The violence in Xinjiang took place almost a month ago, but it continues to generate interesting commentary (see, for example, this thoughtful essay by Pallavi Aiyar). The early July events have also recently had two reverberations in Australia, as Jia Zhangke and two other Chinese filmmakers pulled out of a Melbourne film festival where a documentary expected to present a sympathetic view of one of the people Beijing blames for the unrest was to be shown, and then hackers attacked the festival's website to protest that film’s inclusion in the line-up. In light of this, we asked James Millward, a leading specialist in the history of Xinjiang who has written about related issues for us before, to share with the readers of China Beat his take on what happened in early July and how it should be understood.

The ugly mob violence that roiled the western Chinese city of Urumchi in Xinjiang on July 5th was rather quickly suppressed, and Urumchi is now quiet. Thanks to an unprecedented degree of openness to the international press, moreover, we have a better idea specifically what happened than we have for other such incidents in China.

Students who are members of the Uyghur minority—a largely Muslim, Turkic-language speaking group who are natives of the Xinjiang region in far northwestern China—demonstrated on Sunday, July 5 to call for a more thorough investigation into a deadly brawl among Uyghur and Han workers that had occurred at a factory in Guangdong province the previous week. The demonstration turned violent, possibly while it was being repressed by security forces, and thousands of Uyghurs went on a rampage, attacking Hans and destroying property. By Monday, July 6, mobs of Han—the majority ethnic group in China—took to the streets armed with clubs, meat-cleavers and other makeshift weapons, seeking revenge. Police eventually calmed the situation with batons, tear-gas, firearms with live ammunition, curfews and mass arrests. At least 192 people died, and some 1000 were injured.

Though we know the broad outlines of what happened, why it happened remains in dispute. The official story from the Xinjiang regional and Chinese authorities is that the riot was instigated by Rebiya Kadeer and the World Uyghur Congress, an umbrella group made up of overseas Uyghur organizations in Europe, America and Central Asia that claims to represent Uyghur interests internationally. (A Uyghur economist and outspoken blogger, Ilham Tohti, has also been blamed by Xinjiang authorities for inciting the riot, and has apparently been detained.) The PRC routinely claims that the WUC and Kadeer—a charismatic spokeswoman for the Uyghur cause who enjoys sympathy in the US Congress and EU parliament—is surreptitiously engaged in separatist and even terrorist activity. Some of the commentary in Western media has harkened back to the issue of alleged Uyghur jihadism, involvement with Al Qaeda, and terrorist plots—issues much discussed with regard to the Uyghurs who wound up in Guantanamo.

When it comes to the recent Urumchi riots, however, terrorism and even separatism are red herrings. China’s control over Xinjiang is not threatened by these demonstrators or even the handful of jihadi Uyghurs outside of China who espouse terrorism or militancy. No government internationally has ever challenged the PRC’s sovereignty in Xinjiang or officially sympathized with calls for an independent Eastern Turkestan state. The mainstream Uyghur exile groups—World Uyghur Congress and Rabiya Kadeer’s Uyghur American Association among them—do not call for an independent Uyghur or East Turkestan state; rather, these groups lobby for cultural autonomy, legal rights, equal employment opportunity and similar issues—they could not lobby for an independent state without losing their access to members of Western governments or, in the case of Rabiya Kadeer’s Uyghur American Association, jeopardizing funding from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. But most telling of all is the fact that the Uyghur students in their initial demonstration marched under the flag of the People’s Republic of China, explicitly sending a non-separatist message of loyal dissent.

What Urumchi experienced was what Americans, recalling our own troubled history, might call a race riot. The reasons underlying it were likewise familiar: mundane prejudice including easy use of racial slurs by both Han and Uyghur about the other; a widespread perception by the minority Uyghurs, with some justification, that the political, legal and economic system, especially job opportunities, are stacked in favor of the majority Hans; and a simple lack of understanding or empathy for the different cultures of fellow citizens.

Diversity in the US is the result of the colonization of North America by northern Europeans, our proximity to parts of the Americas first colonized by Spain, subsequent migration from other parts of the world, and of course the African slave trade. Though China is of continental dimensions and has long been diverse, the most pressing ethnic issues today largely stem from the 17th and 18th century expansion of the Qing empire which brought Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Taiwan under Beijing’s rule. Regardless of the different historical background, however, China shares with the US, and, for that matter, with India, Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia, Russia and other large nations, the strengths and challenges of an ethnically diverse population. Economic growth, urban development, political evolution, globalization and other processes can exacerbate tensions among ethnic communities in any country.

The proximate cause of the Urumchi troubles was labor migration, both of Uyghurs from Xinjiang to Guangdong, and of Han from other parts of China to Xinjiang, all associated with China’s super-charged market economy and state program to develop western parts of the country. But the deeper problem is essentially the same as that in any large, modern state: how to incorporate ethno-cultural diversity into the national vision. Chinese official rhetoric and policies in the past—especially in the early 1950s and late 1980s—were directed at this goal, but more recent approaches have too often depicted Uyghurs and Tibetans as ungrateful “others,” and even as threats to security. Both Uyghurs and Han have absorbed this message from state media. It has fueled Uyghur frustration and violence, and instilled in Hans a sense of grievance against minorities, their fellow Chinese.

China faces problems of interethnic tension and civil rights all too familiar to other countries in the world. Chinese leaders could enjoy international sympathy and support should they address these issues directly. But claiming that all ethnic problems at home arise from the conspiracies of exiles or machinations of foreigners will only elicit more international sympathy for Chinese minorities and criticism of China's human rights record.

WHAT, what, what,
What's the news from Swat?
Sad news,
Bad news,
Comes by the cable led
Through the Indian Ocean's bed,
Through the Persian Gulf, the Red
Sea and the Med-
Iterranean -- he 's dead;
The Ahkoond is dead!

-- George Thomas Lanigan

Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That's certainly one for the record books.

And it hasn't ended yet. Not by a long shot. Not with the headlines in the U.S. papers about the depredations of the Pakistani Taliban, not with the CIA's drone aircraft striking gatherings in Waziristan and elsewhere near the Afghan border. This spring, for instance, one counter-terrorism analyst stridently (and wholly implausibly) warned that"in one to six months" we could"see the collapse of the Pakistani state," at the hands of the bloodthirsty Taliban, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the situation in Pakistan a"mortal danger" to global security.

