Ota Masahide, a former governor of Okinawa Prefecture and historian of Okinawa, is currently a Social Democratic Party member of the Upper House, in Japan Focus (June 2004):

When a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl was raped by three U.S. soldiers in the autumn of 1995, I was governor of Okinawa Prefecture. In my address to the people of Okinawa, I said,"I apologize to you all for failing to protect the girl's human rights and dignity."
 
I uttered these words not so much as an expression of my personal emotion, but more out of a sense of pained frustration that human rights violations would continue so long as Okinawa remained host to U.S. military bases, and I would be helpless to protect the human dignity of my fellow Okinawans.
 
The girl's rape set off a chain of events that led to the establishment of the Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO) to consolidate and reduce U.S. facilities.
 
According to the SACO Final Report of December 1996, Japan and the United States agreed on the return of land then occupied by 11 U.S. installations that included air stations, training facilities and military ports.
 
That was more than seven years ago. However, not only has there been hardly any progress, Okinawa's base-related problems have actually grown worse.
 
Particularly disturbing are the circumstances surrounding the planned relocation of the Futenma Air Station, one of the focal issues addressed by SACO. On the pretext of adhering to the Final Report, the Japanese government insists on relocating that facility off the cost of Henoko in the city of Nago. But Okinawans have been protesting with sit-ins. And with various environmental groups warning against damage to coral reefs and other forms of environmental destruction, the Futenma issue has hit an impasse.
 
During World War II, Okinawa was the nation's"breakwater" that protected mainland Japan. And with the arrival of the U.S. forces after the war, Okinawa's renewed suffering has continued to this day. There has been little sympathy for Okinawa's plight among the rest of the Japanese public.
 
The government and many Japanese citizens insist the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty is necessary for the nation's security and prosperity. Yet, the last thing they want is a U.S. military base in their backyard. They have been callously taking advantage of Okinawans.
 
The U.S. military presence in Okinawa is not limited to the bases alone. About 40 percent of Okinawan air space and 29 sea areas in the prefecture are controlled by the U.S. forces. When local people are denied free use of their own land, air and sea, how could they be considered citizens of a sovereign nation?
 
The central government in Tokyo has been appallingly indifferent to this reality. And worse yet, many people-including even politicians-believe wrongly that the Okinawan economy would collapse without the U.S. military presence.
 
Here are the facts. Of Okinawa's 52 cities, towns and villages, the community with the highest annual income is a sugarcane farming village where there is no U.S. base. During the 1960s before Okinawa was returned to Japanese rule in 1972, U.S. base-related revenues accounted for half the prefecture's revenues, and about 50,000 people were employed at U.S. bases. Today, there are less than 10,000 base workers and, base-related revenues make up only 5 percent of the prefectural total.
 
There would be jobs for 10 times more people if the U.S. forces were to vacate their bases in urban areas and the returned land was developed by the private sector. Okinawa's tropical climate and abundant nature render it an ideal holiday destination, which should enable the prefecture to bolster revenues from tourism.
 
In short, the bases are actually hampering the development of Okinawa's economy, not sustaining it.
 
With the U.S. forces reorganizing themselves around the world, nothing is set in concrete anymore. Even though the Japanese government remains obsessed with the SACO Final Report, its very content no longer reflects the present reality. And in point of fact, nowhere does the report say anything about reclaiming an offshore area to relocate the Futenma Air Station, nor is there any mention of making it double as a civilian airfield.
 
Given these developments, Tokyo should stop hanging on to the past and call for a new round of negotiations with Washington, keeping in perspective the possibility of bases in Okinawa being relocated to areas outside Japan.
 
If Tokyo really means business, there is no question the Pentagon and the State Department will be flexible and accommodating. In fact, I do not see why we could not have SACO2 and SACO3....

David Stout, in the NYT (June 11, 2004):

... Abraham Lincoln's funeral in 1865 loosed a flood of grief only a half-year after his very re-election was in doubt."In point of sad sublimity and moral grandeur, the spectacle has been the most impressive ever witnessed in the national capital," The New-York Times observed then.

An older generation of Americans recalls the heartbreak of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral in 1945, just five months after he was elected to his fourth term - by a comfortable majority, to be sure, but also his narrowest.

