A Post-Saddam Symposium

...With few exceptions it is the land that globalization forgot—prohibitive trade barriers, puny export sectors, and paltry foreign investment...

...Can't you sense it...

...But scratch the surface, and you'll as likely as not discover anti-capitalism, patronizing and distorting quotas, and intrusions upon the sovereignty and democracy of nations...

...There are always a few carpetbaggers in the crowd...

...The Middle East countries that I have called the Terror Masters—Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia—share two things: they are all sponsors of terrorism and they are all tyrannies...

...The United States should use its predominance to pursue a third alternative, tempering Wilsonian idealism with prudence, but refusing to subordinate the people of the world to the governments of the world...

...Public order and rule of law need to precede private property rights, which need to precede issues of who owns what, securities markets, and how to manage the ownership and proceeds from oil production...

...Hans Blix urged more time for inspections...

...People were often struck by how closely President Reagan and I could work together...

...Low taxes...

...That is the greatest lesson we can draw from what has occurred...

...We- weren't what are sometimes called "pragmatists?' We used that old-fashioned short cut to the right results, which consists of right principles...

...There will be an Oklahoma Land Rush of investors, intent on buying Iraq's land and other assets on the cheap...

...President Bush laid out the new policy in his September 2002 statement, "The National Security Policy of the United States of America...

...Don't be surprised either by the problems that accompany the boom...

...They can't have enjoyed the military picture, and they will undoubtedly carry out a very detailed analysis of our impressive performance on the battlefield...

...Globalization is the future...

...Currency and banking matters are important to get right, but they are not emergencies requiring tourniquets...

...The mullahs' Iran, the world's top warehouse of terrorist networks, is way over that line...

...After all, Taiwan carried out democratization from the top down, and the Taiwanese share the same traditions and the same DNA as the mainlanders...

...The result is a corrupt elite that lives large or builds peace-threatening war machines—or both—while the people suffer...

...When the Soviet Empire fell, previously unfathomable forces were unleashed...

...Whether by internal collapse—which we can try to urge along—or by military means if necessary, these two regimes must also go...

...nations and our allies more secure...

...Traditional society keeps women ignorant and in a burka ("pregnant and barefoot," in the vernacular in which I was raised...

...These are sideshows, and they won't derail the progress any more than they did in Germany, Japan, or Korea in their day...

...And, yes, the solution is to move the misruled nations of the world toward systems of true democracy, thus reducing our foreign policy problems to such relatively benign amusements as France...

...representative to the United Nations, is senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policies at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Amazingly, this principle survived even the experience of the Third Reich...

...Investors are going to make a lot of money, as they always do when new markets with high return on capital become open and attractive for investment...

...Before coming to power, each of us had drunk deep from the same well of ideas...

...We already have preferential trade programs for the Caribbean, the Andean countries, and sub-Saharan Africa—is the Muslim world really less important...

...All sound good in the abstract...

...And that in turn could help alleviate the pervasive sense of frustration and hopelessness off which Islamist extremism feeds...

...Nor can we expect every problem to be addressed at once...

...As the first woman appointed to serve as the head of a Western mission to the UN, I became aware that in the eyes of many of my (male) colleagues, a woman in such a nontraditional role represented an unattractive variant of modernity, which was and is itself an enemy...

...To that end, America must do far more to change the diplomatic mindset—so perfectly embodied by the State Department—that so often helps to legitimize dictators by tagging them as agents of stability...

...Enterprise...

...And it added: "The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better...

...Levy spoke of people who hate us not for our faults but for our virtues—for our freedom, equality, tolerance, daring, and our success...

...But our governments will only have the will to do so if we conservatives challenge false argument and determinedly resist what Solzhenitsyn once called the "censorship of fashion...

...After Saddam was deposed and his murderous ways revealed, the UN was hesitant to give up its sanctions imposed to contain him...

...They have already reshaped much of the world's political and economic systems...

...And just as the Kremlin understood that it would live or die according to the outcome of the great war with the Unit-ed States, so the Terror Masters fear the spread of the democratic revolution we have once again unleashed on the world, this time in the Middle East...