What most observers don't realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It's at least 100 years old. During their campaigns in the northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British officers, journalists and editorialists sounded much like American strategists, analysts, and pundits of the present moment. They construed the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as the new Normans, a dire menace to London that threatened to overturn the British Empire.

The young Winston S. Churchill even wrote a book in 1898, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, about a late-nineteenth-century British campaign in Pashtun territory, based on his earlier journalism there. At that time, London ruled British India, comprising all of what is now India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but the British hold on the mountainous northwestern region abutting Afghanistan and the Himalayas was tenuous. In trying to puzzle out -- like modern analysts -- why the predecessors of the Pakistani Taliban posed such a huge challenge to empire, Churchill singled out two reasons for the martial prowess of those Pashtun tribesmen. One was Islam, of which he wrote,"That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword -- the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men -- stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism."

Churchill actually revealed his prejudices here. In fact, for the most part, Islam spread peacefully in what is now Pakistan, by the preaching and poetry of mystical Sufi leaders, and most Muslims have not been more warlike in history than, for example, Anglo-Saxons.

For his second reason, he settled on the environment in which those tribesmen were supposed to thrive."The inhabitants of these wild but wealthy valleys" are, he explained, in"a continual state of feud and strife." In addition, he insisted, they were early adopters of military technology, so that their weapons were not as primitive as was common among other"races" at what he referred to as"their stage" of development."To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer," he warned.

In these tribesmen, he concluded,"the world is presented with that grim spectacle, 'the strength of civilization without its mercy.'" The Pashtun were, he added, excellent marksmen, who could fell the unwary Westerner with a state-of-the-art breech-loading rifle."His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age."

Ironically, given Churchill's description of them, when four decades later the Pashtuns joined the freedom movement against British rule that led to the formation of independent Pakistan and India in 1947, politicized Pashtuns were notable not for savagery, but for joining Mahatma Gandhi's campaign of non-violent non-cooperation.

Nevertheless, the Churchillian image of primitive, fanatical brutality armed with cutting edge technology, which singled Pashtuns out as an extraordinary peril to the West, survived the Victorian era and has now made it into the headlines of our own newspapers. Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, was tasked by the Obama administration to evaluate security threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times reported breathlessly on July 17th that Riedel had concluded:

"A jihadist victory in Pakistan, meaning the takeover of the nation by a militant Sunni movement led by the Taliban... would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror... [and] is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future."

The article, in true Churchillian fashion, is entitled"Armageddon Alarm Bell Rings."

In fact, few intelligence predictions could have less chance of coming true. In the 2008 parliamentary election, the Pakistani public voted in centrist parties, some of them secular, virtually ignoring the Muslim fundamentalist parties. Today in Pakistan, there are about 24 million Pashtuns, a linguistic ethnic group that speaks Pashto. Another 13 million live across the British-drawn"Durand Line," the border -- mostly unacknowledged by Pashtuns -- between Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Most Taliban derive from this group, but the vast majority of Pashtuns are not Taliban and do not much care for the Muslim radicals.

The Taliban force that was handily defeated this spring by the Pakistani army in a swift campaign in the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province, amounted to a mere 4,000 men. The Pakistani military is 550,000 strong and has a similar number of reservists. It has tanks, artillery, and fighter jets. The Taliban's appeal is limited to that country's Pashtun ethnic group, about 14% of the population and, from everything we can tell, it is a minority taste even among them. The Taliban can commit terrorism and destabilize, but they cannot take over the Pakistani government.

Some Western analysts worry that the Taliban could unite with disgruntled junior officers of the Pakistani Army, who could come to power in a putsch and so offer their Taliban allies access to sophisticated weaponry. Successful Pakistani coups, however, have been made by the chief of staff at the top, not by junior officers, since the military is quite disciplined. Far from coup-making to protect the Taliban, the military has actually spent the past year in hard slogging against them in the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Bajaur and more recently in Swat.

Today's fantasy of a nuclear-armed Taliban is the modern equivalent of Churchill's anxiety about those all-conquering, ultramodern Pashtun riflemen with the instincts of savages.

Frontier Ward and Watch

On a recent research trip to the India Office archives in London to plunge into British military memoirs of the Waziristan campaigns in the first half of the twentieth century, I was overcome by a vivid sense of déjà vu. The British in India fought three wars with Afghanistan, losing the first two decisively, and barely achieving a draw in the third in 1919. Among the Afghan king Amanullah's demands during the third war were that the Pashtun tribes of the frontier be allowed to give him their fealty and that Britain permit Afghanistan to conduct a sovereign foreign policy. He lost on the first demand, but won on the second and soon signed a treaty of friendship with the newly established Soviet Union.

Disgruntled Pashtun tribes in Waziristan, a no-man's land sandwiched between the Afghan border and the formal boundary of the British-ruled North-West Frontier Province, preferred Kabul's rule to that of London, and launched their own attacks on the British, beginning in 1919. Putting down the rebellious Wazir and Mahsud tribes of this region would, in the end, cost imperial Britain's treasury three times as much as had the Third Anglo-Afghan War itself.

On May 2, 1921, long after the Pashtun tribesmen should have been pacified, the Manchester Guardian carried a panicky news release by the British Viceroy of India on a Mahsud attack."Enemy activity continues throughout," the alarmed message from Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, the Marquess of Reading, said, implying that a massive uprising on the subcontinent was underway. In fact, the action at that point was in only a small set of villages in one part of Waziristan, itself but one of several otherwise relatively quiet tribal areas.

On the 23rd of that month, a large band of Mahsud struck" convoys" near the village of Piazha. British losses included a British officer killed, four British and two Indian officers wounded, and seven Indian troops killed, with 26 wounded. On the 24th,"a picket [sentry outpost] near Suidgi was ambushed, and lost nine killed and seven wounded." In nearby Zhob, the British received support from friendly Pashtun tribes engaged in a feud with what they called the"hostiles," and -- a modern touch --"aeroplanes" weighed in as well. They were, it was said," cooperating," though this too was an exaggeration. At the time, the Royal Air Force (RAF) was eager to prove its colonial worth on the imperial frontiers in ways that extended beyond simple reconnaissance, even though in 1921 it maintained but a single airplane at Peshawar, the nearest city, which had"a hole in its wing." By 1925, the RAF had gotten its wish and would drop 150 tons of bombs on the Mahsud tribe.

