Tom Hayden Bio

11.24.2006

Documents Reveal Secret Talks Between U.S. and Armed Iraqi Resistance

Failures on the battlefield and in the recent American elections are propelling the Bush Administration to consider significant changes in Iraq policy. Having placed the Shiite majority in power, the Administration now wonders if the country is being delivered to Iran. Having fought the Sunni-led insurgency for three years, the Administration wonders if negotiations are the only way to reduce American casualties.

It is not for holiday purposes that George Bush and Condoleeza Rice are meeting next week with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Amman while Dick Cheney rushes to Saudi Arabia. The only question being kept from the American people is what the high-level talks are about.

On November 21 on the Huffington Post, I revealed that American officials have contacted Sunni nationalist insurgents to explore a cease-fire and even the possible replacement of the al-Maliki government with an interim one. This plan would reduce US casualties against the Sunni-led insurgency [recently one hundred deaths per month], while consistent with the Pentagon desire to focus firepower on the Shiite Mahdi Army, led by "radical cleric" Moktada al-Sadr, the most prominent Shiite leader calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq. The current obstacle to an all-out American offensive against al-Sadr's stronghold in Sadr City happens to be Prime Minister al-Maliki, whose governing coalition includes al-Sadr.

Today's car bomb explosions in Sadr City and the violent attacks against Baghdad's health ministry are aimed at two main al-Sadr power bases [his representatives run the health ministry].

Sensing that al-Maliki will agree to anything Bush demands, al-Sadr now is demanding that al-Maliki call off his meeting with the President.

Questions have arisen in the media concerning the evidence of my November 22 report that Americans have been involved in direct contacts with the Sunni armed resistance. The evidence is confirmed by a recent impromptu meeting in Amman between a resistance representative and US Congressman Jim McDermott, in the course of two days of discussions facilitated by a former Jordanian diplomat, Munther Haddadin.

More specific are documents dated November 13 and November 16 by an American adviser sketching detailed ongoing discussions with insurgent Sunni leaders aimed at a cease-fire. The plans can only be paraphrased and the adviser's name withheld for reasons of confidentiality. It is not clear that the blueprint awaited an okay at the highest level as of November 16, or whether it was moving forward with plausible deniability. But there is no doubt as to its authenticity.

Here is the plan, paraphrased briefly, as proposed by the source who serves as an authorized back-channel link to the insurgent groups:

Leaders of the organized Sunni resistance groups are seeking immediate meetings with top American generals towards the goal of a cease-fire. Meetings with lower-level US officials already have occurred.

The resistance groups reject the ability of the al-Maliki government to unify its government, and therefore wants an interim government imposed before new elections can be held.

The former Baathist-dominated national army, intelligence services and police, whose leaders currently are heading the underground resistance, would be rehired, restored and re-integrated into national structures under this plan.

Multinational Force [MNF-I] activities aimed at controlling militias to be expanded.

The US-controlled Multi-National Force [MNF-I] would be redeployed to control the eastern border with Iran.

A Status of Forces agreement would be negotiated immediately permitting the presence of American troops in Iraq for as long as ten years. Troop reductions and redeployments would be permitted over time.

Amnesty and prisoner releases would be negotiated between the parties, with the Americans guaranteeing the end of torture of those held in the detention centers and prisons of the current, Shiite-controlled Iraqi state.

De-Baathification edicts issued by Paul Bremer would be rescinded, allowing tens of thousands of former Baathists to resume military and professional service.

An American commitment to financing reconstruction would be continued, and the new Iraqi regime would guarantee incentives for private American companies to participate in the rebuilding effort.

War-debt relief for Kuwait and other countries.

These are essentially similar proposals to those offered by Sunni nationalists and armed resistance groups since 2005. Low-level contacts have been reported before. What is new, apparently, is the November American election result showing a public demand to disengage and sharply reduce American casualty levels. The American neo-conservatives have been discredited and, in their place, a faction of bipartisan "realists" has emerged in the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker. Condoleeza Rice is thought to have aligned herself with these realists. In an October speech, she urged America's Gulf allies to serve as intermediaries to the resistance, according to an Arab diplomat who was present.

Neither the Pentagon nor the realists are committed to bringing American troops home in the near future. Instead, they seek to reduce American casualties, check the influence of Iran, and redeploy US troops to permanent bases. The draft plan for a Status of Forces Agreement is based on the models of Germany and Japan.