To a somewhat younger generation, the funeral of John F. Kennedy will always seem like the day before yesterday. Some historians say the shock of his assassination made him in myth what he had not been in life.

Leaders of yesteryear have often been lionized upon their death, sometimes by people who had reason to feel less than warm toward them.

At Dwight D. Eisenhower's funeral in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon praised the former president and general as"a good and gentle and kind man."

Nixon struggled to keep from choking up, according to one account, in extolling Eisenhower as a man from the country's heartland in every sense,"not only from its geographical heart but from its spiritual heart.''

"He exemplified,'' Nixon said,"what millions of parents hoped that their sons would be - strong and courageous and honest and compassionate."

It was almost as if Eisenhower had never hurt Nixon's chances against Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race by seeming lukewarm toward his own vice president, even telling reporters that he might need a week or so to recall any significant contribution Nixon had made in office.

When former President Lyndon B. Johnson died in 1973, an estimated 40,000 people filed through the Capitol Rotunda, where his coffin lay. Near the National City Christian Church, the site of services here, people stood 8 to 10 deep, united in respect as they had not been during the Vietnam War.

President Warren G. Harding was deeply mourned when he died suddenly in 1923. The throngs of grief-stricken included some 10,000 schoolchildren recruited from Washington's playgrounds to strew Pennsylvania Avenue with flowers as the funeral procession moved from the White House to the Capitol.

Nearly 200 people, including a score of marines standing at attention near the White House, were overcome by the 100-degree heat that Aug. 8. In time, Harding's reputation wilted as well.

When Herbert Hoover died in 1964, after the longest post-White House life of any president, his inability to deal with the Great Depression was, for the moment, forgotten. At his funeral, attended by President Johnson, Hoover was honored in a special prayer for his" concerns for the needs of all mankind." The service recalled the European relief efforts he had helped to organize after both world wars.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who on retirement referred to himself with an old barracks refrain that said"old soldiers never die, they just fade away," did not exactly fade away. The huge crowds at his April 1964 funeral heard him extolled for his military genius and the reforms he instituted in postwar Japan - not, of course, for his peacock vanity or for the near insubordination that prompted President Harry S. Truman to relieve him in 1951 as commander of United Nations forces in Korea.

Rivaling the general's funeral in pageantry, and surpassing it in poignancy, was the 1921 service for an ordinary infantryman, the Unknown Soldier of World War I. Exhumed from an American military cemetery in France, his body lay in the Capitol Rotunda, where an estimated 90,000 people filed past his coffin.

"As he was carried past through the banks of humanity that lined Pennsylvania Avenue a solemn, reverent hush held the living walls," a reporter for The Associated Press wrote."Yet there was not so much of sorrow as of high pride in it all, a pride beyond the reach of shouting and the clamor that marks less sacred moments in life."

The crowds, the account went on,"stood in almost holy awe to take their own part in what was theirs, the glory of the American people, honored here in the honors showered on America's nameless son from France."

And when he was entombed at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the many war dead who could not be identified,"the guns roared out again in the national salute.''

Neela Banerjee, in the NYT (June 6, 2004):

At their meeting here last week, members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries seemed to abdicate responsibility for the recent record-high oil prices. Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the group's president and Indonesia's minister of energy, complained in his opening remarks that"the high prices have been caused by a combination of factors over which OPEC has no control - speculation on futures markets, tightness in the U.S. gasoline market, geopolitical concerns and higher-than-expected oil demand growth, especially in China and the U.S.A."

This is not entirely the case. The 10 voting members of the cartel did help drive up prices over the last 18 months, underestimating world demand and sometimes cutting production to buoy prices.

But it is true that the market OPEC has successfully managed over the last five years seems to be slipping from its grip. By pumping less oil OPEC can keep prices from falling, but it has little power to curtail violence and political instability, and so cannot keep prices from spiraling upward on bad news. For consumers, that could mean continual volatility in fuel prices, and the possibility of continued high prices, which have hit $40 a barrel over the last month.

"How can they control prices when there are three wars in the Middle East?" asked Walid Khadduri, editor of the Middle East Economic Survey, a weekly newsletter."There is the war on terrorism, Iraq and Palestine." He added:"In talking to a lot of delegates here, I think they have reached the point, except for the Saudis, that there is nothing more they can do."