On July 5, 1921, a newspaper report in the Allahabad Pioneer gives a sense of the tactics the British deployed against the"hostiles." One center of rebellion was the village of Makin, inhabited by that same Mahsud tribe, which apparently wanted its own irrigation system and freedom from British interference. The British Indian army held the nearby village of Ladka."Makin was shelled from Ladka on the 20th June," the report ran.

The tribal fighters responded by beginning to move their flocks, though their families remained. British archival sources report that a Muslim holy man, or faqir, attempted to give the people of Makin hope by laying a spell on the 6-inch howitzer shells and pledging that they would no longer explode in the valley. (Overblown imperial anxiety about such faqirs or akhonds, Pashtun religious leaders, inspired Victorian satirists such as Edward Lear, who began one poem,"Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of Swat?")

The faqir's spells were to no avail. The shelling, the Pioneer reported, continued over the next two days,"with good results." Then on the 23rd,"another bombardment of Makin was carried out by our 6-inch howitzers at Ladka." This shelling"had a great moral effect," the newspaper intoned, and revealed with satisfaction that"the inhabitants are now evacuating their families." The particular nature of the moral effect of bombarding a civilian village where women and children were known to be present was not explained. Two days later, however, thanks to air observation, the howitzers at Ladka and the guns at"Piazha camp" made a"direct hit" on another similarly obscure village.

Such accounts of small, vicious engagements in mountainous villages with (to British ears) outlandish names fit oddly with the strange conviction of the elite and the press that the fate of the Empire was somehow at stake -- just as strangely as similar reports out of exactly the same area, often involving the very same tribes, do in our own time. On July 7, 2009, for instance, the Pakistani newspaper The Nation published a typical daily report on the Swat valley campaign which might have come right out of the early twentieth century. Keep in mind that this was a campaign into which the Obama administration forced the Pakistani government to save itself and the American position in the Greater Middle East, and which displaced some two million people, risking the actual destabilization of the whole northwestern region of Pakistan. It went in part:

"[T]he security forces during search operation at Banjut, Swat, recovered 50 mules loaded with arms and ammunition, medicines and ration and also apprehended a few terrorists. During search operation at Thana, an improvised explosive device (IED) went off causing injuries to a soldier. As a result of operation at Tahirabad, Mingora, the security forces recovered surgical equipment, nine hand grenades and office furniture from the house of a militant."

The unfamiliar place names, the attention to confiscated mules, and the fear of tribal militancy differed little from the reports in the Pioneer from nearly a century before. Echoing Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on July 14th,"Our national security as well as the future of Afghanistan depends on a stable, democratic, and economically viable Pakistan. We applaud the new Pakistani determination to deal with the militants who threaten their democracy and our shared security."

As in 1921, so in 2009, the skirmishes were ignored by the general public in the West despite the frenzied assertions of politicians that the fate of the world hung in the balance.

A Paranoid View of the Pashtuns, Then and Now

On July 21, 1921, a" correspondent" for the Allahabad Pioneer -- as anonymous as he was vehement -- explained how some firefights in Waziristan might indeed be consequential for Western civilization. He attacked"Irresponsible Criticism" of the military budget required to face down the Mahsud tribe. He asked,"What is India's strategical position in the world today?" It was a leading question."Along hundreds of miles of her border," he then warned darkly in a mammoth run-on sentence,"are scores of thousands of hardy fighters trained to war and rapine from their very birth, never for an instant forgetful of the soft wealth of India's plains, all of whom would descend to harry them tomorrow if they thought the venture safe, some of whom are determinedly at war with us even now."

Note that he does not explain the challenge posed by the Pashtun tribes in terms of typical military considerations, which would require attention to the exact numbers, training, equipment, tactics and logistics of the fighters, and which would have revealed them as no significant threat to the Indian plains, however hard they were to control in their own territory. The" correspondent" instead ridicules urban"pen-pushers," who little appreciate the"heavy task" of"frontier ward and watch."

Not only were the tribes a danger in themselves, the hawkish correspondent intoned, but"beyond India's border lies a great country [Afghanistan] with whom we are not even yet technically at peace." Nor was that all. The recently-established Soviet Union, with which Afghanistan had concluded a treaty of friendship that February, loomed as the real threat behind the radical Pashtuns."Beyond that again is a huge mad-dog nation that acknowledges no right save the sword, no creed save aggression, murder and loot, that will stay at nothing to gain its end, that covets avowedly a descent upon India above all other aims."

That then-Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, who took an extremely dim view of colonialism and seriously considered freeing the Central Asian possessions of the old tsarist empire, was then contemplating the rape of India is among the least believable calumnies in imperial propaganda. The" correspondent" would have none of it. Those, he concludes, who dare criticize the military budget should try sweet-talking the Mahsud, the Wazir and the Bolsheviks.

In our own day as well, pundits configure the uncontrolled Pashtuns as merely the tip of a geostrategic iceberg, with the sinister icy menace of al-Qaeda stretching beneath, and beyond that greater challenges to the U.S. such as Iran (incredibly, sometimes charged by the U.S. military with supporting the hyper-Sunni, Shiite-hating Taliban in Afghanistan). Occasionally in this decade, attempts have even been made to tie the Russian bear once again to the Pashtun tribes.

In the case of the British Empire, whatever the imperial fears, the actual cost in lives and expenditure of campaigning in the Hindu Kush mountain range was enough to ensure that such engagements would be of relatively limited duration. On October 26, 1921, the Pioneer reported that the British government of India had determined to implement a new system in Waziristan, dependent on tribal mercenaries.

"This system, which was so successfully inaugurated in the Khyber district last year," the article explained,"is really an adaptation of the methods in vogue 40 years ago." The tribal commander provided his own weapons and equipment, and for a fee, protected imperial lines of communication and provided security on the roads."Thus he has an interest in maintaining the tranquility of his territory, and gives support to the more stable elements among the tribes when the hotheads are apt to run amok." The system would be adopted, the article says, to put an end to the ruinous costs of"punitive expeditions of merely ephemeral pacificatory value."

