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agent Jurist

Harry Dexter White was positively identified as agent Jurist in an FBI memorandum dated 16 October 1950.

White became involved with Soviet intelligence espionage in May of 1941. One of the most valuable assets to Soviet intelligence was his ability to infiltrate the United States Department of the Treasury with persons the Silvermaster spy ring wanted to have assinged there. Among the other American citizens and government employees acting as Soviet agents were Lud Ullman, William Henry Taylor, and Sonia Gold.

On December 4, 1945, the FBI transmitted to the White House a report entitled "Soviet Espionage in the United States." The report summarized White's espionage activities. Copies of the report were sent to Attorney General Tom Clark also. The evidence indicated a substantial spy ring operating within the Government and involving White. Given the secrecy of the Venona project materials, the president went ahead six weeks later and nominated White for appointment to head the newly created International Monetary Fund.

White was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in August of 1948. Elizabeth Bentley told the FBI White that had been involved in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union during World War II. Whittaker Chambers earlier had testified of his association with White in the Communist underground secret apparatus up to 1938. White, recovering from a series of heart attacks, proclaimed his lifelong commitment to the principles of democracy and the ideals of President Roosevelt's New Deal. He died of a heart attack three days later and HUAC. The positive identification of Harry Dexter White as agent Jurist came two years after his death.

Below is the text of that memorandum from the FBI's Venona project file released under the Freedom of Information Act.



Office Memorandum ° UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT

DATE: October 16, 1950

TO: The Director
FROM: Mr. Ladd
SUBJECT: ESPIONAGE - R

PURPOSE: To advise you of the positive identification of agent Jurist (the cover name of a Soviet agent operating in 1944 and named by Venona project) as Harry Dexter White, deceased. White was formerly the Administrative Assistant to former Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau.

DETAILS: You have previously been advised of information obtained from [Venona project] regarding Jurist who was active during 1944. According to the previous information received from [Venona project regarding Jurist, during April, 1944, he had reported on conversations between the then Secretary of State Hull and Vice President Wallace. He also reported on Wallace's proposed trip to China. On August 5, 1944, he reported to the Soviets that he was confident of President Roosevelt's victory in the coming elections unless there was a huge military failure. He also reported that Truman's nomination as Vice President was calculated to secure the vote of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. It was also reported that Jurist was willing for any self-sacrifice in behalf of the MGB but was afraid that his activities, if exposed, might lead to a political scandal and have an effect on the elections. It was also mentioned that he would be returning to Washington, D. C., on August 17, 1944. The new information from [Venona project] indicates that Jurist and Morgenthau were to make a trip to London and Normandy and leaving the United States on August 5, 1944.
On the basis of the foregoing, the tentative identification of Harry Dexter White as Jurist appears to be conclusively established inasmuch as Morgenthau and White left the United States on a confidential trip to the Normandy beachhead on August 5, 1944, and they returned to the United States on August 17, 1944.

You may recall that Harry Dexter White was named by Whittaker Chambers in his statements as having been a source of information for Chambers in his work in Soviet espionage until Chambers broke with the Soviets in 1938. Chambers produced a handwritten memorandum that White had given him and our Laboratory established this memorandum as being in White's handwriting. The Treasury Department advised that parts of the material were highly confidential, coming to the Treasury Department from the Department of State.
In addition to the foregoing, Elizabeth T. Bentley in November, 1945, advised that she had learned through Nathan Gregory Silvermaster that White was supplying Silvermaster with information which was obtained by White in the course of his duties as Assistant to the Secretary of the of the Treasury.

RECOMMENDATION:

There is attached hereto a blind memorandum which has been prepared for the information and assistance of [redacted] setting forth this identification. There is also attached a memorandum to the Field giving them the new information from [Venona project] which establishes conclusively the identity of White as Jurist.

Attachment

Source
FBI Venona file pgs. 17-18
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White_(agent_Jurist)"

Westphalia's New International Order: On the Origins of Grand Strategy in Western Diplomacy

James Nathan

International Studies Association

March 18-21, 1998

Introduction

The emergent post-Cold War international order is unique: for the first time since the invention of the diplomatic method, an international architecture is materializing without any post-war diplomatic charter. Moreover, order is now conditioned not on a Germany divided and distracted; on the contrary, if it is to be sustained, order requires Germany to be geopolitically coherent and competent: the reverse of the Cold War reality that the fragmentation of German power was an essential element of stability. Still, this radically new international structure, if it is to sustain itself and prosper, will have to reconcile those contradictory supports of order that were first adumbrated at Westphalia: collective security on the one hand, and the balance of power on the other. Like those well-fed mid-seventeenth century congregants who met in a bereft corner of Prussia, we have come to the crossroads of choice.

Let us recall first the origins of Westphalian order. By the mid-seventeenth century, the flames of the Thirty Years' War scorched the steppes of Transylvania, darkened Ireland, passed the Americas, touched the Cape of Good Hope, and licked at the Straits of Malacca. By 1648, Germans found their numbers reduced by a third. Much of the German countryside had been turned into a howling wilderness, and travelers reported vast stretches populated only by wolves.

The animus that characterized international politics prior to the mid-seventeenth century contradicted civility and denied diplomacy. In an age when religion defined politics, the purpose of war could only be the extirpation of wickedness. In that moral environment, peace treaties were not just impracticable, they were impermissible. The princes and potentates of seventeenth century, fired with chiliastic certainty, held compromise to be not merely wrong-headed, but godless and malign. This world view admitted no middle position: if one side fought with God, it followed that the other had sided with evil. For the hundred years that preceded the treaties of Westphalia, only truces were permissible. It was allowable to truck with heresy only to regroup and fight anew. The very essence of diplomacy -- the peaceful adjustment of conflicting interests by dint of reason and tact -- was perforce banished to the shores of a rising ocean of blood that would, it was believed, wash away misbelief or quite simply end the world in a final sanguinary flood.

Sometime in its third decade, it became clear that the Thirty Years war had become a struggle between contending visions of international order: one based on sovereign, independent dominions; the other on religious faith and universal authority. In the general defeat of the Hapsburgs, the latter theory was demolished. The formal settlement of the Thirty Years War at the Congress of Westphalia heralded the onset of what we now call the "classic" period of international diplomacy. Indeed, from the Westphalia meeting on, European diplomatic history can be seen as the mid-seven narrative of the consequences of diplomatic congresses.

The Congress of Westphalia was the first such meeting of its kind: great numbers of "accredited" diplomatic representatives, plenipotentiaries, and clerics, from over ninety-six entities, assembled in two cities, thirty miles apart -- Osnabrück and Münster. The whole area of Westphalia was a kind of demilitarized zone, surrounded by a hunger so pervasive that criminals feared their famished warders more than any jail. The envoys met continuously from 1642 to 1648. Years were consumed by squabbles over abstruse claims which served to befog their hope that on-going battles, raging on fronts as near as three days' hard ride and as distant as the coast of Ceylon, would compel terms which the negotiators would not otherwise concede.

Time was required to fashion what would be, in their words, a "once and for all" settlement. Diplomats seeking protocol stumbled over conflicting claims of precedent; this formality of the future validation of power was a threatening matter in an age where even "reputation" was valued as life itself.

The congregants at Westphalia knew they were preparing for a new kind of politics predicated on the evident geopolitical reality of a Germany first enervated by war and then divided by design. Most of the delegates' time and energy at the Westphalia Congress was consumed in devising what we would now call "collective security" arrangements for the 300-odd polities: principalities, bishoprics, leagues, duchies, and city-states of Germany. However, the more lasting mechanism for sustaining international order advanced at Westphalia was a rudimentary pan-European balance of power "system." Indeed, its broad outlines remaining at the core of "international society" until the summer of 1914, the Westphalia settlement was truly a stunning success.

There were two pillars to the Westphalia settlement: procedural and geographic. The first prerequisite of the post-Westphalian order was the legitimation of the diplomatic enterprise. But the more palpable element to the Westphalia settlement was the fragmentation of German power.

The Westphalia methodology seemed so successful that within 80 years, Europeans believed they had once again become bound-up in a wholly new, and now palpably secular, "international society." After 1648, Europeans started to become accustomed to dealing with large issues at major gatherings. Congresses composed of ambassadors would meet after wars to frame a peace based on an assumption of the legal "sovereign" equality of victors and vanquished alike. Indeed, the whole of the diplomatic history of Europe, as Sir George Clark once said, can be seen as the stride from one congress to the next. At each new conclave, diplomats assembled to beat out new permutations in the classic Westphalia formula. So common had this process become that, by Rousseau's time, Westphalia seemed to him to have become "the constitution of Europe."

The Spanish Recessional

Much of the Thirty Years' War parallels the Cold War. Both had their geo-strategic loci centered, ultimately, on the issue of the disposition of German power. Both were waged at a time when diplomacy was depreciated or nearly absent. Both were heated ideological contests. Both were waged by powers worried that concessions, although not significant unto themselves, might lead to a further unraveling of position; so it was better not to concede the paltry lest the critical be put into play. And both contests were fought with such bitterness that domestic well-being had to be placed behind the necessity of what many felt was becoming virtually a perpetual struggle.