...Of course, there's not enough paint, some spots on the canvas explode when you touch them, and there are four hundred other guys with paintbrushes trying to box you out...

...We knew, too, what didn't work—namely, socialism in every shape or form...

...and enjoy the benefits of their labor...

...FREE MARKETS, FREE IRAQ By Brink Lindsey T he future of Iraq—and by extension, much of the Middle East—turns on whether its oil wealth will be a blessing or a curse...

...As Hegel would have understood, they have also destroyed the ideologies of the old order—Marxism and the latest versions of American liberalism, to take two...

...Dr...

...Iraq has the same secret weapon that allowed Ireland and China to lead the world in growth in the last decade: vast numbers of rich, educated expatriates who care about their homeland...

...Opening shuttered markets will stimulate growth and promote badly needed reforms...

...This give back could be structured in a variety of ways, from a trust fund that pays regular dividends (a la Alaska) to mass distribution of tradable ownership certificates...

...Transplanted structures and solutions that make sense to Americans may not fit...

...Every generation has to fight anew the battle for liberty.In my generation, Nazism and then Communism were the enemy, and they very nearly prevailed...

...a hatred of the very idea of America, not as a geographic region, but as a region of the soul...

...The recent free-trade agreement with Jordan has already sparked an export boom there...

...A LINE IS DRAWN By Claudia Rosett Having established a doctrine of preemption, trashed the Taliban, and evicted Saddam Hussein, the United States will now make a Sherman's March through the dictatorships of the world, tyrant-toppling and nation-building with the same fervor we bring to the global marketing of action movies and soda pop...

...There is a lot to gain from tapping into the knowledge and experience of Iraqis, Iraqi expatriates, and Iraq's neighbors...

...We are still told that an international consensus confers "legitimacy," although many of the governments reaching that consensus can claim no legitimacy even in the eyes of their own people...

...This—the second point even more than the first—is a profound challenge to the old order...

...The outcome of the war against terrorism—a war that will sometimes take the form of military conflict, as in Iraq, and sometimes be a purely political struggle, as is likely in Iran—will define the world for at least a generation...

...America, Britain, and our allies have the resources to prevail...

...Second, a decade is far too long to wait: concrete action is needed now...

...BENEFITS OF VICTORY By Margaret Thatcher The victories first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq have made our...

...Modernity is mobility, equality, democracy, universal education, capitalism, technology, rising living standards, contraception, and opportunity for women as well as men...

...Instant communication has eroded the nation state, especially police states that can no longer isolate their citizens from the world...

...But there is still in our own countries, particularly in the media class, a pervasive culture of puerile anti-Westernism that needs to be changed...

...For years, many governments played down the threats of Islamic revolution, turned a blind eye to international terrorism, and accepted the development of weaponry of mass destruction by dictators...

...Specifically, the United States should proceed unilaterally—here's an occasion for that word—to eliminate duties and quotas on major exports from selected Muslim countries...

...Immediate, unilateral elimination of U.S...

...ties, traditional conservative values, and free trade...

...Raised and trained in the old order, our foreign policy establishment naturally and inevitably thinks in old categories...

...But as demonstrated on 9/11, traditional society must use the science and technology of modernity to attack it...

...funding from the conclave of tyrants that is the United Nations and set up a new meeting place for democracies, where despots might be allowed to come parley, but would hold no votes and no seats at the main table...

...They are the birthright of the human race...

...When the Soviet Empire fell, tyranny and terrorism lost their most powerful protector, and the burden devolved on lesser powers...

...So I am glad that freedom is on the march again...

...Indeed, some politicians were happy to go further, collaborating with the self-proclaimed enemies of the West for their own short-term gain...

...The crucial message we must keep sending is that we will require of other nations whatever it takes to assure our own survival as a free people—even insisting, if necessary, that they join the club...

...Brink Lindsey is director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies and author of Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism, published in 2002 by John Wiley & Sons...

...Don't be surprised if Iraq's economy does a lot better than pundits predict...

...But what correctly doomed Saddam Hussein was not simply his cruelty at home—on that basis we would at once move against such monsters as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or the rotten, quasi-Communist police state that holds sway in China...

...These events will have huge effects on the world economy...