Absent-minded empire keeps reinventing the local tribal levy, loyal to foreign capitals and paid by them, as a way of keeping the hostiles in check. The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations reported late last year that"U.S. military commanders are studying the feasibility of recruiting Afghan tribesmen... to target Taliban and al-Qaeda elements. Taking a page from the so-called 'Sunni Awakening' in Iraq, which turned Sunni tribesmen against militants first in Anbar Province and then beyond, the strategic about-face in Afghanistan would seek to extend power from Kabul to the country's myriad tribal militias." Likewise, the Pakistani government has attempted to deploy tribal fighters against the Taliban in the Federally Administered areas such as Bajaur. It remains to be seen whether this strategy can succeed.

Both in the era between the two world wars and again in the early twenty-first century, the Pashtun peoples have been objects of anxiety in world capitals out of all proportion to the security challenge they actually pose. As it turned out, the real threat to the British Isles in the twentieth century emanated from one of what Churchill called their" civilized" European neighbors. Nothing the British tried in the North-West Frontier and its hinterland actually worked. By the 1940s the British hold on the tribal agencies and frontier regions was shakier than ever before, and the tribes more assertive. After the British were forced out of the subcontinent in 1947, London's anxieties about the Pashtuns and their world-changing potential abruptly evaporated.

Today, we are again hearing that the Waziris and the Mahsuds are dire threats to Western civilization. The tribal struggle for control of obscure villages in the foothills of the Himalayas is being depicted as a life-and-death matter for the North Atlantic world. Again, there is aerial surveillance, bombing, artillery fire, and -- this time -- displacement of civilians on a scale no British viceroy ever contemplated.

In 1921, vague threats to the British Empire from a small, weak principality of Afghanistan and a nascent, if still supine, Soviet Union underpinned a paranoid view of the Pashtuns. Today, the supposed entanglement with al-Qaeda of those Pashtuns termed"Taliban" by U.S. and NATO officials -- or even with Iran or Russia -- has focused Washington's and Brussels's military and intelligence efforts on the highland villagers once again.

Few of the Pashtuns in question, even the rebellious ones, are really Taliban in the sense of militant seminary students; few so-called Taliban are entwined with what little is left of al-Qaeda in the region; and Iran and Russia are not, of course, actually supporting the latter. There may be plausible reasons for which the U.S. and NATO wish to spend blood and treasure in an attempt to forcibly shape the politics of the 38 million Pashtuns on either side of the Durand Line in the twenty-first century. That they form a dire menace to the security of the North Atlantic world is not one of them.

For all the obvious reasons, I hesitate to even enter this discussion. But (famous last words) I can't help myself.

As you know, high on the list of current right-wing conspiracy theorizing (and sort of a stalking horse for underlying beliefs that President Obama's race and name make him rather less than fully American) is the claim that President Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii but was rather born abroad. And because of this, we're led to believe, he's ineligible to serve as president and therefore actually is not, as we speak, president.

Now, I don't want to get into all the claptrap about the birth certificate. Because the whole story is just unadulterated, raw nonsense. What I do want to figure out, however, is a question that's been rattling around my head for something like a year now. I have never seen any serious argument that the child of an American citizen, even if born abroad, isn't him or herself a natural born American citizen. Yes, it's now and again been raised as a topic with a wrinkle of ambiguity in the law; but the issue has never been that people actually believe such children aren't 'natural born', only that it's a phrase that was never expressly defined and there's never been an opportunity to have a court review it since there's never been a case with the relevant set of facts.

But consider:

If my son Sam had been born while my wife and I were visiting Canada or Egypt, would he be ineligible to serve as president? Would have to apply for him to become a citizen? To have him naturalized? Clearly, not. Everyone agrees he's automatically a citizen. To indulge this nonsense you have to believe there are two categories of citizen -- one that is born a citizen (abroad) but not 'natural born' and another that is born a citizen (in the USA) and is 'natural born.'

How about US military families serving in Europe or South Korea? Are their children ineligible to serve as president? And wouldn't that be a tad rough on military families if it were true? Remember, this question came up during the last election since Sen. McCain was actually born in the Panama Canal Zone.

As far as I can tell, beside being transparently bogus on its face as to the facts (where President Obama was born) it is irrelevant on the law and the constitution since no one seems to question that his mother was an American citizen at the time of his birth.

Like I said, I know I probably shouldn't be feeding the wingnuts, even raising the issue. But can't they at least come up with a conspiracy theory that would have some practical import if it were actually true?

Late Update: Do I think any of this has any practical import? No, not at all. It's just been driving me crazy that in the context of talking about these 'birther' whackjobs, a lot of people are somehow assuming or taking it for granted that a child born to American citizens abroad would not be eligible to serve as president.

Later Update: This appears to be the lacunae the birthers hang their hat on (from the State Department website ...)

Birth Abroad to One Citizen and One Alien Parent in Wedlock: A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child's birth. (For birth on or after November 14, 1986, a period of five years physical presence, two after the age of fourteen is required. For birth between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, a period of ten years, five after the age of fourteen are required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.

Their thinking seems to be that since Obama's mother was just shy of her 19th birthday at the time of his birth, she couldn't meet the"five after the age of fourteen" requirement, thus necessitating rushing home to get the phony certification of stateside birth to make the eventual run for president possible.

In October 1942 leaflets appeared in Egypt. The occasion was the British Eighth Army victory over Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein, which at last made the Allies confident they could drive the Axis out of the Middle East. Moreover, the first American observers had arrived in North Africa in preparation for Operation Torch, the invasion of Morocco and Algeria scheduled for the following month. The leaflets, printed in Arabic and signed by President Roosevelt. proclaimed:

“… Behold. We the American Holy Warriors have arrived. We have come here to fight the great Jihad of Freedom…. Assemble along the highways to welcome your brothers. We have come to set you free. Speak with our fighting men and you will find them pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart. We are not as some other Christians whom ye have known, and who trample you under foot. Our soldiers consider you as their brothers, for we have been reared in the way of free men. Our soldiers have been told about your country and about their Moslem brothers and they will treat you with respect and with a friendly spirit in the eyes of God…”[1]

We may forgive such condescending propaganda on the grounds that Arabs, Persians, and other Muslims were hardly the focus of U.S. geopolitics then that they are today. During World War II they seemed just backward, superstitious, and thieving peoples who happened to be in the way of the armies fighting for control of the world.

