The courtroom provided a telling introduction. I had recently arrived as British ambassador in Uzbekistan's old Silk Road capital of Tashkent, where I was watching the trial of a 22-year-old dissident named Iskander Khuderbegainov. The gaunt young man was accused with five other Muslims of several crimes, including membership in a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda. The six sat huddled in a cage guarded by 14 Kalashnikov-wielding soldiers. The judge made a show of not listening to the defense, haranguing the men with anti-Islamic jokes. It looked like a replay of footage I'd seen of Nazi show trials.

The next day, an envelope landed on my desk; inside were photos of the corpse of a man who had been imprisoned in Uzbekistan's gulags. I learned that his name was Muzafar Avazov. His face was bruised, his torso and limbs livid purple. We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow. Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived. It said that the man's fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid. He had been boiled alive.

That was my welcome to Uzbekistan, a U.S. and British ally in the war on terror. Trying to tell the truth about the country cost me my job. Continuing to tell the truth about it dragged me into the Kafkaesque world of official censorship and gave me a taste of the kind of character assassination of which I once thought only a government like Uzbekistan's was capable.

Her Majesty's Man in Tashkent

“We know that free nations are America's best partners for peace and the only true anchors for stability,” he said. “So we'll continue to support reformers inside and outside governments who are working to build the institutions of liberty.

"We can be confident of the outcome because we know and understand the unstoppable power of freedom.”

Bush Says America Will Continue to Push ‘Freedom Agenda’

Le Monde was nice enough to transcribe the faxed, typewritten letter, making it considerably easier to read.

Despite its clunkiness due to the language barrier, this letter is a fascinating artifact. I enjoyed this tidbit:

Mr President, it is not my intention to distress anyone.

I must question NYT's assertion that "the letter did not address directly the central issue that divides the two countries: Iran's nuclear ambitions." His position is straightforward, if unconvincing and logically flawed. He writes:

You are familiar with history. Aside from the Middle Ages, in what other point in history has scientific and technical progress been a crime? Can the possibility of scientific achievements being utilised for military purposes be reason enough to oppose science and technology altogether? If such a supposition is true, then all scientific disciplines, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, engineering, etc. must be opposed.

Essentially, he is pointing toward the Bill Joy argument, although he gets rather carried away when he writes that "all disciplines must be opposed." And while this is superficially "addressing" the topic, it is really more at misdirection than resolution. I don't think he's going to have much luck getting the UNSC to argue about GM vegetables in lieu of uranium enrichment.

The NYT article did offer this amusing pull-quote from the CFR pundit of the day, in regard to the "values" questions Ahmadinejad raises:

"He might actually inadvertently have a point."

Letter from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to George W. Bush | Le Monde

Jeremy Bernstein loves Jeffrey Richelson's "fascinating new book." He also nicely pulls together some ongoing threads about intelligence and foreign policy.

The themes of this review have been twofold. In order to have really reliable intelligence about the atomic program of a foreign country a necessary, but not sufficient, condition is to have agents on the ground. In the examples I have given the necessity is clear.

The second theme is that in almost all cases the predictions have erred on the side of conservatism. Countries have acquired nuclear weapons well before they were supposed to. The example of the Russians is the most graphic. As the people at Los Alamos discovered, making an implosion bomb was a very difficult technological feat that required the enormous assembled talents of almost the entire laboratory. Do the Iranians have the people to do this, even if they have the plans? We simply do not know.

About the book, Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, saying:

Richelson has written an authoritative and definitive account of US nuclear espionage from the earliest days of atomic research in WWII to the present. ... Richelson concludes chillingly, "Trouble Is Waiting to Happen." More than a comprehensive and often compelling history of nuclear espionage, this is an important contribution to the debate regarding American intelligence that began on 9/11.

