:

"The SWISH Report" (14 July 2004) – to al-Qaida:

"The immediate requirement…is therefore to aid, in any way within the framework of your core values, the survival of the Bush administration."

"The SWISH Report (2)" (13 January 2005) - to al-Qaida:

"You are… in the early stages of a decades-long confrontation, and early ‘success' should not in any way cause you to underestimate the problems that lie ahead."

"The SWISH Report (3)" (19 May 2005) – to the British government:

"We believe that disengagement from Iraq, more emphasis on post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan, and vigorous diplomacy in support of a two-state Israel/Palestine solution offer you the best short-term hope of avoiding further damage to your government's credibility in relation to the United States-led war on terror."

"The SWISH Report (4)" (1 September 2005) – to the United States state department:

"What we find quite extraordinary is the manner in which the full extent of your predicament in Iraq is still not appreciated by your political leadership."

"The SWISH Report (5)" (2 February 2006) – to al-Qaida:

"The greatest risk to your movement is that the opinions of some of the sharper analysts on both sides of the Atlantic begin to transcend those of the political and religious fundamentalists that currently dominate the scene. If that were to happen, then you could be in serious trouble within two or three years."

"The SWISH Report (6)" (7 September 2006) – to al-Qaida:

"(The) influence of your movement and your leader is considerable, but you are not in control of your own strategy; rather, you form just one part of a wider process that is as diffuse and unpredictable as it is potent. You could point to the United States failure to control its global war on terror and you would be correct to do so. You could then claim that it is your own movement that is setting the pace - but you would be wrong. The truly revealing development of recent months is that we have reached a point, five years after 9/11 where no one, but no one, is in control."

"The SWISH Report (7)" (7 December 2006) – to al-Qaida:

"In Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as across the wider middle east, it is the power and influence of the United States that is in crisis. Your movement may not be entirely coherent and the overall circumstances may be more complex than a few months ago, but it probably has greater potential for enhancement and further development than at any time in the past five years."

“The SWISH Report (8)” (16 May 2007) - to the British government:

“Radical changes in your policies in relation to Iraq and Israel are essential, together with a review of policy options for Afghanistan. More generally, you must start the process of reorientating political and security thinking towards the real long-term global challenges.”

“The SWISH Report (9)” (29 November 2007) - to al-Qaida:

“Our broad conclusions are that your prospects are good. Developments in Iraq should not worry you; events in Afghanistan and Pakistan are markedly positive for you; and the work of your associates elsewhere, including north Africa, are a bonus.

We do have to confess to one concern that may surprise you...In a number of western countries the issue of global climate change is rising rapidly up the political agenda and one of the effects of this is to begin to make some analysts and opinion-formers question the western addiction to oil.”

“The SWISH Report (10)” (29 February 2008) - to al-Qaida

“It is said that revolutions change merely the accents of the elites, and we fear that such would be the consequence of your movement coming to power. A lack of flexibility would lead to unbending pursuit of a false purity that would decay rapidly into a bitter autocracy, leading quite possibly to a counter-revolution.

If you really want to succeed then you have to engage in thinking that goes far beyond what appear to be the limits and flaws of your current analysis. We would be happy to assist, but we doubt that your leadership will be willing to allow us to do so. We therefore submit this as possibly our last report.”

 

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It took a brave person to look into the real face of communism, and an even braver one to speak the truth about it. Georgi Markov had both levels of bravery. The Bulgarian writer and broadcaster, after his exile from the country in 1969, used every channel available to him - plays, novels, and his weekly "in absentia" reports from Bulgaria on Radio Free Europe in the late 1970s - to expose the system he had escaped and its authoritarian leaders. On 11 September 1978, Markov paid for his courage with his life.

Irina Novakova is the European Union correspondent of the Bulgarian daily newspaper Dnevnik

It happened in an instant. When passing a stranger on London's Waterloo Bridge on 7 September 1978, Markov felt a stab in his leg and looked round to see the man scurry away, a big umbrella in hand. An illness took hold that led four days later to the writer's death from blood poisoning at the age of 49. A tiny pellet full of potent toxin was recovered from his calf, allegedly shot from the umbrella's tip. The case became known worldwide as "the poisoned umbrella" murder or assassination, and it marked the image of Bulgaria for years afterward - even to this day.

The plot

It is incontestable that Markov's murder was ordered from inside Bulgaria's secret service - a shady and omnipotent organisation of spooks, informers, administrators and politicians, modelled after the Soviet KGB and assigned to deal with "inconvenient" critics of the regime. A short time before the dissident's death, the service had tried to kill another defector, Vladimir Kostov, in Paris; and agents had made two attempts on Markov's life before the successful third operation (which happened to take place on the birthday of Bulgaria's communist leader Todor Zhivkov). The fact that they could operate freely and kill with impunity in western capitals shows just how powerful their organisation was.

The proven involvement of the secret service apart, few facts are known about Markov's assassination. Why exactly was he killed, by whom, and was his murder ordered and assisted by the KGB? These questions will probably remain unanswered, since according to Bulgarian law the statute of limitations of Markov's case lapses thirty years after his murder.