OPEC lives with the ghost of a disastrous miscalculation in 1998. The global economy looked strong at the time, and OPEC increased its production to meet what it thought would be higher demand. Shortly afterward, the Asian economy crashed, demand sank and oil prices plummeted to as low as $10 a barrel. The cartel's member nations recovered by collaborating more closely than they had in years, and mustering the cooperation of non-OPEC countries like Mexico and Norway, to cut production to bolster prices.

Over the last four years, the cartel has tried to keep oil within its so-called price band of $22 to $28 per barrel. But the fear of another price plunge was always a factor, and remains so today, even with high global demand and high prices. The reason is obvious: OPEC members are wholly dependent on oil revenue to run their states and maintain internal social stability.

Prices did in fact stay below $30 a barrel for several years. But OPEC, like the rest of the world, got the supply and demand balance wrong last year, largely because it underestimated the robust growth in China and the United States.

OPEC also fretted about the return of the Iraqi oil exports after the war. The production took longer than predicted to recover, but before the war there was no way of telling how much oil would return and when. And OPEC did not want to produce enough to cause a glut in the market when Iraq did pump more.

Nor did OPEC immediately become concerned about rising prices. The cartel now believes that Western economies and their consumers can thrive with oil that costs more than $30 a barrel, though they may not like it....

Elaine Sciolino, in the NYT (May 31, 2004):

Franklin Roosevelt loathed Charles de Gaulle and de Gaulle loathed him back.

The Free French leader, was given only two days notice that 150,000 American and other foreign troops were coming by sea and air to the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, and de Gaulle was not allowed to take part.

President Roosevelt , worried about de Gaulle's authoritarian streak, drew up a plan to impose an American-run military government on the country. Roosevelt went so far as to print a new currency for the French people, but de Gaulle successfully vetoed its use.

"The French and Americans fought like cats and dogs," said Robert O. Paxton, the American World War II historian."This was not a time of French-American harmony. But in the mythology, we were all heroes and they were all grateful to be saved. We use the positive parts of memory to mend fences."

It is to honor this spirit of sacrifice and liberation that President Bush and 16 other heads of state and government will gather in Normandy next Sunday, the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

Yet even as they celebrate the Atlantic powers' greatest achievement, many will be mourning their greatest debacle: the failure to forge a common strategy on Iraq.

No less than in 1944, political attention will be focused on the difficult relationship between the American and French leaders, George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac, the man who championed European opposition to the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. How these two men get along will help shape the course of trans-Atlantic ties.

French public opinion is overwhelmingly hostile to Mr. Bush. (Eighty-five percent who were asked in a Pew poll in March had an unfavorable opinion of him.)

Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister of France, calls the disconnect between the celebration of the past and the condemnation of the present"the paradox of June 6.''

The American president"will be welcomed as the president of brave men who died for freedom," Mr. Fabius said at the University of Chicago last Tuesday."But he will be considered as the exact opposite of the values that make us love America."

The Socialist Party spokesman, Annick Lepetit, puts it more starkly:"We say yes to America, yes to the heroes of D-Day, yes to peace - and no to George Bush."

Annie Nakao, in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 30, 2004):

Long before Janet Jackson's breast set off national hand-wringing over smut on our airwaves, the world was already a dicey place. Or so Seattle music historian Peter Blecha maintains in his new book, "Taboo Tunes, A History of Banned Bands and Censored Songs," which romps through centuries of public outrage over music of every sort, from bawdy tavern ditties to gritty hip-hop.

"I absolutely sympathize with parents, who have every good reason in the world to protect their children from being exposed to questionable stuff," Blecha says. "But the world has never been perfect. It's always been full of dangerous things, wild and crazy ideas and bad language."

Not to mention songs.

"Some things never change," the 47-year-old onetime garage band drummer and DJ says in a phone interview.

"Taboo Tunes" was published in paperback by San Francisco's Backbeat Books, with a foreword by Nirvana's Krist Novoselic. Blecha, a past senior curator at the Experience Music Project, Seattle's rock 'n' roll museum, has studied public alarm over controversial songs and artists for 20 years. He views the censoriously inclined as mostly "woefully misguided, often destructive, occasionally comical and remarkably unsuccessful."

Hold on, says Jim Steyer, who teaches civil liberties at Stanford University and heads Common Sense Media, which informs parents on films, CDs and TV shows.