By 1609, at the time of the signing of the Truce of Antwerp, Spain had spent five times the revenues of France, England, and the United Provinces put together in trying to put down the fifty year Dutch rebellion. To the pretenses of a substantially theocratic Hapsburg imperium that claimed much of Christendom and beyond as its own, the legitimation of the diplomatic Protestant Dutch republic was itself a challenge. 1 In the Truce of Antwerp, Spain "recognized" the Dutch Republic as if it were a sovereign power, and conceded the closure of the once great city of Antwerp; but the Truce hardly touched any of Spain's continuing irritants: the Dutch combined a ruthless commercial talent with a penchant for provoking their one-time overlords.

The Dutch seemed to feel they were free to smuggle whatever they wanted into Spain, including enormous quantities of counterfeit coins, minted to a higher standard than the Spanish seemed capable of themselves. The practice made the Dutch the arbiters of Spain's money supply while reversing Gresham's Law -- driving the Crown's bad money out of the market with the "good," but counterfeit, coin of the cheeky Protestant rebels. 2

The Dutch also claimed that they had discovered a legal loophole that allowed them to continue to prey on Spanish trade out of European waters. As a result, ten years into the Truce, Spain had nearly lost its entire trade in spices -- a commerce so valuable that one successful delivery could retire a whole ship's company for life. 3 A more vexing activity, which even the most ingenious Dutch lawyering could not explain away, was the Dutch raids on Spanish ships within European waters. Virtually the whole supply of Baltic war stores, amounting to a third of Dutch wealth, was captured by armed merchantmen.

"The Truce," concluded Count Olivares, the Principal adviser to Philip IV, had become "an abomination." It was the view of Carlos Colima, the Governor of the Flemish city of Cambrai, that, "[i]f the truce is continued, we shall condemn ourselves to suffer all the evils of peace and all the dangers of war." 4

When the rebellion of 1618 in Bohemia came to be known to Madrid, the King's advisers viewed the revolt as inseparable from Spain's position in the Low Countries. Philip IV was told that if he did not aid his Hapsburg brethren in Bohemia, Spain would lose its position in the Low Countries; and then, soon, Spain itself would be lost to heresy and rapacious foreigners. A dramatic erosion in the impression of Spain's influence -- even if it occurred at the remote corners of an Empire controlled by an impoverished relative -- was posited as inextricably linked to Spain's overall position. Those who were for war knew that it would expand; and that the Dutch were likely to aid their Protestant coreligionists; and that war could not be confined since the Dutch would probably be abetted by the French and perhaps England as well. A far-flung war was, then, quite deliberately chosen by Spain not because the balance of power favored Spain -- the new King commanded, by his own reckoning, only seven battle worthy ships -- but because Spain had been losing the peace and hoped to recoup by a great roll of the iron dice. 5

The Defenestration of Prague

Even before the time of the Bohemian rebellion, the Holy Roman Empire was something of an anachronism. Imperial claims on the spiritual and temporal life of the whole of Christendom had been unreal since the death of Charlemagne. Outside Germany, the universal claims of the Holy Roman Empire were contradicted by the fact of Protestant states. Within Germany, the Empire was even more bedeviled by the reality of Protestant electorates, Protestant princes, and a rising class of Protestant worshippers.

By the end of the 16th century, most Bohemian nobility had turned Protestant. Catholic Emperors were largely content that their Protestant Bohemian subjects served up enormous revenues to the Emperor, who, by custom, had been a Hapsburg since the Thirteenth Century. But Imperial elections were genuine and by no means was any one candidate a shoo-in. Yet, in 1617, the Bohemian nobles, more or less reflexively, deferred to tradition and accepted Ferdinand, the Catholic Hapsburg, as their King of Bohemia. For Ferdinand, it was to be a time of apprenticeship, since he was also slated as the next Emperor.

Ferdinand, a profound bigot, felt no obligation to those who had given him a lock on the Emperor's throne. For unknown to the Bohemian nobles, Ferdinand had vowed that he would rather "be cut to pieces, or beg my bread outside the gates of my palace, than suffer their heresy." It was a conviction borne not of malice, for this strange fanatic was said to be of a kindly disposition. "[I]t is because I love heretics," the new Bohemian King explained with unfeigned, but peculiar, sweetness, "that I wish to convert them from the path of evil..." 6

Hardly a year past Ferdinand's accession to the Bohemian throne, Protestant churches in Bohemia were boarded up. Permits for new churches were denied; and the Protestant leadership of Bohemia began to have second thoughts about their new King. On the 21st of May, 1618, Bohemian nobles and gentry pushed their way into the Hapsburgs castle of Hardschin. Upon finding two senior officers and an inoffensive secretary, the Protestant leaders conducted a kangaroo court. "Were these Hapsburg officials guilty of treason against Bohemia?" The crowd shouted its affirmation, whereupon the three unfortunates were hurled from a window. Catholics maintained that the trio was born safely to ground -- some 75 feet -- upon the wings of angels. Skeptics and Protestants pointed to the moldering dung heap in which all three came to rest.

From death's door in Vienna, Mathias, the depleted and half-crazed Emperor, sent offers of amnesty; but the Bohemian rebels showed no interest in further Hapsburg rule. Within days, the senior Spanish representative to Vienna mustered an army for the Emperor's use in repressing rebellion. 7

Frederick and the Peace of Europe

Meanwhile, the Bohemian nobles met to strip Ferdinand of his recent crown and offer it to a fellow Protestant: Frederick of Palatine. Frederick appeared to be a logical candidate. The Protestant son-in-law of King James of England, Frederick was also related to William of Orange, the House of Denmark, and Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus. Young Frederick was one of the best- connected princes in Protestant Europe. 8 If he were King of Bohemia as well as Elector of the Palatinate, Frederick would then dominate the upper waters of the Elbe, the Oder, and the middle of the Rhine. Moreover, if Frederick accepted the invitation of the Bohemians, he would have two votes out of seven in the Imperial Diet.

Frederick found little support among his new fraternity of kings. England's James I was too troubled by rebellion and plots himself to be pleased by his son-in-law's exploitation of a Bohemian rebellion. James even forbade public prayer to be said on Frederick's behalf. In fact, no crowned government in Europe encouraged Frederick's accession to the Crown of St. Stephan. If Frederick accepted the Bohemian offer, he could reason that he would become one of the great princes of Europe. But when he contemplated the opposition, the twenty-one year old Frederick mused with uncharacteristic perspicacity: "This is risky business." 9 If Frederick was given to some hesitation, Frederick's wife was not. As the daughter of England's King, Elizabeth figured she and her husband were meant for grander things: "I would rather eat sauerkraut with a King than roast meat with an elector." 10 Emboldened by his wife's ambitions, buoyed by his astrologer, and steeled with a substantial Dutch pledge, Frederick rode defiantly from Heidelberg. Frederick's party left for Prague, taking with them 153 baggage carriages, a thousand soldiers, and the peace of Europe. 11

A year and a half later, on the outskirts of Prague, Frederick's army found itself trapped by Hapsburg forces. Just at the gates of the city, readying himself to visit his forces at what was to be the scene of the "Battle of White Mountain," Frederick and an English ambassador found themselves nearly bowled over by the first wave of fugitive Protestant forces. The panicked Bohemians shouted at the young King to flee for his life as they were most certainly fleeing for theirs. Frederick V and his queen heeded the advice of the mob.

Making their way to Holland, the exiles were sustained only by the jewels the queen was able to carry on her person. In one broadside after another, Frederick's departure was mocked. In Berlin, one wall poster read: "... His men and horses were quickly Struck down on the White Hill. ... He was very much frightened He applied this magical spell to his feet, And with his wife he hastily took to his heels." 12

A Hapsburg Indian Summer and Widening War

The Emperor offered Frederick the status quo ante bellum. If he had accepted, the matter would have ended. But the Dutch would not forgo the issue, nor, by then, could Frederick's father in law. Though one of England's least bellicose Kings, James I was forced by militant Puritan pressure to offer a modest stipend for the restitution of his son-in-law's Palatine estates. Meanwhile, among the advisors to both Hapsburg branches, but especially in Madrid, there was the hope that the moment had arrived to finally extirpate heresy: Fortune's top was set in motion. The Spanish army, only awaiting the end of the 1212 Years' Truce, occupied the whole of Frederick's lands; the Palatinate suffered frightfully; and Frankenthal was besieged for more than a year. The fortress capital of Heidelberg finally fell in the spring of 1623: much of the old city, including universities and libraries, was set to flames. 13 Seven years later, upon returning to his hereditary lands escorted by Swedish troops, Frederick found them "in ruins." Separated from his guards by battle, weary from wandering, Frederick picked his way up the road to the Hague where his exiled queen awaited him. Taking uninvited refuge from a storm, in the cellar of a merchant, Frederick died as unwelcome as the pest that felled him. 14

Meanwhile, Ferdinand himself returned to Bohemia to oversee a long night of Inquisitional terror. In the rooting out of heresy, a man named Debis was nailed by the tongue to the gibbet. Count Schlick, 80, a leader of the rebellion, had his right hand cut off, and was then beheaded. Protestant school masters were ordered to leave Bohemia in 8 days and to make the point, the Chancellor of the University had his tongue torn out before he was executed. University life ceased. One half of the property of Bohemia changed title so that Protestant landowning virtually disappeared. The mint was contracted to a foundry that produced coins so light and manifestly worthless that disgusted Imperial soldiers flipped their pay back at their officers. Protestants were denied wills, testaments, and marriages. When the citizens of Bohemia were given 18 months to accept Catholicism or leave, 180,000 people fled. In little more than two years, one of the brightest cultures of Europe had been eclipsed. 15

By 1624, the Bohemian rebellion had been resolved to the immediate satisfaction of both Hapsburg Houses. It could have ended then: Spanish troops had been confirmed again as the most formidable force in Europe; "The Spanish Roads," the passages from Italy to Flanders, were more secure than they had been in a hundred years; and France, the greatest potential continental adversary of Spain, was surrounded north and west by Spanish redoubts.