...So is Kim Jong Il's North Korea, retailer of weapons to the wicked and longtime practitioner of nuclear blackmail...

...The old competing concepts of "balance of power"and "world government" are both outmoded...

...Had America and Britain not halted the descent into global anarchy, every peaceful nation, every democratic institution would have been threatened...

...In dealing with another rogue state in North Korea, the pressure is unmistakable, for another set of promises like the ones Pyongyang has continuously broken...

...Integrating the Muslim world more fully into the world economy is critically important...

...Small government...

...Treasury Department's task force on reconstructing Iraq...

...worship as they please...

...War against Iraq did not fit Osama's paradigm, as he well understood...

...You no sooner discover a remedy for one version, when it spontaneously evolves into another...

...Globalization threatens the annihilation of traditional society, of which the Taliban was the quintessential embodiment...

...one with Morocco is now in the works...

...First, like the T-shirt that says, "So much beer, so little time"—there is a ton to do and not enough experienced people to do the work...

...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39 OUT WITH THE OLD By Robert L. Bartley T he challenge before American foreign policy is to maintain the momentum toward a twenty-first century foreign policy against the huge pull of inertia...

...Self-doubt can on occasion be attractive...

...To maximize the chances for healthy economic—and political—development, state control of Iraq's prize asset has to be unwound...

...The whole world now pivots on a Middle Eastern hinge, and its final stopping point will shape the planet for a generation or more...

...Now comes SARS putting us all in masks, keeping us close to home, giving us lots of opportunity to contemplate the future...

...I recall how, representing the United States in the United Nations in the eighties, I encountered more than once the charge that America was a "rootless" country, as was Israel, filled with restless people who could not strike roots anywhere...

...And in a commencement address this spring at the University of South Carolina, President Bush unveiled a bold plan to move from bilateral deals to a wider United States-Middle East free-trade area within a decade...

...Though this is the caricature one now gets of U.S...

...But, helpful though that would be, we have neither the resources nor the will to depose all the world's tyrants tomorrow, or even most of them...

...To escape that dead end, the new Iraqi government should sell off its producing oil fields as well as its prodigious untapped deposits...

...but self-loathing is a sure-fire guarantee of a nervous breakdown...

...I am told that a month or so before we struck in Iraq the French told the Iraqis, Iranians, and Syrians that an American victory would be catastrophic for the entire region, and none of the sitting regimes would be secure...

...What we do have—it started about the time President Bush held up that bullhorn at Ground Zero—is the beginnings of the most coherent foreign policy since Ronald Reagan decided the Soviet Empire had to go...

...By spreading terrorist messages and recipes for mass killing, though, information technology has also created large, new dangers...

...We need to ask for help...

...As further issues develop, the forces of inertia will be on constant display...

...Privatizing the Iraqi oil industry is the best vaccine against the rampant corruption and wealth-destroying misrule that plague so many petroleum-rich countries, from the Persian Gulf to Nigeria to Venezuela...

...Meanwhile, the reestablishment of order in Iraq is proving more difficult than military victory...

...Sound money...

...Few peoples have ever had such an opportunity...

...We didn't need to ask ourselves those endless questions about "What Works...

...Excerpted from a speech in New York in May 2003 to the Atlantic Bridge, a London-based foundation for promoting US-U.K...

...In the past, we had nationalization, penal taxation, and the command economy...

...We cannot police the whole world...

...The Cold War's end was the first jolt to our thinking about the future and about our security needs...

...We cannot free the world of evil...

...That said, it is Kansas out there, to Iraqis and their neighbors in the region...

...They will be the biggest, 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 most knowledgeable, and most reliable source of capital and trained business people to feed Iraq's growth...

...They are what worked—and they always work...

...Solutions must respect Iraqi's history, culture, and religious beliefs or they won't last...

...It is hard to find a more dramatic moment in all of history...

...Yet surely the Bush administration is on the right course for the new century...

...Then 9/11 communicated the need for a new approach to security, with new organization and new technology...

...Our most potent tool of economic diplomacy is trade policy, and the good news is that the Bush administration appears to be serious about using it...

...So what can we—egalitarian, modernist, democrats—in this situation do...