An even more realistic position, though not yet an acceptable one, is that of former CIA director John Deutch, calling for an American troop withdrawal combined with a diplomatic initiative to Iran, seeking non-intervention by Teheran in exchange for the US leaving.

Secretive wars include secretive diplomacy. The American people will be the last to find out what future is being prepared in the flurry of events beginning now. But these documents offer clues. #

TOM HAYDEN is teaching a course on Iraq at Pitzer College. A former anti-Vietnam war leader and state senator, he has interviewed Iraqis from all major parties and associations during two visits to Amman, Jordan, during the past year. For more information go to www.tomhayden.com

What did Rumsfeld really mean...?

Over 50 years ago, Billy Wilder attended the premiere of C.B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. Wilder hated the film but liked DeMille personally. He had to say something nice without lying. "C.B.," he grandly announced, "you have indeed made THE Greatest Show on Earth."

Saying one thing while meaning another is an art as old as speech itself. Donald Rumsfeld, infamous for his hermetic pronouncements, may have practiced that art on the occasion of his "resignation." You've no doubt heard or read the words already, but take another look:

The great respect that I have for your leadership, Mr. President, in this little understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century -- it is not well-known, it was not well-understood, it is complex for people to comprehend. And I know, with certainty, that over time the contributions you've made will be recorded by history.

I must say that it's been the highest honor of my life to serve with the talented men and women of the Department of Defense, the amazing men and women -- young men and women in uniform. It's a privilege.

If you listen to the voice as he delivers this speech, you'll note that he speaks forthrightly and emotionally when praising those "talented men and women" of the DOD. But when he addresses Bush, his voice sounds odd. He never really finishes the sentence that begins with "The great respect I have for your leadership." The sentence makes no grammatical sense; it's as though he could not bear to finish the thought.

Note that he does not call the war justified. He simply implies that its origins are "complex" and not understood by the people. Rumsfeld as much as admits that a great secret lies at the heart of the war -- a secret known to him and to a select few, but not to the citizenry.

"And I know, with certainty, that over time the contributions you've made will be recorded by history." That's it. That's all he has to say about Bush's competence. Rumsfeld never states that Bush acted correctly -- he merely hints that, one of these days, historians will discover what really happened.

Perhaps the outgoing Secretary of Defense did his own version of the Billy Wilder sidestep. Doesn't "the contributions you've made will be recorded by history" sound an awful lot like "you've made THE Greatest Show on Earth"?

Survivor: The White House Edition

As with Vietnam, so with Iraq: in the last act of a failed war the backstage action is about saving reputations, not lives. The flurry of exits, finger-pointing, and self-justification exploited by Bob Woodward leaves just three men to blame: Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Which is where Henry Kissinger, the master survivor, comes in.

by Michael Wolff December 2006

Bush fires Cheney and names McCain as the replacement V.P.—although it is not yet entirely clear to me who tells Bush to fire Cheney, if not Cheney. The war in Iraq, except for the shooting, is so over. But between now and when, as the president has no doubt accurately described it, we "cut and run," when there's a final helicopter lifting from a Green Zone rooftop, there's a whole third act to play.

In Vietnam the third act began more or less with the Tet offensive, in 1968—when, with Saigon and the U.S. Embassy nearly overrun, it became clear that not only were we not winning, we were not going to win—and went on, encompassing the downfall of Lyndon Johnson, the election of Richard Nixon, the rise of Henry Kissinger, the dubious invasion of Cambodia, and, ultimately, Watergate (one proposed article of impeachment involved Nixon's deception of Congress in bombing Cambodia), until 1975 and the final helicopter scene from the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon.

In the third act of a failing war—when, in Vietnam, most of the American casualties actually occurred—much of the off-site drama involves how the panicky people involved with the mess manage their own public relations. The goal, obviously, is to not be blamed, and even, perchance, to emerge heroically. (John Kerry became an anti-war activist in the third act of Vietnam, and was celebrated for it; most others in the military, not so sensitive to the Zeitgeist, plodded on, and came home more or less ignominiously. In part, the Swift-boat episode during the last election was the revenge of the less adroit.)

It's the Walter Cronkite moment. Far from being remembered as a detached narrator of a situation that, for three years, had been wildly spiraling out of control, Cronkite is remembered as the man who, suddenly, in 1968, told truth to power (though, in fact, he was the power) and exposed the hopelessness of the whole misadventure.