"Millions of parents are really concerned about the music their kids are listening to," Steyer said. "We're for sanity, not censorship."

But Blecha believes history justifies his protectionist stance on behalf of "unintimidated music making."

Plato warned politicians of his day to be wary of poets and their corrupting influences on youth. Henry David Thoreau, in 1854, opined that like liquor, "even music may be intoxicating."

Plato also noted that new rhythms can set in motion ripples that can turn cultures on their heads. This explains why jazz, rock 'n' roll and now hip-hop have caused such a ruckus.

"A wave of vulgar, filthy and suggestive music has inundated the land with its obscene posturing, its lewd gestures," spewed one newspaper in 1899 about jazz.

When jazz swept through Chicago, the playing of saxophones and trumpets was banned after dark; "reckless" new jazz dance steps like the bunny hug, the turkey trot and the lame duck were outlawed.

A half-century later, Time magazine disparaged rock 'n' roll as "an unrelenting, shocking syncopation that sounds like a bull whip; a choleric saxophone honking mating calls; an electric guitar turned up so loud that it shatters and splits."

Rock festivals were targeted in the early 1970s. The Indiana Legislature hastily enacted laws barring such events, only to discover that it had outlawed nearly every large public gathering, including the Indianapolis 500 auto race....

Until Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first nomination as the Democratic candidate in 1932, no candidates attended their parties' conventions, and they waited weeks before getting the news and accepting. So John Kerry's consideration of the idea of not formally accept his party's nomination at the convention would be a throwback, not a precedent.

Click here to hear the report.

Brendan Miniter, in the WSJ (May 27, 2004):

For more than a decade I believed that the first President Bush made a massive mistake in leaving Saddam Hussein in power in 1991. I almost voted against him for this wobbliness in 1992. But the longer the fight drags on in Iraq today, the more I thank God that the first Gulf War stopped with the liberation of Kuwait. This is no endorsement of Saddam's final 12 years of rule, nor a repudiation of the invasion last year. But it's time to face a hard truth: America cannot afford to be beaten in the sands of Iraq.

Let's consider what would've happened had George H.W. Bush ordered the troops to go on to Baghdad in the first Gulf War. Whether in quiet desertion or mass protest, much of Europe and the Arab world would have turned against the American president in the face of a protracted insurgent war--and there is every reason to believe Saddam loyalists would have been much stronger then than they are today. Each ally's departure would have emboldened domestic opponents, who were more numerous back then. (Only 10 of 56 Senate Democrats voted for the Gulf War, compared with 29 of 50 who backed Iraq's liberation in 2002.) The impulse to withdraw with less than total victory would have been almost irresistible. And without seeing the war in moral terms, the first Bush administration would likely have buckled under the pressure.

Republicans didn't control Congress at the time of the Gulf War, so the erosion of what little Democratic support there was would have doomed the war effort. Last week the House approved a defense bill north of $400 billion. Would a Democratic Congress have been willing to appropriate such a large sum to fight insurgents and rebuild Iraq in the run-up to the 1992 presidential election, at a time when the nation hadn't been steeled by a terrorist attack on our own soil?

On the world stage, this would have been infinitely worse than Mogadishu. Osama bin Laden would have had the kind of victory he'd hoped for in Afghanistan in 2001--proof that a Muslim population could defeat the U.S. And domestic resolve would have been devastated.

Gerald Nicosia, author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement (Crown Publishers, 2001, forthcoming in a new edition from Carroll & Graf this August), in the LAT (May 25, 2004):

... The next big event by the VVAW [Vietnam Veterans Against the War] began in late January 1971, at a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge in Detroit. [John] Kerry attended the Winter Soldier Investigation, reluctantly. Despite claims by recent Kerry-bashers, including Vietnam veteran Stephen Sherman in the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 26, 2004), that Kerry was the "emcee" of Winter Soldier, not a single FBI document concerning that event bears his name.

Winter Soldier "shattered" Kerry, he said to me in a 1988 interview. More than 100 veterans spoke. Kerry saw their discharge forms and talked with the vets enough, he said, to become satisfied that most were telling authentic stories—of torturing and murdering Viet Cong prisoners, raping village women, shooting villagers for target practice, cutting off ears and other body parts. These accounts were news to him and educated him, he said then. "It was a very, very heavy, difficult kind of thing to listen to, and it was painful."