That isn’t to say that the United States has not been engaged with the Middle East throughout its history, at first modestly but with increasing intensity. Moreover, the Middle East has always held a certain fascination for various groups of Americans whether or not their government was entangled there. But not until 1979, when Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called the Islamic Crescent an Arc of Crisis, did the Middle East take center stage. By that time all the major U.S. foreign policy traditions were already in place.

It is my assigned task to provide the overarching context of American foreign relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My most telling message is that the strategies and methodologies—the ends and means of America as a world power—were all contrived to surmount crises and challenges elsewhere in the world. They had no initial relevance to Islamic cultures or Middle East geography, but had somehow to be applied to Middle Eastern policies once they had pushed themselves onto the American foreign policy agenda. That is why I shall have nothing more to say on the Middle East until the very end.

U.S. Foreign Policy Traditions

The genesis of these remarks date from 1988, when I left Berkeley to become chair of the international relations program at Penn. Since Penn’s U.S. diplomatic historian Bruce Kuklick was away that first year, I agreed to work up lectures for a survey course in that field. It occurred to me that a good way to structure the course would be to focus on the discrete traditions that Americans founded regarding their proper place in the world. I defined a genuine tradition as a principle or strategy that “commanded solid bipartisan support, outlived the era that gave it birth, entered the permanent lexicon of our national discourse, and continued to resonate with a portion of the American public even during eras when it did not directly inspire policy.”[2]

I identified eight, divided into two groups (see handout, www.fpri.org/education/modernmiddleeast/). The first four, what I call our Old Testament, defined U.S. grand strategy during its first century: (1) Independence, Unity, and Liberty at Home, or “Exceptionalism” (as properly understood); (2) Unilateralism, or “Isolationism” (as mistakenly derided); (3) the American System, or Monroe Doctrine (as commonly called); and (4) Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (as triumphantly touted). These were designed to prevent the outside world from shaping America on the assumption that the wicked Old World must threaten or corrupt. The last four, our New Testament, defined U.S. grand strategy during its second century: (5) Progressive Imperialism; (6) Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism; (7) Containment; and (8) Global Meliorism. These were designed to help America shape the outside world on the assumption that the benevolent New World must uplift and reform.

It struck me that the frequent confusion in U.S. foreign policy stemmed not from false dichotomies between a mythical Realism vs. Idealism, or Isolationism vs. Interventionism, but rather from tensions among our twentieth-century traditions and between the twentieth- and nineteenth-century ones. Americans imagine theirs to be a Crusader State destined to transform the world in the pursuit of justice and freedom, but at the same time they want America to remain a Promised Land, uncorrupted by the world outside.

The Old Testament

One of my first discoveries was that America’s vaunted moral Exceptionalism had little to do with foreign relations. To be sure, American colonists believed their country was destined to be different and better than others. Colonial leaders imagined America a land set apart and called by Providence and Enlightenment Reason alike to “begin the world over again.” That is what historians mean when they refer to American messianism, mission, idealism, or the morally neutral term Exceptionalism.

But when I examined early American statecraft, I was struck by the virtual absence of policies born of idealism, pacifism, or mission. On the contrary, from the moment Benjamin Franklin sailed for Europe, U.S. diplomacy was shaped by power politics and the need to secure the new nation’s goals. Those goals, above all, were Liberty, Unity, and Independence at home, and what America was at home – a land of civil and religious liberty under law and growing equality and opportunity – was what made the nation exceptional.

The framers of the Constitution were careful to apply checks and balances to the President’s military and diplomatic power, but it never occurred to them to restrict how the federal government ought to conduct foreign policy. The goal of the federal government, rather, should be to create “one American system” strong enough “to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.” As John Adams wrote,

“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion only of her own…. For she knows well that by once enlisting under other banners than her own … she would involve herself beyond the powers of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of avarice, envy, and ambition…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

American Exceptionalism did not require that the U.S. pursue a pacifist, revolutionary, or ideological foreign policy. To do so would only endanger what made America exceptional at home: free, united, and independent.

The second, third, and fourth traditions in U.S. foreign relations follow in such logical progression that Unilateralism, an American System of states, and Expansion across the continent were implicit from the very beginning. For if the nation was to preserve its hard-won Liberty, be spared the threat and expense of large armies and navies, avoid becoming a pawn of foreign powers, and instead exploit their conflicts in order to grow, then it must pursue a Unilateral policy, even (as in 1812) when it went to war. But Unilateralism in no way implied Isolationism, a term coined in the 1890s. Americans always pursued close commercial, financial, and cultural ties with Europe, the Caribbean, and Pacific, and the nation that dispatched one-third of its navy to open Japan was by no stretch of the imagination isolationist. So did Expansion, or Manifest Destiny, for if Europeans were not to occupy the empty lands of North America, and if the exploding American population was to enjoy its exceptional freedom and opportunity, then the U.S. itself had to fill the void from coast to coast.

These four traditions were coherent, mutually reinforcing, and spectacularly successful. They created the necessary conditions for the explosive territorial, demographic, and economic growth of the nation without compromise of its small government, free enterprise principles.

The New Testament

Imperialism

So what happened in 1898? Why did Americans suddenly embrace a form of Imperialism so at odds with all that they stood for? According to most historians this was a “great aberration”: by 1898 the U.S. was a potential world power in need of foreign markets; the Navy, big business, politicians, and the press were eager to junk what they now damned as isolationism; an assertive mood had swept the country; and the Western frontier had closed. But whatever motives historians stress, most conclude that President McKinley, once he intervened in Cuba’s war of independence against Spain, took the occasion to annex overseas colonies initiate 15 years of Yankee imperialism until Woodrow Wilson put us back on track.

But 1898 could not mark the end of Isolationism, because the U.S. had never been isolationist. Nor was overseas expansion anything new: the U.S. had purchased Alaska, bid for Samoa, and aggressively pursued commerce in Asia. Nor did U.S. exports, which were booming, require new markets. Nor, finally, were many Americans troubled by their little island empire as a moral issue—the leaders of the Progressive Movement and Protestant churches were eager to redeem colonial peoples from Spanish obscurantism.