Bob Woodward, the nation's most famous journalist—a wooden and sanctimonious television presence, as well as an author of books and a reporter for The Washington Post—is a reasonable equivalent of Cronkite. If he's going in another direction, the world has changed. He's the power barometer. And broker. If he's no longer sucking up to you, you better get out of town in a hurry.

You've lost if you've lost Woodward.

With the publication of State of Denial, Woodward's peeling away of the flesh of the Bush national-security team, the third act is under way.

Woodward is hardly the only turn of the screw. There's Bill Clinton (there's always Bill Clinton). The once and future leader, who's been building himself a global career as, in part, the other president, has taken a more or less righteous position on virtually every global issue—health, environment, economics—except the war elephant in the room. Now, as the third act begins, he seizes the opportunity and is suddenly in high dudgeon about who is or is not to be blamed for the terror mess, not just defending his pursuit of Osama bin Laden but accusing the Bush administration of idleness and negligence. Fair enough, perhaps. But 9/11 was an age ago. How come we had to wait for this most fundamental discussion?

And there's The New York Times, which, after nearly five years of highly politic treatment of virtually anything that the White House coupled with the war on terror, is now, as the press critic Michael Massing recently characterized it, "the voice of the opposition." Here in the third act, there's Colin Powell—who prides himself on his soldier's loyalty except when he's whispering to reporters—playing the martyr. There's the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Virginia Republican John Warner, saying that the U.S. might have to consider "a change of course"—translation: run, run, run for the hills. (The chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Maine Republican Susan Collins, added, for good measure: "When Chairman Warner, who has been a steadfast ally of this administration, calls for a new strategy, that is clearly significant.") Via Woodward, there's Andrew Card, the president's former chief of staff, adjusting his position; Jay Garner, the Bush administration's haplessly selected first proconsul in Iraq, telling his revisionist tale of gross mismanagement in the war zone; George Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, taking the dramatic opportunity of the third act to, finally, drop responsibility for 9/11 onto the White House; Powell's number two, Richard Armitage, dumping all over just about everything; and, indeed, even Laura Bush, wringing her hands.

Such re-inventions and rationalizations and self-justifications and personal P.R. game plans will continue until the responsibility for Iraq has been reduced to Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld—the troika.

Everybody's positioning himself for the end.

The plot structure of the war, and how it reaches its conclusion, is determined less, at this point, by events in Iraq (although the Times gamely reported a few weeks ago on the front page that the military was really, truly honing a new counter-insurgency strategy) than by the involvement of so many drama queens with their super-awareness of crisis and timing.

The basic facts, after all, are three years old: no W.M.D., no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, not enough troops, no planning, and, obviously, no idea about how to deal with an ever growing insurgency.

But patience is key. Richard Clarke, the terrorism expert of both the Clinton and first Bush administrations, went public more than two years ago with his harsh critique of the Bush terror war, and, to many, seemed like a bitchy Cassandra, which is not necessarily the perfect career face. Clarke seemed to think he could precipitate the dénouement, but the drama has its own rhythms. It's only in the third act that you get the big reversals and tough truths—we're finally ready.

Knowing when we're ready is the important skill set—the higher media talent.

Early in the war, a network correspondent and I were debating the troop-casualty/president-approval-rating calculus. I said, naïvely, anything beyond the death toll of the first Gulf war would seem like a worrisome deficit to me. The network correspondent speculated that the war could support the same number of people killed on 9/11—a number we are, in fact, about to reach. I bring this up not to say I, or necessarily anyone, really know when the worm actually turns, but to make the point that the calculation of when too much is too much is ever present, and even something of a moral guide in the mind of the media.

Hence, Woodward's deliberate, steady, committed, even quite intelligent troika of the first two volumes of his war trilogy (Bush at War and Plan of Attack—in the first book our protagonists come to moral attention; in the second they take managerial action and responsibility) turn into the three crazy buggers in the third, when everything collapses. From even-tempered managers to narcissistic stooges. (What reader would believe such a stark reversal not just of the facts and circumstances but of character? But then, I don't think Woodward or his publishers expect us to read all three volumes together. Woodward isn't Churchill.)