Others wondered at the time if Kerry had made peace with his memories. Jack Smith, a veteran from Connecticut, says in a recent interview that he could see from Kerry's eyes that he was struggling as he listened to veterans telling painful war stories. Peggy Kerry says that her brother "had the anguish" shared by so many other vets just back from Vietnam; she says he suffered "indescribable pain" about the people who'd died in the war, and that he would sometimes wake up screaming from nightmares that continued even into his present marriage with Teresa Heinz Kerry. At a rally on Wall Street in April 1971, the files show, Kerry spoke of being "guilty" like everyone else in the country "for having allowed the war to go on"—a burden that, he said to me in a second interview, in 1989, could have "croaked" him if he had not been personally strong enough to deal with it.

Winter Soldier was held in Detroit because its sponsor, Jane Fonda, wanted to reach the "working class." By then, Kerry's public speaking had impressed two VVAW founders, Jan Barry and Sheldon Ramsdell. After Kerry's speech at Valley Forge, Ramsdell had told Peggy Kerry: "Whoa! He looks like Lincoln, and he sounds like a Kennedy. Get him on the road!" Kerry quickly became what the FBI calls several times "National Spokesman for VVAW."

But the Winter Soldier meeting received virtually no publicity, which bothered Kerry, and gave him an opening. He called upon VVAW leaders to demonstrate in Washington, a proposal that brought Kerry his first taste of the opposition that would drive him from the organization later in 1971. Many veterans, especially the grunts, were tired of being led by officers. Mike McCusker, a former Marine sergeant who was then VVAW Oregon coordinator, says the dispute was between the "top-downers versus the bottom-uppers." McCusker says he and the other bottom-uppers won—for the moment—but only by agreeing to go along with the demonstration in Washington, known as Operation Dewey Canyon III.

The next month, in February, McCusker recalls walking into VVAW's national office in New York and discovering to his dismay that Kerry was in charge of the meeting. Organization leaders were gathering for their first national steering committee meeting. Kerry looked "stiff and starchy," a "top-downer" if McCusker had ever seen one. But, he says, Kerry won him over in two ways. First, he saw that as the room filled with vets, Kerry loosened up, as if these truly were his brothers, people with whom he felt safe and comfortable. Second, Kerry began sounding unlike an officer, talking about his Paris trip to meet the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegates and about his great respect for the Vietnamese. Kerry and McCusker developed an immediate rapport.

After the New York meeting, Kerry began stumping the country to raise funds for the demonstration in Washington. FBI files show that the agency was unsure what to make of him, for despite his tailored suits, Gucci loafers and "JFK" monogrammed sweaters that other vets kidded him about, and despite the patrician manners and stock patriotic phrases, Kerry seemed to harbor, and at times openly express, some fairly radical beliefs. The files contain an array of his edgy political positions, including his statement in Philadelphia that "Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington of Vietnam." Southeastern VVAW coordinator Scott Camil says that he heard Kerry make the comment several times. Also in Philadelphia, according to the files, Kerry noted Ho Chi Minh's understanding of the United States Constitution and his efforts "to install the same provisions into the government of Vietnam."

Kerry also attacked President Richard Nixon as relentlessly as he praised Ho Chi Minh, but his criteria for both, Camil says, was honesty and sincerity. What Kerry held most against Nixon was that he had been elected in 1968 on a promise to end the war, yet by mid 1971, Nixon had extended the ground war into Laos and Cambodia and had begun plans to massively escalate the air war against North Vietnam. "Nixon ran 3 1/2 years ago saying, 'I have the secret plan for peace,' " the files say Kerry told one audience, "and now, the only promise he has kept is that the plan is still a secret."

Though Kerry at times lectured VVAW to stick to the single issue of ending the war, and to eschew attacks on racism, poverty and other broader issues, Kerry himself often condemned social injustices. He told an audience in Reno that, "The United States has become a society based on whose ox is being gored," and in Oklahoma City, he warned, according to a newspaper account, that the country must change its political power structure to avoid violent efforts to seize power.