For Spain, however, the most serious irritation was not the Bohemian provocation, but the Dutch Republic: the Dutch would not turn away from the issue of the future of the Palatinate. When the Emperor Ferdinand decided to transfer Frederick's lands to Catholic-led Bavaria, it became certain that Holland and whatever allies the merchant republic might muster, would stand in opposition to Spain. England's Odd Man Out

King James I's general desire had been for peace. The King knew that Parliament's continuing demands to help Frederick were in contradiction to any dispassionate understanding of English interests. Any Machiavellian could have understood that England could only benefit if the Spanish and the Dutch exhausted themselves in war. After all, the Spanish were England's rivals in the Americas. In the Indies, English merchant ships involved in the pepper trade were subject to Dutch plunder. In more than a few oceans, armed Dutch merchantmen captured English crews, and even sold some of them into slavery. Finally, the King agreed to let the redoubtable Mansfield, Frederick's generally luckless commander, empty London's poor houses of a few thousand reluctant warriors, some of whom, anticipating the rigors of service, committed suicide.

So disreputable had Mansfield become, the Dutch did not even want his English forces to transit their soil. As a result, the English army was confined to their ships. Without water or provision, seventy-five per cent of the English troops, some 8,000 men, were lost at anchor in Dutch harbors. Mansfield's failure drifted back to London as James fell mortally ill, leaving the final determination for peace or war to his son, Charles 1. 16

Parliament had wanted war with Spain, but had not wanted to provide for it. Charles decided to provide the war, hoping that a great victory would make Parliament more compliant in confirming the King's revenues. A victory at sea, Charles was persuaded, would establish his position with the Commons -- although it was not clear what this would do for his long-suffering sister, Elizabeth, the wife of Frederick. 17

Since the days of Drake, raiding Spanish ports had a certain cachet. Charles sent the Navy to Cadiz where 15,000 English sailors managed only to secure the Spanish wine store. Blamed for the Cadiz disaster, the organizer of the Cadiz raid, Charles' handsome "favorite," Buckingham, was impeached in the Commons. But Charles sided with his companion and dismissed the House. Two years later, the Duke of Buckingham failed again in a naval expedition. Less than a third of the expeditionary forces returned to English ports. "That slime" Buckingham, became a common epithet:

"And now, Just God! I humble pray
That thou wilt take that slime away
That keeps my sovereign's eyes from viewing
The things that will be our undoing." 18

Charles was now without any more disposition for war: he paid off the army from his own purse, and had his forces stand down. As Thomas Crew wrote in 1630 of England's temper,

"...What thought the German drum
Bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise
Concerns not us, nor should divert our joys;
Nor ought the thunder or carbines
Drown the sweet air of our tun'd violins." 19

But Parliament's long recess made Charles susceptible to Spanish silver. In 1639, Charles enabled Spain, for a fee, to ship Spanish troops to Flanders by way of Dover, sometimes even transporting Spanish terceros in English ships. When, in 1640, the Irish revolt broke out (abetted, it was rumored, by Spanish priests and Spanish soldiers), the just reconvened Parliament would insist that any English forces raised to quell rebellious Catholics ought to be controlled by the Commons. Charles was forced into a compromise that soon broke down. Following a lengthy and destructive civil war -- beyond our scope in this essay -- Charles was captured by Parliamentary forces. A "Rump" Parliament brought the unfortunate King to a drum-head trial where it was resolved that Charles was a "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy." 20 Three days later, Charles' head was detached from his body in a stroke. News of Charles' death reached the Hague as the just-ratified Peace of Westphalia restored the long-suffering Palatinate to the descendants of Charles' sister, Elizabeth.

The French Phase: Spain Brought Low

France prepared for war against its old Hapsburg rivals for years, and in the last days of 1634, French forces moved across the Rhine to take the much abused fortress city of Heidelberg. Not much later, Richelieu sent his heralds to Brussels to deliver the Spanish viceroys a copy of his after-the-fact declaration of war. 21 Catholic France had to align itself with its Protestant neighbors, Richelieu concluded, since Spanish power had "for its goal to augment its dominions and extend its frontiers" at French expense. 22 Richelieu would justify Protestant alliances to his King advancing "necessity of state," while employing an army of lawyers who argued that the Pope would have approved of his policies if he had been aware of the true facts.

In contrast to the national egoism suggested by Richelieu, Spain's Philip IV and his advisors saw themselves as Paladins of Catholic rectitude. The Spanish King had helped his brother-in-law, Louis XIII against the Huguenot challenge; indeed, Spain had extended herself beyond all proportion. Richelieu, Philip despaired, had repaid the Spanish badly. Soon the French and Dutch were working in close cooperation: the Spanish lost huge numbers of men and ships in engagements with the Dutch that extended from Brazil to Sicily. By land, French troops occupied key points astride the old Spanish Road. By the end of the 1630s, Spain, in its (almost Roman) attempt to eliminate the Carthage of the Zuider Zee, had come apart: in 1640, Catalonia and Portugal rebelled and went over to the French.

From Flanders, the Spanish, in a last desperate effort to reverse their fortunes, tried to move south on Paris with all their available strength, some 32,000 battle hardened veterans. But because horses had become too expensive, the Spanish marched without adequate cavalry. At the frontier fortress of Rocroi, in a single morning in February 1643, French cavalry and cannon tore into the Spanish positions. At the end of the day, Spain's military treasury had been captured and half the Spanish army lay dead or had been made prisoner. A French officer asked one tired Spanish officer, "How many of there are you?" "Count the dead and the prisoners, that is all," came the weary reply. 23 The great battle marked all but the formal end of Spain's position and its displacement by France. As Philip IV's new minister, Don Louis De Haro, put it later: Rocroi was "a defeat that gives rise in all parts to the consequences we feared." 24 Peace

Olivares, Philip IV's old war hawk, finding neither army fit to serve nor generals fit to lead, relented: "I propose peace, and more peace, ...we must certainly beg God to give us general peace, which even if it is not good, or even average, would be better than the most advantageous war." 25 In fact, Spain and Holland were able to agree on a peace on January 30, 1648, as Spain and France could not. But the Dutch refused to lift the siege of Antwerp and Spain was forced to concede much of its critical trade in the Indies. As Queen Elizabeth had forecast 100 years earlier, "you touch" the King of Spain, "in the Indies, you touche him in the apple of his eye, for you take away the treasure ... his ... bands of soldiers will soon dissolve, his purposes defeated, his power and strength diminished, his pride abated and his tyranny utterly suppressed." 26

Within France itself, with interest rates exceeding 24% and crown revenues pledged years in advance, there were hints of civil war. The French Advocate General wrote his young King: "We are told that it is not easy to conclude peace, that it is to the state's advantage not to neglect the King's victories....Whether or not it is true ... there are whole provinces where they live on nothing.... Taxes and duties are put on every imaginable thing. The only thing your subjects have left, Sire, is their souls, and if they had any market value they would have been put up for sale long ago." 27

With a shudder of horror at the door opened in England by the arrest of Charles I, Mazarin sped to make "peace at the earliest opportunity," if not with all the Spanish Hapsburgs, then at least with its Austrian branch. France was coming undone. The Austrian Emperor's honest loyalty to Spain could only seem lopsided when he learned of Spain's eagerness to make a separate peace with the Dutch. Abandoned by his Spanish cousins, his armies broken, the cannon of his enemies within earshot, the son of Ferdinand had no choice but to yield to the logic of peace.

For the rest of Europe, there was the hope of repose, signaled on Saturday, October 24, 1648, by sounds of cannons and bells, and endless Te Deums sung from the Russian Steppes to the Americas. As the Treaty of Münster put it: "the mishaps, destruction and disorders which the heavy plague of war has made men suffer for so long and so heavily" had ended. 28

The Meaning of the Westphalia Settlement

The geographic division of the conferences between Münster and Osnabrück was the empirical affirmation that international order was to be newly undergirded by an assumption that Germany, from then on, was not whole. Instead, Germany was defined, as a congeries of sovereign, autonomous states. A new organizing principle was offered to replace Hapsburg religious and political hegemony in Germany: each signatory to the Westphalia settlement would have the right to determine the faith of the realm. The Prince of a region, "the sovereign," was to make the rules. Once the Emperor acknowledged this formula, he recognized the Protestant states of Germany as morally valid objects of diplomacy and not secular subjects of a vast Christian realm.

Political relations from the periphery to the center are different from those politics that proceed along a horizontal plane of moral equality. Although both types of interactions may be called "diplomacy," one implies the politics of submission; and the other, the politics of compromise. One requires deference, and works best with orthodoxy, while the other specifies non-interference, and allows for pluralism and autonomy. In conferring a moral equality on hundreds of entities, the Westphalia settlement detailed the undoing of the Hapsburg-maintained Medieval hierarchy, and put in its place a new organizing principle based on the sovereign equality of states.