In retrospect, the “great aberration” was really a culmination of trends that had been building up since the Civil War. America was now able to throw its naval weight around; Europe’s imperial powers were pressing against the edges of the American sphere in the Pacific and Caribbean; and reformers from Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Croly to evangelist Josiah Strong all claimed that God had made America great for the purpose of uplifting other peoples.

The truly new and risky departure in 1898 was not colonialism, but moral progressivism! Americans abandoned their traditions when they went to war with Spain in the first place to save a damsel in distress. Still thinking of itself as a Promised Land, America chose also to be a Crusader State. With that, our New Testament traditions began to be written.

Wilsonianism

In 1898, Americans were swept away by militant self-righteousness into a crusade and then stuck around to export American values. Even Woodrow Wilson had applauded the Spanish American War and annexation of colonies. As President, he intervened in the Caribbean more often and with more firepower than did TR and Taft put together. He invaded Mexico twice in order, he said, to “teach the Mexicans to elect good men.” He also said that to base foreign policy on one’s self-interest was an insult to other nations and a disgrace to one’s own. Accordingly, when war broke out in 1914, he put his energy into trying to mediate a Peace Without Victory in the belief that it was America’s calling to crusade on behalf of democratic diplomacy.

When the belligerents spurned his call for peace and the Germans multiplied their outrages, Wilson finally made the hard decision for war, but only because he persuaded himself that it was a moral act: that is, precisely the opposite definition of Exceptionalism from the one the Founding Fathers endorsed. He would go to war to end war everywhere. He would teach the Germans to elect good men just as he tried to teach the Mexicans. He would create a League of all Nations modeled on his abortive Pan American League of 1913.

Wilsonianism was not slain by Isolationists until it was resurrected by Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. The Republican internationalist administrations of the 1920s endorsed such Wilsonian goals as disarmament, collective security, self-determination, and the Open Door, and thanks to the diplomacy of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, the U.S. achieved far more than Wilson did in stabilizing Europe and Asia. What hurled the U.S. into its deep Isolation in the 1930s were the effects of the Great Depression, the Neutrality Acts of the Democratic Congress, and the eager support for them of FDR, at least until 1938.

Of course, after Pearl Harbor the Roosevelt administration instantly embraced Wilsonianism, if only because America had no other banner under which to wage world war. But thanks to Joseph Stalin, Wilsonianism failed a second time as a blueprint for world order. If Unilateralism had been discredited by Versailles, the Depression, Munich, and Pearl Harbor, the deadlock with the Soviets at the UN meant that Wilsonianism was no guide for America’s place in the world either.

Containment

The Truman administration came up with a new tradition, Containment, to convince the American people to wage another dangerous contest with another aggressive dictator. The Truman Doctrine passed the Senate by a margin of 3:1, the Marshall Plan by 4:1, NATO by 6:1, and support for the Korean War by 10:1. This was not all the result of anticommunist hysteria, though that played its part. Containment was in fact not such a sharp break with the past after all, but meshed well with the previous traditions. It was based on the premise that the nation’s Liberty at home was under assault by a global conspiracy that reached into American labor unions, government agencies, schools, churches, Hollywood, even atomic facilities.

Nor did Containment necessarily violate Unilateralism, for whereas the U.S. now made alliances all over the map, it was clearly the boss of them and so retained its freedom of action. Containment meshed well with Progressive Imperialism since it justified projecting American power across the oceans and made parts of the world into virtual protectorates. It did excellent duty on behalf of Expansionism in that it opposed both the communist and European colonial empires and opened up half the world to American enterprise. Containment even honored Wilsonianism insofar as it served liberal values and worked through the UN when possible. Finally, global anticommunism amounted to a veritable religious war for many millions of Americans, both secular and sectarian.[3] It was a foreign policy expression of the American civil religion even more fervent and un-conflicted than Wilson’s war to end war had been.

Containment was by far the most successful twentieth-century U.S. strategy, but the cost was very high. At home, the Cold War meant conscription, high taxes, federal intervention in science, education, business, and labor, militarization of the economy, domestic surveillance, and loyalty oaths. Critics on the Left and Right echoed the Neutralists of the 1930s by predicting that global involvement would push America itself in the direction of fascism or socialism. And Containment was frustrating and wearisome abroad. If pursued too vigorously, it risked nuclear war; too feebly, it amounted to appeasement; and pursued moderately, it risked dragging the U.S. into limited wars in which stalemate was all it dared hope for.

In the end, Containment not only triumphed, it outlived the Soviet Union itself. George H. W. Bush applied it against Iraq, then against Iraq and Iran in “dual containment,” while pundits have repeatedly discussed the need to embrace Containment versus China, Putin’s Russia, or radical Islam. It is our seventh hallowed tradition.

Global Meliorism

How, one may ask, can Containment be construed as a success when it inspired such obvious disasters as the Vietnam War? Perhaps it did not, which leads us to the eighth and last tradition. Since 1898, the U.S. has sought a practical means of coping with a world ravaged by revolution and war. Wilson offered a legal, institutional answer; Truman a political, military one. Global Meliorism is the socioeconomic and cultural answer to how to make the world a better place by promoting economic growth, human rights, social reform, and democracy. The core belief is that the root causes of revolutions and militarism are poverty, ignorance, oppression, and despair. Hence we ought to seek to cure the disease rather than just combat the symptoms.

I trace Global Meliorism back to the nineteenth-century missionaries in the Pacific and East Asia. But it began to influence official policy in the Caribbean and Philippines under the Progressive Imperialists, then became a centerpiece of U.S. strategy with the Democratization pursued by Wilson and the massive famine relief pursued by Wilson’s food czar for Europe, Herbert Hoover. A Quaker pacifist, he pleaded for food to be shipped to the enemy lest starving Germans turn to extremists. He urged Wilson to fight Bolshevism in Russia with bread, not guns. Thanks in part to Hoover, the U.S. bankrolled European reconstruction in the 1920s.

During World War II Global Meliorism moved to the forefront of U.S. policy. Inspired by Hoover’s relief agencies, the New Deal, Keynsian economics, and the hardship and inflation of the interwar years, the U.S. founded the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. The postwar occupations of Germany and Japan and the Marshall Plan seemed to prove America’s power to democratize and prosper whole nations.