This is, I suppose, a terrible thing to suggest: that Woodward might have been overly attentive to the president's soaring approval ratings, and to what was then considered the likelihood that we'd get out of this Iraq war with some efficiency; that he might have seen a picture of illogic and disarray in the White House (the picture, based at least in part on reporting he did while writing the previous book, that he is painting now), but instead rendered a picture of conviction and even occasional sagacity, because that was the canny and commercial way to tell the story, and because these were the terms on which he got his intimate access. But now, suddenly, like everybody else, including his great cast of highly placed characters, he sees it all going south, and smells the blood … hmm.

And yet you don't really believe he could be that mercenary (perhaps he was just obtuse or clinically unself-aware).

Well, give him the first two volumes—let's assume his admiration was genuine, his sucking up a professional habit and technique.

But since then, given that Woodward has gotten all his access, and given that he now understands that the war is a historic calamity, I'd have sure liked to know, among other things, that Kissinger (Kissinger!) was advising this White House, as he had advised the Nixon White House on Vietnam, as soon as Woodward found out about it. (It's important to know when the drama turns surreal.) Also, it would have been useful to know that George Tenet had told the White House in July of 2001 that a terror attack was imminent, that, as he later described it, "the system was blinking red," as soon as Woodward knew it. But Woodward, even though on the payroll of a daily newspaper, held his tongue. Why? Well … I guess for dramatic effect. (We've been here recently: Woodward had the key to the Valerie Plame leak mystery—it turned out he was at the very nexus of who said what to whom—but kept it hidden.) And, indeed, few books in the history of publishing have been received like this one (all right, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, emerging out of the Soviet prison camps)—Woodward's sense of the dramatic is really something.

He's writer and director, pushing his actors to their appointed moment. It must be an extraordinary backstage drama, too. It's Woodward trying to figure out if Bush is really cooked, if the war is really toast. And it's everybody else trying to figure out what Woodward has figured out. Because you want to be in step with Woodward. You want to give the director what the director wants. And then, Woodward, because in a sense he's the producer too, has to hold it all together—has to somehow bind his people not to blow the ending (not to leak what they've leaked to him). Indeed, a new biography of Colin Powell, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, written by Washington Post associate editor Karen DeYoung and excerpted in The Washington Post's Sunday magazine, further positioning Powell as distinct from the mess, confirming his special if tragic wisdom, appeared only just as Woodward's book did—reality is so managed and negotiated.

Anyway, why Cheney makes his exit … The third act may be the most historically memorable part of any war because this is when so many of the books are written. (It's odd and quaint that books still seem to be the medium of final account.) And, indeed, for the past year, the troika (I don't mean to exclude Condi Rice here, but she does seem to be, at least as Woodward sees her, not too substantial—Rummy doesn't return her calls) has more and more found itself on the nether side of an ever growing library which disputes the most fundamental aspects of why and how the war has been waged. It must be confusing for Karl Rove—that master of repetition and keeping it simple, stupid—to have to fight against these thousands of pages, this ferocious welter of detail (do they have people in the White House reading and summarizing?).

This information divide itself—between those who have read these books and those who haven't, or, anyway, those who have read about these books—becomes a crucial element of the third act. In some sense, it was the third act of Vietnam that defined these dual constituencies: part of the country, which followed the information trend, came to believe the war was unwinnable and suspect, while the other part, more remote from the information, continued to believe in the simpler, standard patriotic assumptions. This is the same divide that we now analyze ideologically as blue and red, but in so many aspects it might just be reduced to the smarts and the stupids, or the on-the-makes and the always-out-of-its.

It involves not only information (i.e., knowing that Saddam and Osama were not partners in the same law firm) but opportunity too—or opportunism. This is one reason the smarts have such a bad reputation among the stupids, because so many of them, including the Democrats in Congress, the news media, and Woodward himself, as well as the many people who once helped give the president his 80 or 90 percent approval rating, were stupids when that was advantageous. And because so many of them, like Woodward, and the editors of The New York Times, and the Clintons, did not make the break across the information divide until they were confident that they'd be in good company.

Indeed, the Woodward book gives a pretty clear picture of the time lag between when the smarties knew the war was a loser and when they decided to strategically alter and broadcast their own positions with regard to it. In some sense, the book goes back to Woodward's career theme: who knew what when. First there's the cover-up and then the unraveling.

Colin Powell, currently working so hard on salvaging his reputation, knew that the war was a hopeless calamity pretty much 2,500 bodies ago.