At a time of civil disorder that ranged from the Irish Sea to Turkey (and according to one diplomat at the conference, Savius, even to China), the Westphalia settlement was a self conscious effort to buttress domestic authority. By granting the right of each state to give the law and maintain order in its own realm without interference, the conference of Westphalia aimed to solve the problem of internal legitimacy and order while mitigating the animus that characterized the relations of warring states. The troublesome problem of domestic authority was eased by making religion an exclusively internal matter at the determination of the realm's ruling house.

Antinomies of Order: the Balance of Power vs. Collective Security

Although the Westphalia Treaties allowed the signatories to be "... free perpetually ... to make alliances with strangers for their preservation and safety," an alternative was presented in the form of a rudimentary "collective security" system. Article XVII of the Treaty of Osnabrück declared: "All and each of the contracting parties of this treaty shall be held to defend and maintain all and each of the dispositions of this peace, against whomsoever it may be, without distinction of religion."

Like the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations, the Münster treaty "outlawed" a recourse to arms: "It shall not be permitted to any State of the Empire to pursue his Right by Force and Arms; but if any difference ... happens for the future ... the Contravener shall be regarded as an Infringer of the Peace." 29

Within Germany, the Westphalia treaties sketched out the antinomies of a system based on armed self-help on the one hand, and a system based on mutual interests and diplomacy, on the other. States could either go their own way, secured by their own means and those of their allies; or, states could arrange for their collective defense, perhaps as Grotius had suggested (and the Westphalia treaty called for) in the context of great conferences. Outside the Holy Roman Empire, the Westphalia treaty pointed down a similar divide. The first led to a society of states that might compose their difficulties by negotiations and tribunals. The other way led to a self-centered system undergirded by the now undisputed right of each state to make alliances with foreigners and manage their own defense.

But collective security would prove the weaker thread with which to weave a fabric of stability. For any collective security would require the habit of subordination of conflicting interests to the common good. The problem with the notion of a common good is that it usually proves either quite elastic or ethereal -- or both. Even if the common good were knowable and fixed, it might require self-sacrifice. Nations without any higher authority to compel them to do otherwise would not prove themselves ready candidates for martyrdom. The Westphalia settlement thus resulted in a system predicated on a sovereign self-help. It limited war by dispersing power among a great number of states so that no single state, nor any combination of states, might gain more than limited objectives against adversaries.

Almost every study of the balance of power argues that it emerged as self conscious European strategy of order in the crucible of the Thirty Years' War. Indeed, as Cornelis Peiterszoom Hooft wrote at the time of Westphalia "Everything, indeed, has been due to the jealousy of Spain, France and England." 30 But the balance of power system was not just a matter of power unconstrained except by the counterweight of equivalent power, a kind of physics reified to the level of statecraft; for the post-Westphalia system embraced, on the one hand, the emergence of a new community of interests, and on the other, a new restraint borne from universal revulsion at the inhumane excesses -- and cost -- of war.

A Repelling Wall of Disgust

By 1635, hordes of plague-infested refugees were trampling crops. Depleted pastures were called on to support ever larger armies (Wallenstein and Gustavus fought with over 100,000 at their command; the French mustered over 180,000.) 31 While armies circulated faster to find their daily requirements, plague increased as a function of the velocity of armies on the move. Discipline broke: by 1640, war had achieved a general barbarity. Peasants were sawed, pierced, burned, and boiled. "He who had money," a contemporary saying went, "was the enemy. He who had none was tortured because he had it not." 32 A sport was made from wagering how many peasants or prisoners could be felled by a single bullet. Soldiers sprinkled gunpowder on the clothes of prisoners and set their garments alight. Children were kidnapped and held for ransom. Priests and burghers were tied under wagons and made to crawl until they dropped. Hunger was everywhere and there were reports that criminals were cut down from the gallows to be devoured, and graves opened so that the newly buried could nourish the still living. 33

Formerly verdant, Germany itself was in ruins. When Robert Monroe, a Scottish mercenary made way to the Rhine Valley with Gustavus Adolphus, he had written: "No country in Europe is comparable unto Germany, for fertility, riches, corn, and wine, traffic by land, pleasant sites, fair buildings, rare orchards, woods and planting, civility as well in the country as in the cities." Four years later, a secretary to an English ambassador traveling from Cologne up the Rhine came by "many villages pillaged and shot down." In Bacharach, "the poor people are found dead with grass in their mouths." In Metz, the party had to stay aboard ship and hurry away from the starving, who swam out to beseech the travelers for a scrap. From Cologne to Frankfort, "All the towns, villages and castles be battered, pillaged or burned." At Neustadt, "a fair city ... now burned miserably. One village in the Upper Palatinate had "been pillaged eight and twenty times in two years and twice in one day." 34

The Thirty Years' War itself had created a repelling wall of disgust. The percentage of people lost in Germany -- some seven million out of a population of twenty one million -- was far greater than the numbers lost even in World War II; and the material devastation was probably worse. On nearly every measure: duration, number of participants, severity of damage to the population, and battlefield deaths as a percentage of the population, the Thirty Years' War was the most destructive in history. During the period of continuous warfare between 1621 and 1639, out of a population of a million in Sweden and Finland, 100,000 were in the army, and of these, nearly half were killed or wounded. Between 1618 and 1659, about 300,000 men were lost from Castille out of a population of 6 million. 35

For ordinary people, peace had become a mirage, long promised, but seemingly extinguished by each near approach. So bad were conditions for the ordinary people of Germany that many thought the Thirty Years' War was but apiece with the imminent coming of the end of the world; and when, at long last, the news of the peace came, it was hard to believe. A Nuremberg poet, Johann Vogel wrote: "Something you never believed Has come to pass. What? Will the camel pass through the Needle's Eye Now that peace has returned to Germany?" 36

Novel Premises: Nationalism, Raison d' Etat, the Regularization of Diplomacy, and the Management of Force

The Thirty Years' War gave a great fillip to national consciousness, provoking Englishmen to hate Spaniards and Swedish antipathy to Russians. Brandenberg's chief religious authority, John Bergius, thundered: "Is there anyone with German blood in his veins whose heart does not ache when he sees and hears how our fatherland is plundered and ravaged by foreign invaders worse than the Turks and the Tartars?" Religion had become the bridge on which nationalism passed and prospered. In England, "Protestant" and "English" gradually became coterminous. The feelings in England expressed for James' exiled daughter, Elizabeth "the Winter Queen," could best be described as a patriotic sense of outrage. A kind of Jingoism even infiltrated the law courts where those who made light of Frederick's precipitous exit from Prague found themselves, notwithstanding their age or position, branded, fined, imprisoned, or worse. Some of Elizabeth's detractors were nailed by their ears, and others were recorded to have been nearly torn to pieces by angry mobs. 37

Much later, nationalism would become a constant in the life of states and even be married to state power. But for 150 years, patriotic feeling remained tamed and subservient to reason of state. In the absence of debilitating religious or national passions, a genuine diplomacy could develop that ascertained "the balance of interests" as well as the balance of forces available to support them. Those agreements that proceeded from this process went on to create their own constituencies, and the elaborate process of negotiation and treaty-making would endow some Europeans with more than the pious hope that international "society" might become a permanent feature of international relations. ****

Now that "reason of state" has prevailed, one wag observed after the Westphalia Congress, it seems to be ".. a wonderful beast for it chases away all other reasons." 38 The Westphalia settlement advanced reason of state, devising the notion from its religious garb. As Richelieu's confidant, Rohan wrote (somewhat optimistically), "princes rule the people and interests rule the prince." But if interests are to be rationally pursued they must be detached from zeal. As Rohan put it: "In matters of state one must not let oneself by guided by disorderly appetites, which make us often undertake tasks beyond our strength; nor by violent passions which agitate us in various ways as soon as they possess us; ... but by our own interests guided by reason alone, which must be the rule of our action." 39

"State interests" suggests proximate goals of a definable group that neither extend to the whole of humanity, nor are confined to a puny section of a community. Interests admit compromise whereas passionate truths obviate middle measures. Interests can be approximated. One does not have to achieve them at one fell swoop or risk damnation. A statecraft infused by interests necessarily places a premium on the tangible rather than the theological. An emphasis on interests hoists calculable advantage over transcendent purposes. Interests imply predictability, prudence, reason, and mutual gain. In itself, the notion of interests is a moderating idea. Passions are inconsistent, or as Hobbes put it, they are "insatiable." But in the mid-17th Century, the concept of interests became the means to exorcise caprice and instability in human affairs. Therein lay the burden of the mid-17th Century maxim "interests do not lie." 40

In the hundred years before Westphalia, the gulf between Catholics and Protestants contradicted civility, obstructed diplomacy, and defined the purpose of war as the extirpation of wickedness. If one fights with God, it follows that one's opponents are fighting iniquitously. The argument admitted no middle positions. Fired with chiliastic certainty, contestants denied compromises and adjustments short of war as being not merely wrong-headed, or injurious, but evil. In this kind of moral environment, the very essence of diplomacy -- adjudication of conflicting interests by dint of reason, persuasion, and tact -- was, perforce, banished.