This American mission to uplift the poor and oppressed was given new urgency by the Cold War, and the rhetoric and methods behind Truman’s Point Four Program for foreign aid were boldly Meliorist. Eisenhower at first was skeptical of governmental foreign aid, but the emergence of the third world—where the Soviets played the anti-imperialist card, supported guerilla wars, and claimed that communism was the best road to development—gradually convinced Ike that the U.S. had to try to export economic growth and democracy. Meanwhile, economists developed theories on how American investment and technology could lift any nation into economic takeoff and self-sustained growth.

John F. Kennedy, a convert, established the Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress, and USAID. But his most aggressive Meliorist offensive was in South Vietnam. Granted, the commitment to Vietnam grew out of the extension of Containment to Asia. But when Truman helped Greece, Turkey, and South Korea he did not ask those countries to become model democracies. JFK’s advisers, by contrast, believed that state-building, nation-building, and the “winning of hearts and minds” through social reforms were the keys to victory. So where Eisenhower, a military man thinking in terms of Containment, saw control of Laos as the key to South Vietnam’s security, Kennedy bargained away Laos, then overthrew Saigon’s Diem regime in 1963—not because Diem wasn’t anticommunist enough, but because he refused to push the reforms that Americans deemed necessary. When his successors proved even worse, the Americans had no choice but to go in and remake the country themselves.

Vietnam was the first war in which large U.S. forces were sent overseas not to defeat the enemy, but just to keep their ally from losing until such time as U.S. civilian agencies could fashion a state able to stand up to Hanoi on its own. Lyndon Johnson waged a Great Society war based on the same methods of social engineering that he practiced at home. The Vietnam War was a thorough repudiation of America’s Old Testament traditions. That is why the most effective critiques of it came not from the radical left, which shared most of the Meliorist assumptions, but from conservatives like George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, and J. William Fulbright, who saw the Vietnam War as arrogance and presumption.

Failure in Vietnam dealt Global Meliorism a serious blow, but did not kill it. Nixon and Ford practiced it in the form of billions of loan guarantees and a subsidized wheat deal to the Soviet bloc. Jimmy Carter then clearly separated Meliorism from Containment when he asked Americans to let go of their “inordinate fear of communism” and focus on human rights and third-world development. Of course, Soviet provocations culminating in their invasion of Afghanistan caused Carter to rediscover Containment, which in turn allowed Ronald Reagan to redeploy human rights rhetoric against the Soviets even as his administration ratcheted up the military and economic pressure on Moscow. That turned out to be just the right mix of policies needed to promote Gorbachev’s internal reforms and so bring the Cold War to an end.

George H.W. Bush shared Eisenhower’s skepticism about nation-building. He wanted no part of governing Iraq and confined the Somali intervention to humanitarian relief. But Global Meliorism returned in force when Carter veterans such as Anthony Lake and Warren Christopher returned to office under Bill Clinton. Their post-Cold War doctrines of assertive multilateralism and enlargement, and occupations of Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, attested to their abiding faith that the U.S. had the power, duty, and know-how to reform and uplift whole countries. They were roundly criticized: Jeane Kirkpatrick observed that the military “doesn’t do windows,” and Michael Mandelbaum called Clinton’s “a Mother Teresa foreign policy.” Even Jimmy Carter noted that the U.S. had sent 20,000 soldiers to Bosnia while ignoring the holocausts occurring in Africa; he called Clinton’s policies racist. Most ironic, it was Clinton’s mentor, Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, who questioned most sharply the United States’ ability “to create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is a way of life.”

Promised Land was published in 1997, hence that was the end of my story. Indeed, my FPRI colleague Paul Dickler recently reminded me that I had written precisely the following in that final chapter:

“For no international bureaucracy, much less a single nation, however powerful and idealistic, can substitute itself for the healthy nationalism of an alien people. Almost everyone agrees, for instance, that Saddam Hussein is bad for his country. But can Americans can be better Iraqis than Iraqis themselves, or presume to tell the Chinese how to be better Chinese”?[4]

So what did I subsequently make of 9/11, the global war on terror, and the Bush Doctrine? Do the events and decisions of the Bush years mark a radical departure for U.S. traditions because our first Middle East-born existential crisis has created unprecedented circumstances? And may the Bush Doctrine yet qualify as a ninth tradition of American foreign relations?

Taking the second question first, the answer is not yet, because of my criteria for a tradition, and probably not at all, since Operation Iraqi Freedom may turn out to be a one-shot deal. Most telling, preemption is not new at all if we are at war. Since the seventeenth century at least, almost the whole world has understood a state of war to mean the declaration of hostilities between two or more sovereign states. After World War II, however, that clear definition began to break down.

The U.S. itself has played a major role in that breakdown, for not since 1941 has the U.S. Congress declared war against anyone. Korea was called a police action, engaged in with approval by the UN. Vietnam was called a conflict, engaged in on the dubious grounds of the Congressional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti were likewise executive police actions launched in the name, not of U.S. security, but universal human rights. Even the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were not preceded by declarations of war, although they clearly involved U.S. security as well as human rights. Does the existence of transnational, non-state terrorist movements imply that the U.S. and its allies are in a permanent state of something like warfare against people who may be lurking in every country on earth? If so, can the U.S. or any other government claim the right to intervene anywhere according to their traditional right of self-defense? Perhaps a major theme of twenty-first century international relations will be a great global debate over the redefinition of war itself.

Whether the Bush policies were a radical departure from our traditions is also a complicated issue. I believe the Bush Doctrine is rooted to a surprising degree in American traditions. Terrorism against the U.S. homeland is surely a devastating assault against our Exceptionalism, our Unity, Independence, and Liberty at Home, our Freedom to pursue our American Dream. If the Boston Massacre and Britain’s Intolerable Acts demanded an American Declaration of Independence, certainly 9/11 did. The War on Terror as waged by Bush also echoed some themes of Progressive Imperialism and Containment, and it brought to a deafening crescendo the theme of Global Meliorism. The Iraqi occupation has been called Wilsonianism with Guns. It is really Global Meliorism with Guns, which, to me, is the most persuasive analogy between Iraq and Vietnam, and therefore the most troubling as well.