The Secrets of the Bomb

On newsstands starting April 25, 2006

* Jorge Castaneda contends that only Latin America's ex-communist left can stop the region's populists.
* Lawrence Freedman declares that Margaret Thatcher's forgotten war turned Tony Blair into "Bush's poodle."
* Michael Shifter shows how Washington can checkmate Hugo Chavez.
* John Rapley argues that the future of international relations will be a lot like the Middle Ages.
* Martin Feldstein says that a rise in U.S. household savings could be a catastrophe for the world economy.
* Ruth Greenspan Bell explains that stopping climate change will require empowering developing countries.
* Samuel Palmisano, CEO of IBM, hails the advent of the global corporation.

Plus: Pro-Americans in Europe: Walter Russell Mead reviews Bernard-Henry Levy's American Vertigo and Josef Joffe's Uberpower, and Haaretz columnist Tom Segev reviews Gershom Gorenberg's The Accidental Empire.

Try a Google search for

"John Rapley" "middle ages" "foreignaffairs"

UPDATE: The essay is available in HTML. The full text is available in PDF (though it is rather poorly formatted). See also this PBS special on El Salvador, which reprints extended excerpts from the essay.

In the Next Issue of Foreign Affairs

These are the rationales for contemplating a preventive attack. The problem is that the likely costs of carrying out such an attack substantially outweigh probable benefits.

Too soon to talk of attacks against Iran

Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.

That moment of ascendancy is now upon us.

The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.

Facing Down Iran by Mark Steyn, City Journal Spring 2006

I also pointed you to Daniel Cohen's previous book, "Our Modern Times."

The enemies of globalization -- whether they denounce the exploitation of poor countries by rich ones or the imposition of Western values on traditional cultures -- see the new world economy as forcing a system on people who do not want it. But the truth of the matter, writes Daniel Cohen in this provocative account, may be the reverse. Globalization, thanks to the speed of twenty-first-century communications, shows people a world of material prosperity that they do want -- a vivid world of promises that have yet to be fulfilled. For most impoverished, developing nations, globalization remains only an image, a fleeting mirage. Never before, Cohen says, have the means of communication -- the media -- created such a global consciousness, and never have economic forces lagged so far behind expectations.

Today's globalization, Cohen argues, is the third act in a history that began with the Spanish Conquistadors in the sixteenth century and continued with Great Britain's empire of free trade in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, as in the twenty-first, a revolution in transportation and communication did not promote widespread wealth but favored polarization. India, a part of the British empire, was just as poor in 1913 as it was in 1820. Will today's information economy do better in disseminating wealth than the telegraph did two centuries ago? Presumably yes, if one gauges the outcome from China's perspective; not, surely, if Africa's experience is a guide. At any rate, it takes poor countries much effort and investment to become players in the global game. The view that technologies and world trade bring wealth by themselves is no more true today than it was two centuries ago.

We should not, Cohen writes, consider globalization as an accomplished fact. It is because of what has yet to happen--the unfulfilled promises of prosperity--that globalization has so many enemies. For the poorest countries of the world, the problem is not so much that they are exploited by globalization as that they are forgotten and excluded.

About this book, John Gray wrote in the New York Review of Books:

Globalization and Its Enemies is one of the most original and incisive inquiries into the subject I have seen. No one who reads and understands it can come away believing that the current phase of this complex and uneven process is leading to the peaceful universal market of business utopians, or accept the simple narrative of anti-capitalist movements in which underdevelopment is a consequence of the wealth of advanced countries. There is more wisdom in Cohen's short book than in dozens of weightier tomes.

Globalization and Its Enemies, by Daniel Cohen

Compare and contrast with Fukuyama's view.

We’ve removed Saddam Hussein, established a democratic government in Iraq, and transformed the dynamics of the Middle East. "Muscular idealism is the new American realism."

The New Realism, by Victor Davis Hanson

Know your enemy.

When President Bush speaks derisively about advocates of "cutting and running" from Iraq, he has in mind people like Nir Rosen, a journalist whose reporting has led him to the conclusion that U.S. withdrawal is the best policy. Rosen recently explained to FP why leaving Iraq is the best option, why Moktada al-Sadr is the only man who can keep Iraq together, and why Iran and the United States are natural allies.

How's that for contrarian?

Seven Questions: What Next for Iraq?