...A convincing American performance in the Middle East will undermine the ambitions of people like Chirac, raise the stock of the many European leaders who wish to grow even closer to us, and do wonders for the "new Europeans...

...Right...

...Far more than the Middle East is at stake in Iraq...

...Bush has stressed, self-defense...

...GLOBAL FOR GOOD By Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick ord of harsh new warnings from al-Qaeda should remind listeners of the intensity, determination, and spread of "globalized anti-Americanism" in the contemporary world...

...Then, as now, strong arms and stout hearts were called upon to sustain the struggle for truth and right...

...but as the world's most powerful nation, we are the maker of manners...

...Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former U.S...

...The administration felt compelled to submit to the cacophony of the United Nations not once, but twice...

...But what we can do—what we have begun to do—is to draw a line that is clearly fatal for any regime to cross...

...This is the ultimate clash of civilizations, about which Samuel Huntington wrote with stunning imagination...

...educate their children—male and female...

...These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society...

...And it must never be forgotten...

...These precedents we must end...

...Spared the need to build a tax base through marketJUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41 friendly policies and institutions, they fail to do so...

...In an America that just three years ago was preoccupied with dot-corns and hanging chads, we have woken to a world of threats, summed up by highly mobile terrorists and their tyrannical sponsors...

...China, for example, is watching events there very carefully, trying to gauge the strength of our will and of our armed forces...

...Modernity's final stage is globalization...

...Every government is the equal of any other, whether it rules through the consent of the governed or through terror...

...It is, as Mr...

...But the obstacles were manifest...

...the obvious step of recognizing and preparing a government in exile was blocked by State Department and CIA objections to its only plausible leader, Amend Chalabi...

...It pits Osama bin Laden operating from his cave in Afghanistan against the world's financial capital...

...Michael Ledeen is a resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of The War Against the Terror Masters, published in 2002 by St...

...The problem with oil wealth is that it allows governments to fund themselves simply by pumping money out of the ground...

...If we are driven out of Iraq by a combination of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist assault, much of the world will conclude that America is not up to the challenge...

...French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy described it earlier this year as "a grave danger...

...Then our tyrannical enemies will gain strength, the forces of freedom will despair, and we will go through another cycle of the sort that followed the end of the Cold War: enemies will regroup for another assault, and we will have to fight again...

...Private property...

...Robert L. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal...

...It threatens traditional societies with total revolution—social, cultural...

...And how many forms there are...

...This is going to be on-the-job training...

...This announced the preemption doctrine—that in a world of terrorism potentially linked to weapons of mass destruction, "we cannot let our enemies strike first...

...It is also witnessed in such episodes as the maneuverings around the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court...

...First, the newly announced plan for a free-trade area curiously omits Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—all nations of obvious strategic significance...

...But there was no secret...

...By American military might and sheer willpower, the Bush administration managed to follow its policy through to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein...

...What spelled the end for Saddam was that he posed a mortal and immediate danger to the United States...

...Just as Tocqueville foresaw with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread, the destiny of the world was defined for half a century by the epochal struggle between tyrannical Russia and free America...

...But it is yesterday's weakness, not today's resolve, which is to blame for the risks we face...

...While encouraging the new Iraq to do the right thing economically, the United States should be pushing Iraq's neighbors in the same direction...

...They are not going to happen...

...The Bush administration is on the right track, but even greater ambition is called for...

...choose who will govern them...

...We must also remember that it's not Kansas out thereto us...

...If we show the determination and tenacity necessary to rebuild Iraq, and 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 thwart the efforts of the Iranians and the Syrians to turn our victory to dust in our mouths, the Chinese will be far more cautious than if we fail...

...But just as important, if less heroic, is the role of ideas...

...New slogans: old errors...

...America's top priority is not, in fact, nation-building...

...we knew what worked...

...The Bush NSS further proclaimed: "People everywhere want to be able to speak freely...

...Implicit in that grim forecast was that French policy would also be shaped by the outcome, and with it, that of other Europeans...

...Think hard...

...Following on that, in an imperfectworld of limited resources, we will build what we can...

...The $20 bills circulating on the streets and in the souks are working fine for now...