Woodward (never, in the book, acknowledging his own personal time line of apparent support and doubt about the war) reports that in September 2005 he told Senator Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, that he "thought Powell was in anguish about what had happened in Iraq, with 130,000 American troops still stuck there, facing an ever-growing insurgency."

"I don't want to hear about his anguish," Woodward has Levin responding. "I don't have the stomach to hear his anguish. He is so smart and his instincts are so decent and good that I can't just accept his anguish. I want more than anguish. I expected more than anguish.… I don't want to read a year later or two years later saying that this is the worst moment of his life or something."

Richard Armitage was, inside the administration, one of its most caustic and astute critics—Cheney and Rumsfeld can't stand him. Perhaps to his credit, he was a great leaker. But he takes his public stand only now, making himself a moral stalwart, only because Woodward gives him cover (likewise, if he hadn't appeared, Woodward might have easily made him into a moral coward).

In the aftermath of the publication of State of Denial, the White House has most furiously gone after George Tenet, a man Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to. This is partly because if he really did tell them in the summer of 2001 that an attack was imminent, then that changes the Bush narrative in a really dicey way. But they're also going after him because he's so desperate not to be blamed himself. He may be right, the White House is, oddly, in essence saying, but he's dirty, too—remember, he's one of us.

Jay Garner, the first Iraq administrator, has chosen not to write a book (the next guy in the job, Paul Bremer, who, according to both Woodward and Garner, was a terrifyingly arrogant dope, wrote his own, majorly self-justifying book, My Year in Iraq) and instead gave Woodward his story about, sure enough, the mismanagement three years ago of the occupation. Even Woodward taunts him a bit for not at least trying to lay this out for the president when he had the chance.

The time just wasn't right, Garner says.

Timing.

The point here is about the pendulum swinging. Count on it: all the characters in Woodward's book—Powell, Armitage, Garner, Tenet, Card, et al.—along with Woodward himself, and the Clintons, and the people at The New York Times, and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Warner, and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairwoman Collins, say "tipping point" several times a day, at least.

They all have had their fingers in the wind.

The interesting thing is that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are as concerned about their reputations—for them, it's called their "place in history"—as all the other pathological careerists who surround them.

Hence, Kissinger in the White House. Kissinger, to whom, according to Woodward, it is not clear "the president really knew how to run the government," is, nevertheless, "the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs."

"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Cheney tells Woodward, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else."

Now, it cannot be that the Bush team so thoroughly admires the way Kissinger handled Vietnam—that remarkable success. But it is not unlikely that they are well aware that he is the only primary player in the Vietnam War to have emerged with his reputation not in tatters (indeed, he thrived for many years and still, it seems, is at it). He survived the third act, not to mention several Woodward books.

The similarities between now and then are stark. By the end in Vietnam, the media and the smarties, the makers and breakers of reputations, had deserted the war. Nixon and Kissinger had to go on fighting with only the support of the stupids. Likewise, the only group foursquare in the Bush camp at this point are the people who wait patiently for news of the discovery of W.M.D. and who continue to believe that Saddam and Osama were once lovers. Even the neocons and Weekly Standard crowd, the very people who invented the war, have a new line: the war was right, but the people running it are hopeless.

What Kissinger is telling the troika, as they perhaps waiver (who wouldn't waiver?) in their resolve, is that you can continue, as he and Nixon did, fighting a war with the support only of the morons—there are that many of them—for a long time. In the process, you can invade Cambodia, or Laos, or Iran (Kissinger has always believed in raising the stakes). But you can't just cut off the smarties, see them as the enemy, as Nixon did, and as, for instance, Cheney obviously does—but as Kissinger didn't. Whereas the troika was united in snubbing Woodward for this most recent book, Kissinger was always talking, selling Nixon out.

The third act is ever so complicated—who knows this better than Kissinger? People must pay, blame must be apportioned. Not everybody gets out alive. Your own party—everyone eager to avoid blame—turns against you. (Actually, even your own father turns against you: Woodward reports that George Bush Sr. is, according to his close friend and former national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, "in 'agony,' 'anguished' and 'tormented' by the war.")

Rummy, for instance—"enigmatic, obstructionist, devious, never know what his game is" Rummy (as Woodward has Scowcroft describe him)—is, let's face it, dead. He's gone at any moment. Indeed, as Woodward points out, he's managed to hold on only because intransigent Cheney intransigently supports him.