Anyone who thinks, as some veterans do, that the young Kerry calculated his remarks with an eye toward running for president some day will have to deal with the many unequivocal charges he made against his own government and society as recorded in the FBI documents. At times, Kerry sounded more like Eugene Debs than today's typical Republicrat. One newspaper reported: "Kerry said it is wrong for some persons to make millions of dollars and pay no taxes while others barely making a living have to pay them," and that "of 234 congressmen's sons eligible for service in Vietnam, only 24 went there and only one of them was wounded."

Indeed, the files show that Kerry was far from politically correct even within his own organization. He joined in the dedication of Victor Westphall's Vietnam War memorial, an activity hardly prescribed for VVAW leaders, in Angel Fire, N.M., on May 18, 1971. Nixon sent a supportive letter about the memorial to Westphall that month. An FBI agent, apparently spotting the potential for embarrassing Kerry by putting him on the same side of an issue with Nixon, forwarded both texts to the bureau's Washington office.

The Kansas state coordinator for VVAW, John Musgrave, who spoke beside Kerry at a couple of colleges, says that Kerry impressed him by "always speaking directly from the pain and misery of a combat veteran. He adds, "I believed every word he said in those days." Musgrave, a Marine veteran who almost lost his life to three AK-47 rounds, recalls that Kerry touched hearts with his honesty and deep feeling—as though he were speaking for America's conscience. He believes that Kerry played a major role because "the nation needs to hear what combat vets have to say, and Kerry was able to tell them." Musgrave is angry at Kerry today mainly because he believes that Kerry "has stopped speaking that way, and he owes it to the American people to speak like that again—like a human being, not a politician."

Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat and vice president of the new Akita International University, in Japan Times (May 25, 204):

U.S. President George W. Bush says often that the American aim in Iraq is to promote something called "democracy." But what is this democracy?

The American philosopher Francis Fukuyama has gotten much publicity with his thesis that democracy, particularly the Anglo-Saxon version, is "The End of History" -- namely the last and final stage in humanity's efforts to establish the ideal political system.

Ideal? With the news of prisoner torture and abuse by U.S. forces in Iraq?

Few may realize this, but the origins of the Fukuyama thesis can be traced back to a 1980s visit to Japan by a Lawrence Harrison, a dedicated U.S. expert on aid to Latin America. His visit was part of a quest to discover why Latin American societies found it so hard to match the economic and social progress of North America. His hypothesis was that the "radius of trust" -- the extent to which individuals in a society cooperate with each other -- was much wider in North American and northern European than in Latin societies.

Where the northern peoples had networks of professional and trade groups, traditions of voluntarism, etc., Harrison saw the Latin radius of trust as confined largely to close relatives and the Church.

Why the difference? Harrison saw it as embedded in religion -- the Protestant ethic of the north as opposed to the Catholicism of the south. But this left him with the problem of explaining non-Protestant Japan, whose progress at the time seemed to exceed even that of North America and Europe.

Visiting Japan, Harrison found similarly wide networks of trusting relationships, and assumed that the Confucian ethic was the reason. He saw that ethic as matching the Protestant ethic. At the time, some of us tried in vain to convince him that Japan was not a very Confucian society and that traditional Confucianism was usually seen more as a brake than as an aid to progress. This flaw, plus the lack of hype, probably caused his otherwise valuable radius-of-trust concept to be overlooked.

Enter Fukuyama. With only slight attribution, he picked up Harrison's concept of trusting relationships as the key to social and economic progress. But Fukuyama saw the radius of trust in North America, North Europe and Japan as having little to do with any religious ethic. Rather he saw it as proof that these societies had moved much further than others down the path of history -- all the way to advanced industrialization and liberal democracy.

The Fukuyama thesis has had enormous influence. It coincided with the collapse of communism in East Europe. Today it provides much of the rationale for the fruitless U.S. push into Iraq. But with a U.S. president as blinded by messianic fundamentalism as any al-Qaeda suicide bomber, who owes his job partly to electoral manipulation and who plans to continue it with massive spending aimed at slandering his opponent, can anyone really talk of democracy being the final stage in humankind's political development?

Far from being the end of history, democracy is the middle of history, and a very temporary one at that....

This "middle of history" thesis could explain the sharp contrast between the relative honesty and cooperation found at home in Japan and the Anglo-Saxon societies compared with the clumsy deviousness of their foreign policies and the brutality of their soldiers abroad....