The Westphalia settlement marked the start of a novel premises in international affairs: armed struggle was no longer defined as a contest between varieties of confessional truths, but rather, a dispute among secular "sovereigns." The final settlement of armed disputes, after Westphalia, was no longer the province of military contractors and theologians. Instead, the termination of war fell within the purview of an identifiable coterie of a new class: professional diplomats and warriors sworn to the service of a state.

Before the Westphalia settlement, there was no recognizable diplomatic profession. Spies, irregular envoys, and heralds citing scripture or handing out ringing declamations were the usual route that princes chose to alert one another to each other's demands and to sound the start of war. After Westphalia, the diplomatic craft was practiced by a kind of well-born guild, with members who were adept at melding reason, precedent, and law with quiet allusion to the implication of armed compunction.

Before Westphalia, soldiers were led by contractors, private entrepreneurs who garnered pay from their won estates or from the lands they plundered. After Westphalia, soldiers were led by military bureaucrats who raised armies year-round and paid for their keep through levies and taxes. After Westphalia, diplomats and warriors began to share a kind of regulatory synergy. Both diplomat and warrior sought less "victory," and more, the achievement of a favorable peace. War, after Westphalia, as the great observer Clausewitz put it, came to be a "stronger form of diplomacy," and the battlefield an extension of the conference chamber. 41

War itself was, to a degree, more tame as a result of the great mêlée. Gustavus Adolphus, the principal champion of Protestants during the Thirty Years' War, took to carrying a copy of Grotius' massive work on the rules of war and peace with him to battle. 42 To Gustavus, the model of the enlightened prince, moderating the savagery of battle, was part self-interest and Calvinist piety. But after the Thirty Years' War, armies throughout Europe started to review and publicize codes of conduct. The notion spread that there was a lawful way to conduct war and that it was a palpable interest of states to heed legal restriction. 43

The Thirty Years War had lasting effect. In Germany, neither religion nor Hapsburg imperialism ever produced another war. 44 In the hundred years after Westphalia, war had achieved a certain "regulatory function" in delimiting change and state ambition. But as the volume of violence available to combatants expanded, war's "legitimacy" as an instrument of statecraft began to erode. When, in the Twentieth Century, war began to approach its terrible and absolute form, the only compelling rationale for its employment came to be the defeat of the causes of war itself. As Raymond Aron put it, "as operations mounted...it was essential to inflate the purposes of victory..[P]eace would be durable only if dictated unconditionally after crushing the enemy. The demand for total victory was so not so much the expression of politics as a reflex reaction to total war." 45

In the present century, at the same time the expansion of violence tended to take "absolute" and "absurd" form (in Clausewitz' words), diplomacy abutted another zealous nemesis: the recrudescence of fervent, apocalyptic belief. Illustrative was Harry Truman's famous address to Congress in March 1947, when he argued that the West's struggle with the Soviets was over "two ways of life:" "One ... based upon the will of the majority, and ... distinguished by free institutions ... free speech ... and freedom from oppression ...The second ... based upon the will for a minority ... rel[ying] upon terror and oppression." 46

To the extent that Truman's analysis obtained, negotiation would be little valued. To be sure, conferences would still be staged; diplomats would meet; and communiqués could be issued. But meetings, in this kind of highly charged ideological atmosphere, would necessarily be little more than venues for mean spirited propaganda, or complex traps to lure Western innocents. In 1954, for instance, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asked an aide if he would be satisfied if the Soviets accepted free elections and the reunification of Germany. "Why, yes," his aide acknowledged brightly. "Well, that's where you and I part company," Dulles retorted. "I wouldn't. There'd be a catch in it." 47

Associated with appeasement and grisly calamities for most of the Twentieth Century, ancient practices of European diplomacy fell into a swamp of disgrace. Diplomacy, especially in the Cold War, came to be known not so much as a method of ameliorating the clash of interests, but at best, as a self-defeating vestige of an ancient and irrelevant civility. Now, however, with the passing of Cold War passions, prospects for a renaissance of the Westphalian diplomatic patrimony brighten anew. The settlement of the Thirty Years' War at Westphalia marks the start of the new professionalization of diplomacy. And if, in fact, diplomacy has now been given a reprieve, it behooves us, therefore, to recall its painful beginnings, its achievements, and to explore its relevance to our collective future.

Note 1: By the early 17th century, there was a widespread sense that Spain was in a state of precipitous decline. "Never," in nearly 800 years of continuous war, "has Spain been as poor as is now.'' Louis Valle de la Cerda. Cited by JH Elliot "Self Perception and Decline" in Spain, Past and Present, number 74 page 53. Back.

Note 2: Charles Howard Carter, The Secret Diplomacy of the Hapsburgs:1598-1625, (N.Y. Columbia, 1964) page 31. Back.

Note 3: John Lynch, Spain Under the Hapsburgs, (Oxford, Basil Blackwell) Volume Two, 1598-1700, (second edition, 1981), page 65.; and Charles Howard Carter The Secret Diplomacy of the Hapsburgs: 1598-1625, (N.Y. Columbia, 1964) page 30 Back.

Note 4: In a letter written in 1629, cited by John Elliot, The Count Duke Olivares, the Statesman of an Age of Decline,(New Haven, Yale University Press,1986), page 66. fn57; also see Peter Brightwell various articles: 'The Spanish origins of the Thirty Years War, European Studies Review,(9) 1979; and "Spain and Bohemia, 1619-1621," European Studies Review (12)1982;"The Spanish System and the twelve years Truce," English Historical Review (12) 1982 pp.270-292. Back.

Note 5: Hugh Trevor Roper "The Outbreak of the Thirty Years War" in Hugh Trevor Roper, Renaissance Essays, University of Chicago Press, 1985, page 293; and Peter Brightwell,"The Spanish origins of the Thirty Years' War', European Studies Review, October 1979, Vol. 9, Number 4, pages 409-431. and HR Trevor-Roper "Spain-and Europe: 1598-1621 in J.P Cooper (ed) The New Cambridge Modern History,:The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War:1609-84/9, (Cambridge, 1970) page 281. Back.

Note 6: Cited by Lt Col J Mitchell, The Life of Wallenstein: Duke of Friedland, (New York: Greenwood Press), 1968 page 21. The defenestration of 1618 was, in fact, a well planned imitation of a famous defenestration two hundred years earlier that had started the Hussite revolution. Back.

Note 7: David Maland, Europe at War: 1600-1650, (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980) page 64. Back.

Note 8: Geoffrey Parker and Simon Adams. The Indecisive War, 1618-1629, Chapter 2 page 52 and genealogical table on p.53 in Parker, The Thirty Years' War, Op cit. Back.

Note 9: Elmer A Beller, "The Thirty Years War," in JP Cooper, The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume IV, The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War:1609-1659 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 1970 page 311. Back.

Note 10: C.V Wedgewood, The Thirty Years War (New Haven: Yale University Press;1939, page 100; also Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth: Electress of Palatine and Queen of Bohemia, (London, Methuen & Co.), rev. ed., 1909; p.129-130 for Frederick's hesitations. Back.

Note 11: C.V Wedgewood, The Thirty Years War, op cit page 85C.V Wedgewood, The Thirty Years War, op cit page 85ff Back.

Note 12: Elmer Beller, Propaganda in Germany during the Thirty Years War, (Princeton, Princeton University Press,) 1940, page 24 Back.

Note 13: Traveling south to the Rhine, disguised as a merchant, Frederick caught up with his com manding General, Mansfield who, at the moment of his encounter with Frederick, was actually engaged in talks about switching sides with a Spanish diplomat. Frederick would have been advised to release his mercenary to Spain; for Mansfield's record in the field was one of almost perfect failure. As for the army," Frederick wrote his queen as he fled from the battlefield, "... I think there are men in it who are possessed of the devil, and who take a pleasure in setting fire to everything." [Everett Green, Elizabeth: Electress of Palatine and Queen of Bohemia, Op Cit, p 93] and Elmer A Beller, "The Thirty Years War", in JP Cooper, The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume IV, The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War:1609-1659 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 1970 317. Back.

Note 14: On November 19 1632. Green, Ibid, page 299; Wedgewood, The Thirty Years' War, op cit, page 332. Back.

Note 15: Lt Col J Mitchell, The Life of Wallenstein: Duke of Friedland, page 74; and Wedgewood, The Thirty Years' War, page 143-169. Back.

Note 16: See Leopold Von Ranke, A History of England, principally in the Seventeenth Century, Vol 1, (Oxford, Clarendon Press), 1875, page 562ff Back.

Note 17: Leopold Von Ranke, Frederick, The Age of the Baroque, op cit, page p.129-130 fo21-213ff; and Cicely Veronica Wedgewood. Richelieu and the French Monarchy, (New York, Collier Books) 1962 pp. 50- 2 Back.

Note 18: Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch, (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1983. page 96 Back.

Note 19: CV Wedgewood, History and Hope:: the Collected Essays of CV Wedgewood, (London, Collins, 1987) p.72. Back.

Note 20: CV Wedgewood, History and Hope, ibid, pp. 87 Back.

Note 21: Even his declaration was novel for a medievally trained man of the Canon. Indeed, Richelieu's policy would be recognized by any of the American "realist" architects of "containment." Back.