How the Iraqi crusade comes out will be of surpassing importance for the short-range future of American statecraft and the place of the U.S. in the world. State-building, much less democratization, in Iraq and even more in Afghanistan is a fantastic proposition. But if I am wrong, then Bush’s stock may rise in decades to come as Truman’s did, the lessons of 2003-06 will be forgotten, and at some point Americans will over-reach all over again someplace else. Alas, failing to reckon with our own history and those of the countries we presume to invade and redeem is also a venerable U.S. tradition.

Notes

1. ^ The leaflet was authored by two American officials and one local agent. See Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 104-105; see also http://www.meforum.org/45/fdr-addresses-the-arabs.
2. ^ See Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 10.
3. ^ See William Imboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge, 2008).
4. ^Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 220.

As I mentioned awhile back, I devoted a good chunk of my vacation out west reading Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997. As you might imagine, I spent a lot of time thinking about possible parallels and lessons for America's current global position, just as English imperialists spent a lot of time pondering the Roman experience (ably documented by Edward Gibbon).

In a tapestry this rich and varied, it is easy to read into it just about any "lesson" one wants to draw. With that caveat in mind, here are the top ten lessons on empire that I drew from Brendon's book. Even if you don't agree with them, you should still read the book.

1. There is no such thing as a "benevolent" Empire.

In his classic history of ancient Rome, Gibbon had noted that "There is nothing more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest." Britons thought of the empire as a positive force for themselves and their subjects, even though they had to slaughter thousands of their imperial subjects in order to maintain their control. Americans should be under no illusions either: if you maintain garrisons all over the world and repeatedly interfere in the internal politics of other countries, you are inevitably going to end up breaking a lot of heads.

2. All Empires depend on self-justifying ideology and rhetoric that is often at odds with reality.

British imperialists repeatedly portrayed their role as the "white man's burden" and maintained that imperial control brought considerable benefits to their subjects. (This is an old story: France proclaimed its mission civilizatrice, and the Soviet empire claimed it was spreading the benefits of communism. Today, Americans say we are spreading freedom and liberty). Brendon's account describes the various benefits of imperial rule, but also emphasizes the profound social disruptions that imperial rule caused in India, Africa, and elsewhere. Moreover, because British control often depended on strategies of "divide-and-conquer," its rule often left its colonies deeply divided and ill-prepared for independence. But that's not what English citizens were told at the time.

3. Successful empires require ample "hard power."

Although the British did worry a lot about their reputation and prestige (what one might now term their "soft power") what really killed the Empire was its eroding economic position. Once Britain ceased to be the world’s major economic and industrial power, its days as an imperial power were numbered. It simply couldn't maintain the ships, the men, the aircraft, and the economic leverage needed to rule millions of foreigners, especially in a world where other rapacious great powers preyed. The moral for Americans? It is far more important to maintain a robust and productive economy here at home than it is to squander billions of dollars trying to determine the political fate of some remote country thousands of miles away. External conditions may impinge on U.S. power, but it is internal conditions that generate it....

We've just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here's how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney's orders, didn't inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn't keep that body's "Gang of Eight" informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We're told that the CIA -- being the president's private army and part of the executive branch of our government -- has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even "be illegal," according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

This story, however, has a largely unexplored strangeness to it that has only been discussed on the fringes of the mainstream media (or in the press of other countries). After all, during the eight years this CIA assassination program was supposedly in formation, U.S. military special ops death squads were, as far as we can tell, freely roaming the planet conducting (or botching) assassination missions, and the CIA's own robot assassins, airborne death squads, were also launching operations -- sometimes wiping out innocent civilians -- from Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. They continue to run such operations in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands near Afghanistan. So we still await an explanation of just why the CIA spent close to eight years, under Vice Presidential oversight, getting its death squads almost operational, but never -- we're told -- off the ground.

If there seems to be something odd about this latest flap, if there's much that we don't know yet, we do, at least, know one thing: This particular small splash from the previous administration's deep dive into crime and folly will have its brief time in the media sun and then be swallowed up by oblivion, just as each of the previous flaps has been.

After all, can you honestly tell me that you think often about the CIA torture flap, the CIA-destruction-of-interrogation-video-tapes flap, the what-did-Congress/Nancy Pelosi-really-know-about-torture-methods flap, the Bush-administration-officials-(like-Condi-Rice)-signed-off-on-torture-methods-in-2002-even-before-the-Justice-Department-justified-them flap, the National-Security-Agency-(it-was-far-more-widespread-than-anyone-imagined)-electronic-surveillance flap, the should-the-NSA's-telecom-spies-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-engaging-in-illegal-warrantless-wiretapping flap, the should-CIA-torturers-be-investigated-and-prosecuted-for-using-enhanced-interrogation-techniques flap, the Abu-Ghraib-photos-(round-two)-suppression flap, or various versions of the can-they-close-Guantanamo, will-they-keep-detainees-in-prison-forever flaps, among others that have already disappeared into my own personal oblivion file? Every flap its day, evidently. Each flap another problem (again we're told) for a president with an ambitious program who is eager to "look forward, not backward."

Of course, he's not alone. Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but -- just for a moment -- let's not.

Admittedly, we're a people who don't really believe in history -- so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing, of which each of these flaps has been but a tiny example. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each one of them is, soon enough, lessened by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?

The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we -- not just the Obama administration -- have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn't been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.

As a start, remind me: What didn't we do? Let's review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques -- known to the previous administration and most of the media as"enhanced interrogation techniques" -- were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at "black sites" offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown, but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its global war on terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the" cleansing" of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our Special Forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out -- and still carry out -- assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world, on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined"torture" out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).

And don't think that that's anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It's only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying:"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what's missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category or, as with the latest CIA assassination story, a known curiosity whose full shape and depths remain to be grasped. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It's a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.

Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place, rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately, is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared"war," made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power in the world, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.

Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don't believe it. History matters.

Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don't face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson -- the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson -- of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam -- and Laos and Cambodia -- because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H.W. Bush,"kicked the Vietnam syndrome." It still haunts us.

However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country -- and they remain monstrously large -- we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of... well, of us and our"safety." We need to face who we've been and just how badly we've acted, if we care to become something better.

Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren't we the people your mother warned you about?