...This is a sample of the old order asserting itself...

...The prevailing conception is one of "national sovereignty" of "nation states...

...It is a revolutionary moment, as the world's tyrants know better than anyone else...

...The important thing is to prevent the nation's oil wealth from once again becoming a state-monopolized slush fund—and get that wealth into the hands of ordinary citizens who can put it to productive use...

...AN ECONOMIST'S DREAM By John Rutledge Rebuilding Iraq is an economist's dream assignment, like standing in front of a giant blank canvas with a paintbrush...

...Martin's Press...

...But enough about the French...

...foreign policy as experts debate the burdens of empire, the gory side of globalization, and how to handle the axes of evil, weasels and—here comes SARS—sneezles...

...we can never make it entirely safe...

...A big help would be to yank U.S...

...But they will also draw some very cold-blooded conclusions from our behavior after the military victory...

...The rest of the world's despots may be slated for and deserve extinction, but in all likelihood the best we can do is remind them of the line we have drawn and encourage their own people to achieve liberty from within...

...The good news is that there's not much to sort out: just law, education, health care, currency, banking, capital markets, debts, land, and oil...

...Claudia Rosett is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com and The Wall Street Journal Europe...

...Because of that, we knew where we stood...

...Nor do we have the ability to replace them all pronto with complex fabrics of genuinely democratic institutions—a process that is far less a science than an art...

...There are too many people who imagine that there is something sophisticated about always believing the best of those who hate your country, and the worst of those who defend it...

...Lady Thatcher is the former prime minister of Great Britain...

...As Forrest Gump might say, "Growth happens...

...John Rutledge is chairman of Rutledge Capital and an adviser to the U.S...

...self-criticism may sometimes be necessary...

...Let's hope we use it well...

...We should not be looking for detailed, elegant solutions...

...Modernity is what Saudi Arabia is not...

...Newt Gingrich was perhaps not the right messenger, but his suggestion of a reordering of the State Department is one of the important tasks now before us...

...Some of the proceeds can be put in special funds earmarked for rebuilding the country's shattered infrastructure, but the lion's share should be returned to its rightful owners—the Iraqi people...

...It may not be too much to say that if we win convincingly in the Middle East, China may decide to adopt the American model, abandon—at least temporarily—her quest for geostrategic competition with us, and join the democratic revolution...

...own property...

...To encourage speedy reforms in the region, benefits can be staged so that countries with better policies get better access to the U.S...

...Yes, the world remains dangerous...

...Socialism is like one of those horrible viruses...

...It should not be an indictment of either the American diplomatic corps or a particular secretary of state to suggest that implementing such a policy will require new attitudes at the Department of State...

...Hardly...

...Nowadays socialism is more often dressed up as environmentalism, feminism, or international concern for human rights...

...Those who hate us, he believes, reproach us especially for being an "unrooted" country, built not on an historical culture but on an idea, or, more accurately, on ideas, not on habit and custom but on a written constitution...

...Ronald Reagan and I didn't need persuading, either, that ideas like democracy, law, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, were more than just another "option," a mere Western construct, which we shouldn't be exporting because the locals might misuse them...

...In particular, secure rule of law in Iraq will allow efficient security markets that could help stabilize global oil prices by allowing oil owners to sell future deliveries, rather than relying on spot shipments when they want to raise cash or diversify their wealth...

...They have shown all who are tempted to do us harm that they will have to pay the price of their actions...

...If we prevail, then the forces of freedom will become more optimistic and more popular...

...market...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003...

...We should also remember that since the end of the Cold War we, too, have lived through a series of surprises...

...Even after supporting the first UN resolution, France lobbied against the second, which logically followed...

...we could stand firm, and we also knew that we would stand together...

...Thus must we choose our targets, which brings us to the two remaining charter members of the evil axis...

...So deep had the rot set in, that the UN Security Council itself was paralyzed...

...There will be price distortions and inflation...

...Not only does the destiny of the world hinge on the outcome of the Middle Eastern drama, but we can determine the outcome ourselves, through our own strength, wisdom, and determination...

...trade barriers would demonstrate the seriousness of America's commitment to economic engagement and build momentum for an eventual free-trade area...