Note 22: Cicely Veronica Wedgewood. Richelieu and the French Monarchy, p63 and JH Elliot, Richelieu and Olivares, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984), page 67. But the calculations and techniques of Richelieu were only partly modern. On the one hand, Richelieu's view that France was divinely sanctioned to find lasting peace for Christendom was decidedly medieval. But Richelieu's view of political authority was distinctly modern. Papal authority was moral only; the Pope had no temporal rights in Richelieu's cosmos: "[T]he King," wrote Richelieu, "is the recognized sovereign in his state, not holding his crown but from God alone, there exists no power on earth whatever it might be ... which has any right over his kingdom ..." J. A. W. Gunn, "Interests Will Not Lie: A Seventeenth Century Political Maxim" Journal of the History of Ideas, (October-Dec 1968) pp.551-564 and JAW Gunn, Politics and the Public Interests in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1969, page 36ff. Richelieu's argument for fidelity to treaties was also modern. As he told his King, even though "many political thinkers teach the contrary," treaties should be "religiously" observed. But to the cardinal, the rationale for solemnly honoring contracts with other princes was less the cause of international order and more the Baroque age issue of his Sovereign's "reputation." "A great prince," the cardinal wrote, "should risk even his person and the interests of state rather than break his word...CR Freidericks, "The War and Politics, " in Parker, et. al, The Thirty Years War, p219. In the end, Richelieu's insistence on talks with adversaries, no matter how remote the chance of settlement or hostile the confessional claims of one's adversaries, became the basis of modern diplomacy. Back.

Note 23: Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World, University of Illinois Press (Urbana and Chicago, 1987) page 293ff. Back.

Note 24: Robert Stadling, "Catastrophe and Recovery: The Defeat of Spain, 1639-1643" History Vol 64, no.211 June 1979, pp217ff. Back.

Note 25: Cited by Elliot, Olivares, page 601. Back.

Note 26: Geoffrey Parker, "The Dutch Revolt" In Geoffrey Parker and Leslie M Smith(ed) The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1978, page 69. Back.

Note 27: Georges Pages (trans by David Maland and John Hooper), The Thirty Years' War (New York, Harper and Row, 1939) page 226. Back.

Note 28: Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, the Military Revolution, 1560-1660, (Enslow Publishers, Short Hills, 1979) page 203. The list of contemporary disorders is impressive: England, Ireland and Scotland, Sicily, Naples, Paris, Catalonia, and Portugal. There were peasant uprisings in Sweden and rumors of revolt in Poland. See Herbert Langer, The Thirty Years' War, (Poole: Blandford Press) 1978, page 260. One well-informed diplomat, Savius, wrote that people everywhere had risen up, even in Turkey and China. Back.

Note 29: A complete text is available in C Perry (ed), The Consolidated Treaty Series, (Dobbs Ferry, New York, 1969). See RB Mowat, The European States System: A Study of International Relations, (London: Oxford University Press, 1923) page 16. As a function of the sheer cost of power, there was a drastic reduction in the number of states in the first rank. A standing army exacted an enormous price, and only well-organized and prosperous states could for long afford the expense of big battalions. The first sign of this winnowing process was the Westphalia settlement itself which reduced the number of sovereign entities within the German Empire from 900 to 234. Back.

Note 30: Geoffrey Parker, "The Dutch Revolt," in Parker and Lesley M Smith, ed The General Crisis, of the Seventeenth Century (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 72 and pp68-9. Back.

Note 31: It is hard to find parallels with the armies of this period. The Mongol army that stormed Samarkand in 1219 may have exceeded 200,000, but did not have the extensive support system of Wallenstein's armies. See James Chambers, The Devils Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe, (NY Athenaeum, 1985) page 9. Rome's regular legions are usually put at 160,000 to 175,000 although they may have had as many as 360,00 men under arms throughout the Empire; see Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) page 16; Robert L O'Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1989) page 75; and Philippe Contamine (trans by Michael Jones) War in the Middle Ages, (London, Basil Blackwell, 1984) page 306. Back.

Note 32: Charles Petrie, Earlier Diplomatic History, 1492-1713, (London, Hollis and Charter, 1949) page 147. Back.

Note 33: Wedgewood, The Thirty Years' War pages 257, 410-11, 419, and David Ogg Europe in the Seventieth Century, (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1961), (8th ed. rev.), page 168. Back.

Note 34: William Crowne, A true relation of all the remarkable places and passages observed in travels of the right honorable Thomas Lord Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, 1636 (London, 1637) pp.5-17 cited by Elmer A Beller, The Thirty Years War, in the New Cambridge Modern History, Volume 1V, pp.345-346 Back.

Note 35: Evan Luard, War in International Society: A Study of International Sociology, (London, I. B. Taurus &Co., Ltd) and Hugh Trevor Roper, Spain and Europe, 1598-1621, The New Cambridge Modern History, vol iv, pp 357. Back.

Note 36: Cited by Parker, The Thirty Years' War, page 189. Back.

Note 37: Joycelyne G Russell, Peacemaking in the Renaissance, (London Duckworth, 1986) pages 228-229; Bodo Nischan, "Calvinism, the Thirty Years' War, and the Beginning of Absolutism in Brandenburg: The Political Thought of John Bergius," Central European History, Volume 15, Number 3, September 1982, page 216. Back.

Note 38: CR Freidericks, "The War and Politics, " in Parker, et. al, The Thirty Years War p.219. Back.

Note 39: "On the Interests of Princes and States of Christendom," cited by Albert I Hirschman, The Passions of the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1977) page 34. Back.

Note 40: See also J. A. W. Gunn, "Interests Will Not Lie: A Seventeenth Century Political Maxim" Journal of the History of Ideas, (October-Dec 1968) pp.551-564 and JAW Gunn, Politics and the Public Interests in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) page 36ff. Back.

Note 41: Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, (ed and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Book one Chapter two, and pages 488, 501. Back.

Note 42: G Teitler (trans CN Ter Heide-Lopy), The Genesis of the Professional Officers Corps, (Beverly Hills, Sage, 1977) pp.181-188. Back.

Note 43: Sir George Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) page 84. Back.

Note 44: The Westphalia settlement also helped to limit war by dispersing power among a great number of states so that no single state, nor any combination of states, might gain more than limited objectives against adversaries. The drastic reduction in the number of states to the first rank occurred as a function of the sheer cost of power. A standing army exacted an enormous and perpetual toll on any society, and only well organized and prosperous states could for long afford the expense of big battalions. The first sign of this winnowing process was the Westphalia settlement itself which reduced the number of sovereign entities within the German Empire from 900 to about 234. (The figure varies from 355 to 234. Geoffrey Barraclough's figures are at the low end but probably more accurate: The Origins of Modern Germany, (New York, Capricorn, 1963) page 385). Back.

Note 45: Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), page 28. Back.

Note 46: Harry S Truman, "The Truman Doctrine: Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey", March 12, 1947, 180th Congress, 1st Sess., March 24, 1947. Back.

Note 47: Richard Gould Adams, John Foster Dulles: A Reappraisal (New York, 1962), page 293. Back.

Senior Democratic Figure Criticizes Bill Richardson

from Press Reports

Former Democratic Party Chairman for Rio Arriba County Emilio Naranjo criticized Governor Bill Richardson's appointment of Thomas Rodella as County Magistrate.

Rodella has been under suspicion for election related complaints since his wife, State Representative Debbie Rodella's, 1992 bid for office, and other charges.

Naranjo says Richardson was "wrong as hell" in appointing him to the job. "This was a terrible appointment that Richardson made, and it's going to cost him thousands of votes", said Naranjo. "He gave a slap in the face to the citizens of Rio Aribba."

Naranjo's said Richardson, who has onlyu lived here a few years of his adult life, understands New Mexico politics very well, and is responsible for John Kerry's failure to carry the state in 2004.

Naranjo also criticied Richardson;s leadership saying he promotes himself too much and acts like a dictator.

Richardson denied knowing about the reports when he appointed Rodella to the vacant judgeship on March 31st.

Naranjo is a four decade fixture in New Mexico state politics, serving as Rio Aribba County Sheriff, County Manager and a State Senator for 19 years.

Richardson has said he stands by the decision and that Rodella is a man of character and substance.

All Referances to Halliburton Sanitized from DNC site

All referances after October 7, 2004 to 'Halliburton' have been sanitized from democrats.org website, most likely due to bin Laden's Election Eve Speech which was interpreted as an open endorsement for John Kerry and
the American Democratic Party's policies.

The phenomenea of what Thomas Sowell calls
"The Struggle to Control Memory" and rewrite history is evidently underway. The following text has been preserved from democrats.org and captures the flavor
of DNC rhetoric on the election eve.

The Hazards of Halliburton

Texas-based Halliburton, Vice President Cheney's former company, won a no-bid contract worth more than $7 billion to help rebuild Iraq-even as Cheney continues to profit from the company. For that favoritism, Halliburton has shown little regard for American taxpayers and-worse yet-American soldiers serving in Iraq and workers laboring at home. Reports show that Halliburton drastically overcharged Americans for gas being imported into Iraq and skimped on basic services to troops like providing clean working conditions and safe food. Halliburton could even benefit from President Bush's push to explore Mars.