Also on Bulgaria in openDemocracy:

Ilija Trojanow, "Bulgaria's red mafia on Europe's trail" (19 January 2006)

Ilija Trojanow, "Bulgaria: the mafia's dance to Europe" (16 August 2006)

Ivan Krastev, "Europe's other legitimacy crisis" (23 July 2008)

Whether this assassination was conceived and executed by the Bulgarians alone, or whether Soviet agents were also involved, will never be known unless the Russian government decides to open the archives of the old KGB. Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB top official and later defector to the west, has stated that the Soviet service was behind the murder and even provided the weapon. This is plausible, as at the time Bulgaria was a loyal Soviet satellite; a decade earlier Todor Zhivkov had (albeit unsuccessfully) even tried to make the country the sixteenth Soviet republic. An operation like Markov's assassination would have been unthinkable without the KGB's support.

The lock

Why was Georgi Markov such an important target for both the Bulgarian and the Soviet services? It is true that he had intimate and detailed knowledge about the inner workings of Bulgaria's communist regime, but it was his vociferous and fearless criticism about the system's rottenness and the figures who manipulated it that sealed his fate. Markov's was a ritual murder - executed both to silence a subversive voice and to warn others - wherever they were - that they should fear their own thoughts before speaking about the regime.

In the eighteen years since Bulgaria shed communism, many have tried to establish the truth about the most notorious political assassination until Alexander Litvinenko's in 2006. Scotland Yard investigators have repeatedly and unsuccessfully requested access to the archives of the former secret services of Bulgaria, but the country's democratic governments proved no more cooperative than their communist predecessors. In May 2008, Scotland Yard reopened the case, and has again requested documents and questioned former secret-service figures in Bulgaria (see Matthew Brunwasser, "Fresh intrigue surrounds a Cold War murder", International Herald Tribune, 10 September 2008).

It has proved almost impossible to establish the whole truth. The most important documents on the case have been unaccountably destroyed, and two of the people charged with this destruction died in strange circumstances in the early 1990s. So far, the indefatigable researches of the Bulgarian journalist Hristo Hristov have come closest to revealing the true facts of the Markov case. After a three-year-long legal battle, Hristov got access to most of the former service's archives, including what is left of the files on Markov and the man Hristov named as his likeliest murderer: an Italian called Francesco Gullino.

Gullino, codenamed Agent Piccadilly, was trained by the Bulgarian secret service and paid handsomely for the "job" he did for them in London. His file, however, says little of the nature of his work; as with much of the information on Markov's case, it has been carefully weeded.

Since the end of communism, the Bulgarian authorities have tried hard to prevent the secrets surrounding Markov's assassination from being exposed. A number of former Bulgarian investigators spread disinformation and rumour, such that no poison had been found in Markov's body or that medical errors were responsible for his death. They were joined by former state security officers who implied that Markov himself had been a spy, and by establishment politicians who dismissed questions about what happened with the argument that "nobody is interested in this case anymore". Scotland Yard investigators and British politicians have complained that the Bulgarians have been blocking their access to evidence on the case. Hristo Hristov believes that elements of the former secret service still exert a strong influence in Bulgaria's public life, sufficient it seems to keep a lock on the case until its passes its date of legal closure.

The link

But with renewed demands from the British investigators, and with the documents obtained by Hristo Hristov, the key is out of hands of the communist-era spooks. Moreover, in July 2008 Bulgaria was the target of sharp criticism from the European Union because of its apparently invincible corruption and organised crime, and its sloppy judiciary (see Ivan Krastev, "Europe's other legitimacy crisis", 23 July 2008). Even after the formal closure of the Markov case, cooperation with those who are actually determined to uncover the truth will help Sofia make some amends with its European partners. This will also be an indicator of how powerful the spooks' lobby still is.

Whatever the outcome, Georgi Markov's murder remains an enigma as well as an unsolved crime. To some observers, the idea that someone can kill a dissident in London and never be found out creates a link with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Indeed, a comparison between these incidents is inevitable (see Zygmunt Dzieciolowski, "Alexander Litvinenko: the poison of power", 20 November 2006). Both men criticised lawless and pitiless regimes whose agents killed them with exotic poisons. Both murders provoked rage and helplessness in the western world. Both operations demonstrated that a foreign intelligence service can operate freely in the heart of a democratic society. Both cases showed how dangerous, and necessary, speaking truth to power can be. Both deaths leave an open wound that only justice - however belated - can heal. Georgi Markov, thirty years on, deserves no less.

I am an American who has grown increasingly disenchanted with "the American story." Everyone seems to have one. As evidenced by the biography-laden speeches at the Republican National Convention, John McCain and Sarah Palin are running an entire campaign on the promise of the power of personal narrative: McCain's tenure as a POW; Palin's "hockey-mom" origins and moose-hunting proclivities; and, of course, their opponent's supposedly inferior narrative, his insufficiently American, American story.

The Republican candidates' crass deployment of identity politics is depressing; their attempt to lay claim to "true American patriotism" unsurprising at best. But we mustn't forget that "the American story" is a theme embraced by the Democrats as well, and that the effect of their narratives is equally problematic. Barack Obama has the single mother, Michelle Obama has the city-worker father, Joe Biden has the commute from Wilmington to Washington, D.C. They're blue-collar, hardworking, working-class, value-filled folks. Their parents pulled themselves up by the bootstraps. Their successes are proof of the endurance of the American dream.

I don't mean to mock the Obamas or Biden or dismiss their remarkable personal narratives. Nor do I deny that each has made what Michelle Obama memorably called "an improbable journey." But I do want to call into question the way these narratives are deployed, the language used to tell their tales of triumph, and the erasures that happen when we allow a single, limited version of "the American story" to become the template for all Americans.