Halliburton Has Been Very, Very Good to Dick Cheney

Cheney Made Millions As Halliburton CEO, Continues To Receive Income From The Company.Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Texas-based Halliburton from 1995-2000. In addition to providing a massive salary and bonus for only eight months of work in 2000, Halliburton's board of directors voted to give Dick Cheney a $20 million retirement package when he resigned. Cheney received the severance package even though he had only been with the company for five years and his contract stated that he would have to forfeit some of his retirement package if he retired before turning 62-Cheney retired at age 59. Cheney's compensation for the eight months of 2000 he served as CEO of Halliburton, according to the Associated Press, was "$4.3 million in deferred compensation and bonuses, and $806,332 in salary. The summer when he began his campaign with Bush for the White House, Cheney sold stock options worth just over $40 million." Halliburton approved the package on July 20, 2000, just five days before Cheney was announced as George W. Bush's running mate. [New York Times, 8/12/00; Los Angeles Times, 7/24/00; Associated Press, 7/18/02]

As Vice President, Cheney Continued Receiving Compensation From Halliburton. In his retirement package from Halliburton, Cheney was granted deferred compensation, which paid out his bonus his salary from 1999 over a five-year period and his bonus from that year in 2001. In 2001, while serving as Vice President, Cheney received $1,656,696 in deferred compensation from Halliburton, which included a bonus worth $1,451,398 and $205,298 in deferred salary. In 2002, Cheney received $162,392 in deferred salary compensation. ["Income: Type and amount," Schedule A, Standard Form 278, Richard B. Cheney Personal Financial Disclosure, May 15, 2002; May 15, 2003]

Cheney Retained Possession of 433,333 Options of Halliburton; Committed Them to Charities. Following his departure from Halliburton, Cheney retained possession of 433,333 options of Halliburton stock that were set to expire at three different times. In a press release, the Cheneys announced they were committing the options to three charities. [Richard Cheney Public Financial Disclosure, 9/6/00; 5/15/01; White House Press Release, "Vice President and Mrs. Cheney Release 2000 Income Tax Return," 4/13/01]

Congressional Research Service Said Cheney's Deferred Compensation Still Counts As Financial Interest. Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert that, "since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now for over three years." But, just days later, the Congressional Research Service released a report saying that federal ethics laws consider both Cheney's deferred compensation and his unexercised stock options as a lingering financial interest in the company. [Meet the Press, 9/14/03; Washington Post, 9/26/03]

Halliburton Did Business with Saddam

After First Gulf War, Halliburton Did Business With Iraq While Cheney Was CEO. While Cheney served as chairman and chief executive of Halliburton, the company acquired two subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., which had signed contracts to sell oil production equipment to Iraq under the oil-for-food program for more than $73 million. The subsidiaries were formed and co-owned in 1993 between Dresser Industries, which Halliburton acquired in a merger under Cheney, and Ingersoll-Rand in order to enter a joint venture. Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser "sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show." Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts -- later blocked by the United States -- to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War." [Washington Post, 6/23/01; Petroleum Economist, 6/93]

Cheney Claimed Halliburton Did Not Do Business With Iraq. Cheney claimed on ABC's "This Week" that Halliburton did not do business in Iraq while he was with the company. After he was asked specifically about Iraq, Cheney said, "No. No, I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even - even arrangements that were supposedly legal. ... Iraq's different, but we've not done any business in Iraq since the sanctions are [sic] imposed, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that." [ABC, "This Week," 7/30/00]

Halliburton Questioned About Role In Iran. The Office of New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson asked Halliburton to provide more details about the work of its subsidiaries in Iran. In March 2003, Halliburton promised it would release information about its work in that country-which President Bush called a member of an "axis of evil." In October 2003, Halliburton gave the comptroller a "confidential" report, which Thompson posted on his website. The report shows that "Halliburton Products & Services Ltd.," is "a Cayman Islands firm headquartered in the United Arab Emirates," and forecasts more than $39 million worth of services for 2003. [ Houston Chronicle, 12/15/03; Bush State of the Union, 1/29/2002; Office of New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson]

Halliburton Hurting US Troops in Iraq

Halliburton Reaps Profits While Forcing Troops To Eat In Filthy Conditions. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root [KBR] serves 110,000 soldiers in Iraq their meals. For that service, American taxpayers pay Halliburton "$28 per soldier per day." But, according to NBC News, "Pentagon inspections of mess halls run by KBR are finding a mess in some of them...In the main Baghdad dining facility where President Bush surprised the troops on Thanksgiving, inspectors found filthy kitchen conditions in each of the three previous months. Complaints filed in August, September and again in October report problems. Blood all over the floor of refrigerators, dirty pans, dirty grills, dirty salad bars, rotting meats and vegetables. In October, the inspector writes that Halliburton's previous promises to fix the problems have not been followed through and warns the company serious repercussions may result, due to improper handling and serving of food." [NBC News, 12/12/03]

Halliburton Overcharged On Troops' Food. The Wall Street Journal reported that Halliburton "allegedly overcharged more than $16 million for meals at a single U.S. military base in Kuwait during the first seven months of last year, according to Pentagon investigators auditing the company's work... Because of the new meal-billing discrepancies, the Pentagon has extended its audit of KBR food services to include more than 50 other dining facilities in Kuwait and Iraq, according to an e-mail 'alert' sent [January 30, 2004] to more than a dozen U.S. Army contracting officials ...This dispute focuses on meals served at Camp Arifjan, the huge U.S. military base south of Kuwait City. The e-mail memo...said that in July [2003] alone, a Saudi subcontractor hired by KBR billed for 42,042 meals a day on average but served only 14,053 meals a day. After reports of the investigation surfaced, Halliburton agreed to reimburse the government $27.4 million to cover any potential overcharges. In March 2003, the Pentagon announced it would withhold nearly $300 million in payments to Halliburton due to the company's overcharging on food contracts. "Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the company disagreed with the decision and hoped to persuade the Pentagon to drop its plans." [Wall Street Journal, 2/2/04; Reuters, 2/3/04; Associated Press, 3/17/04]

Halliburton Stiffs Subcontractor: Troops May Face Cold Meals; American Workers Laid Off. NBC News reported that Event Source, the company subcontracted by Halliburton to provide 100,000 meals per day to US troops in Iraq, has been stiffed for over $87 million it's owed by Halliburton. As a result, Event Source threatened to stop serving hot meals until it is paid by Halliburton, and the company has had to lay off workers back in the United States. "When you get stuck out there for $87 million," explained Event Source CEO Phil Morrell, "it's a question of economics." [NBC News, 3/8/04]

U.S. Military Chief: Halliburton Is Stumbling Block to US Forces. During the second week in March 2004, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military officer in Iraq, circulated a letter calling Halliburton a major stumbling block to US efforts there. Gen. Sanchez' letter "addresses efforts by Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) subsidiary to help the Army consolidate to fewer, but larger, bases around Iraq without interrupting military operations. In Baghdad, Iraq, for example, U.S. troops are moving from 26 bases to as few as six. But in the letter, Gen. Sanchez says KBR hasn't said precisely when it will have these consolidated bases ready for new troops. Army officials say KBR's shortcomings on the base construction have complicated the largest troop rotation since World War II. The letter also criticizes KBR for late payments to food subcontractors, said Army officials, who gave details of the letter but declined to provide a copy. At least one subcontractor has threatened to withhold food service to about 2, 000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, leading the Pentagon's inspector general to investigate KBR food-subcontractor complaints that KBR isn't paying its bills on time." [CNN, 3/15/04]

Despite Fraud, Halliburton Continues to Receive Billions in Taxpayer Money

As The Second War In Iraq Began, Halliburton Was Awarded No-Bid Rebuilding Contracts Worth Billions. In March 2003, the Pentagon awarded Kellogg Brown and Root, the construction wing of Halliburton, a no-bid contract to help rebuild Iraqi oil fields and conduct "operation of facilities and distribution of products." The initial deal was thought to be worth as much as $7 billion. Today, Halliburton is the largest private contractor in postwar Iraq, with potential deals totaling over $11 billion [ Los Angeles Times, 5/7/03; Washington Post, 2/10/04]

Halliburton Gouged Gas Prices In Postwar Iraq At Expense Of American Taxpayers. The military investigated Halliburton and found that it overcharged for gas it imported into Iraq from Kuwait by as much as $61 million. US taxpayers and the United Nations oil-for-food program are paying Halliburton an average price of $2.64 per gallon, which is more than twice what others pay for Kuwait fuel. The appropriations bill that President Bush signed in November 2003 mandates that taxpayers subsidize all gas important costs beginning in 2004. Pentagon auditors have asked the Department of Defense to investigate Halliburton's activity in Kuwait, and in December the military ended its contract to with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root to import oil. On February 23, 2004 the Pentagon opened a criminal probe into Halliburton's price-gouging. [Associated Press, 2/9/04; Reuters, 12/11/03; New York Times, 12/10/03; Associated Press, 11/5/03; Washington Post, 1/16/04, 12/31/04; Reuters, 2/23/04]

• Bush Demanded Halliburton Repayment. Asked by reporters about Halliburton's price gouging, President Bush claimed "if there is an overcharge like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid." [Bush Media Availability, 12/12/03]



• Halliburton Has History of Defrauding Government In Military Contracts. In February 2002, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root Services agreed to pay the government $2 million to settle charges that it had inflated contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord in Monterey, CA. According to the Associated Press, "The suit, filed in Sacramento, alleged the company submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998. Under the terms of its contract, the company did not bid against other contractors for maintenance and repair projects, instead presenting the military with fixed costs it said were necessary to perform specific projects." [Associated Press, 2/9/02; Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT), 8/5/02]

Halliburton Employees Took Kickbacks To Help Gouge US Taxpayers. Halliburton admitted it overcharged the Pentagon $6.3 million for an Army supply contract in Iraq and repaid the money. Part of that overcharge may have taken the form of kickbacks paid by a Kuwaiti subcontractor to at least two of its employees. Halliburton has already admitted the kickbacks took place, and has fired the individuals involved. The kickbacks are, however, under Pentagon investigation. [Associated Press, 1/24/04; Los Angeles Times,1/24/04]

US Knew Of Halliburton Kickbacks Before New Contract Awarded. The Financial Times reported that "The Bush administration knew that Halliburton had overcharged the US government on an Iraq reconstruction contract before it awarded the company a separate lucrative contract last week to repair Iraqi oilfields. Halliburton...informed the Pentagon inspector-general on January 15 that its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary had overcharged the US government by $6 million on a contract to supply US troops. But the following day, the Army Corps of Engineers gave the company another contract worth up to $1.2 billion to rebuild southern Iraq's oil industry." [ Financial Times,1/24/04]

White House Ignored Environmental Concerns Caused By Halliburton. Halliburton is the leading provider of an oil and gas procedure called hydraulic fracturing, which can sometimes cause underground sources of drinking water to be contaminated by carcinogenic and toxic chemicals. The White House deleted from its "White House National Energy Policy" any mention of the environmental concerns associated with hydraulic fracturing, even though the Department of Energy had included the information in a draft of its own energy policy briefing, and the EPA had told Congress such concerns exist. The energy bill passed by the US House in November 2003 contains exemptions for hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act regulations. [House Committee On Government Reform, Minority Staff, 11/13/03; Knight-Ridder, 11/18/03]

Halliburton Benefits From Massive Corporate Tax Loopholes. While Vice President Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the company set up offshore affiliates to avoid paying US taxes. According the Security and Exchange Commission, while Cheney was in charge, Halliburton set up over 20 affiliates in the Cayman Islands. [ Washington Post, 8/1/02]

Halliburton Could Benefit From Mars Exploration. In January 2004, President Bush proposed to spend billion of dollars on a push to put man on Mars by 2015. According to an article published in Oil & Gas Journal in 2000 by a scientific advisor to Halliburton, Mars exploration would benefit the company. The advisor, Steve Streich, was among several authors to suggest exploration of Mars represented "an unprecedented opportunity for both investigating the possibility of life on Mars and for improving our abilities to support oil and gas demands on Earth." [Associated Press, 1/15/03; Washington Post,1/16/04]

Origins of Political Correctness

The first use of the term in commercial publishing was in 1912 in Chapter 1 of Senator Robert LaFollette's Autobiography . Speaking of his education at the University of Wisconsin, he says "In those days we did not so much get correct political and economic views, for there was then little teaching of sociology or political economy worthy the name".

Sen. La Follette of Wisconsin later ran for President in 1924 on the Progressive Party platform. The University of Wisconsin Madison campus has often been cited as the birthplace of political correctness. Donna Shalala, former Clinton Secretary of Health & Human Services and University of Wisconsin Chancellor has been called the founder of political correctness.

Here is an extended excerpt of the passage:

It is difficult, indeed, to overestimate the part which the university has played in the Wisconsin revolution. For myself, I owe what I am and what I have done largely to the inspiration I received while there. It was not so much the actual courses of study which I pursued; it was rather the spirit of the institution--a high spirit of earnest endeavor, a spirit of fresh interest in new things, and beyond all else a sense that somehow the state and the university were intimately related, and that they should be of mutual service.

The guiding spirit of my time, and the man to whom Wisconsin owes a debt greater than it can ever pay, was its President, John Bascom.

I never saw Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I should say that John Bascom was a man of much his type, both in appearance and in character. He was the embodiment of moral force and moral enthusiasm; and he was in advance of his time in feeling the new social forces and in emphasizing the new social responsibilities. His addresses to the students on Sunday afternoons, together with his work in the classroom, were among the most important influences in my early life. It was his teaching, iterated and reiterated, of the obligation of both the university and the students to the mother state that may be said to have originated the Wisconsin idea in education. He was forever telling us what the state was doing for us and urging our return obligation not to use our education wholly for our own selfish benefit, but to return some service to the state. That teaching animated and inspired hundreds of students who sat under John Bascom. The present President of the university, Charles R. Van Hise, a classmate of mine, was one of the men who has nobly handed down the tradition and continued the teaching of John Bascom.

In those days we did not so much get correct political and economic views, for there was then little teaching of sociology or political economy worthy the name, but what we somehow did get, and largely from Bascom, was a proper attitude toward public affairs. And when all is said, this attitude is more important than any definite views a man may hold.

Political Correctness has become institutionalized at the 'the Wisconsin Idea', using stated funded educational institutions to serve State government.
Here's a quote from the introduction to the aforementioned link (appropriately published by the Wisconsin State Legislature,

"One can divide more careful attempts to define the Idea into two categories. One consists of definitions that emphasize the Idea’s political dimension, even its partisan political dimension (progressive or liberal politics)."

Anecdotally, the story is told about a professional boxer who was denied a boxing license in virtually every state because doctors told him one more blow to the head could lead to a detached retina and permanent blindness. The Wisconsin Boxing Commission ruled they could not deny him a license based on his disability. See below

Aaron Pryor, former junior welterweight champion from Cincinnati, was granted a license to box in Madison in 1990, despite being legally blind in one eye. The State Boxing Commission maintained it could not violate Pryor's constitutional rights by denying him a licence to fight based on disability.

bin Ladin Election Speech

from Aljazeera.net
View Clip

Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed:

Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.

Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom.

If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike for example - Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don't possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 - may Allah have mercy on them.

No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.

No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.

I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.

I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children - also in Iraq - as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages.

So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?

Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.

This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.

And you can read this, if you wish, in my interview with Scott in Time Magazine in 1996, or with Peter Arnett on CNN in 1997, or my meeting with John Weiner in 1998.

You can observe it practically, if you wish, in Kenya and Tanzania and in Aden. And you can read it in my interview with Abdul Bari Atwan, as well as my interviews with Robert Fisk.

The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at the White House and the channels controlled by them able to run an interview with him? So that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?

If you were to avoid these reasons, you will have taken the correct path that will lead America to the security that it was in before September 11th. This concerned the causes of the war.

As for it's results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief among them, that we have found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.

Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr to the region.

At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.

So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretence of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn't forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.

All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.

All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.

That being said, those who say that al-Qaida has won against the administration in the White House or that the administration has lost in this war have not been precise, because when one scrutinises the results, one cannot say that al-Qaida is the sole factor in achieving those spectacular gains.

Rather, the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations - whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction - has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results.

And so it has appeared to some analysts and diplomats that the White House and us are playing as one team towards the economic goals of the United States, even if the intentions differ.

And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [When they pointed out that] for example, al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost - according to the lowest estimate - more than $500 billion.

Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan - with Allah's permission.

It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is ... you.

It is the American people and their economy. And for the record, we had agreed with the Commander-General Muhammad Ataa, Allah have mercy on him, that all the operations should be carried out within 20 minutes, before Bush and his administration notice.

It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would abandon 50,000 of his citizens in the twin towers to face those great horrors alone, the time when they most needed him.

But because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, we were given three times the period required to execute the operations - all praise is due to Allah.

And it's no secret to you that the thinkers and perceptive ones from among the Americans warned Bush before the war and told him: "All that you want for securing America and removing the weapons of mass destruction - assuming they exist - is available to you, and the nations of the world are with you in the inspections, and it is in the interest of America that it not be thrust into an unjustified war with an unknown outcome."

But the darkness of the black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.

So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future. He fits the saying "like the naughty she-goat who used her hoof to dig up a knife from under the earth".

So I say to you, over 15,000 of our people have been killed and tens of thousands injured, while more than a thousand of you have been killed and more than 10,000 injured. And Bush's hands are stained with the blood of all those killed from both sides, all for the sake of oil and keeping their private companies in business.

Be aware that it is the nation who punishes the weak man when he causes the killing of one of its citizens for money, while letting the powerful one get off, when he causes the killing of more than 1000 of its sons, also for money.

And the same goes for your allies in Palestine. They terrorise the women and children, and kill and capture the men as they lie sleeping with their families on the mattresses, that you may recall that for every action, there is a reaction.

Finally, it behoves you to reflect on the last wills and testaments of the thousands who left you on the 11th as they gestured in despair. They are important testaments, which should be studied and researched.

Among the most important of what I read in them was some prose in their gestures before the collapse, where they say: "How mistaken we were to have allowed the White House to implement its aggressive foreign policies against the weak without supervision."

It is as if they were telling you, the people of America: "Hold to account those who have caused us to be killed, and happy is he who learns from others' mistakes."

And among that which I read in their gestures is a verse of poetry. "Injustice chases its people, and how unhealthy the bed of tyranny."

As has been said: "An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure."

And know that: "It is better to return to the truth than persist in error." And that the wise man doesn't squander his security, wealth and children for the sake of the liar in the White House.

In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No.

Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security.

And Allah is our Guardian and Helper, while you have no Guardian or Helper. All peace be upon he who follows the Guidance.


Aljazeera


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