Cheney. "Cheney was the worst," Woodward says, again using Scowcroft as his moral guide. Kissinger, the architect of the bloodiest and most catastrophic phase of the Vietnam War, emerged as well as he did (for sure, a war criminal to some, but to many, a man of renown) because most of the ill will got heaped on Nixon. Kissinger was the contrast gainer. Next to Nixon, he seemed … human.

So, yes, Cheney is the new Nixon.

It's Kissinger, it's got to be Kissinger, who tells Bush what he's got to do with Cheney.

Cheney, in this respect, is such a gift. Born to be hated. He might even willingly—given his dystopian personality—take the fall. He resigns—his hundred heart attacks could be the gentle cover. But it's clear: the war's on him. It's his mistake. (Since we've regarded him as a virtual president anyway, we ought to accept his leave-taking as a virtual impeachment and removal.) McCain is nominated to replace Cheney as V.P. The Republicans go wild because they have a presidential contender in the White House (likewise, the Democrats might not be so unhappy to have McCain suddenly stuck with Iraq). The smarty-media pendulum swings (or at least hesitates) because McCain is McCain and because he might be the next president. A big conference of Arabs is convened. McCain heads a blue-ribbon delegation to Iraq (Powell comes back for this), which determines that the Iraqis are ready to handle their own security. We cut and run, declaring victory.

And Bush can go to China, or North Korea. With Kissinger.

The end in Iraq may not yet be near, but it is ordained.

Michael Wolff, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, is the author of Autumn of the Moguls (HarperBusiness) and Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet (Simon & Schuster).

Barry Goldwater, prophet

"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them...

There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.'" - Barry Goldwater, prophet.

BUSH'S STRANGE VIETNAM VISIT

Joe ConasonThu Nov 23, 5:47 AM ET

What may be remembered someday as one of the strangest moments of George W. Bush's presidency took place last week in Vietnam, when he chose to mention the American defeat there in the same breath as our failing occupation of Iraq. That comparison is often made by his critics, and often elicits irritated rebuttals from the White House.

Yet now the president himself was explicitly drawing a connection between those misadventures -- and drawing a lesson that could only dismay anyone who remembers what really happened during that war in which he so famously avoided serving.

Not long after he landed in the capital of Hanoi, the president explained that the American departure from Vietnam, more than 30 years ago, should teach perseverance in Iraq. "We'll succeed," he said, "unless we quit."

Set aside the witless irony of that remark, coming from a man who quit Vietnam before he ever got there. Instead let us consider the implications of what he said, and the price that he evidently believes Americans and Iraqis ought to be willing to pay for his geopolitical folly. For what he seems to be suggesting, particularly at a time when he has supposedly been chastened by his party's midterm losses, is beyond belief -- not only as policy but as historical judgment.

By the time the United States "quit" Vietnam, the human costs of the war were staggering. More than 58,000 Americans had been killed, or roughly 20 times as many as we have lost so far in Iraq. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese military and civilian deaths range upward from two million, including hundreds of thousands poisoned by the deliberate dropping of defoliants or killed by cluster bombs and napalm. Nobody knows how many Iraqis have been killed so far, but the most careful estimates range from 30,000 to 250,000.

By war's end, the financial cost of Vietnam to the United States Treasury, updated for inflation, reached nearly $600 billion. The average monthly expense of fighting the war in Iraq, which was supposed to cost us nothing, is considerably higher than the monthly cost of the Vietnam War. The final bill will be more than a trillion dollars.

Even Henry Kissinger, who was willing to dispatch Vietnamese civilians by the thousands, now admits that the president's stated objectives in Iraq are beyond reach by military means. But according to the president, what we have to learn from Vietnam is that we must not "quit."

To understand why that attitude is so demented, it might help to picture Mr. Bush in Hanoi. There he sat, talking with Vietnam's government officials and Communist Party chiefs, beneath a gigantic bronze bust of Ho Chi Minh, the late revolutionary who drove the French and then the Americans out of his country. Now we know that all of the reasons why we spent so much blood and treasure fighting Ho were completely mistaken. The domino theory of communist expansion throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific was wrong, and so was the idea that communism could best be resisted by military action.

But he still thinks we shouldn't have "quit."

While Vietnam is far from free, as Bush might have learned if he had strayed from his controlled tour, its economy is rapidly changing, and political reform may be on the horizon as well. Our longstanding policy is to encourage freedom with trade and aid.

The question that hawks (and chicken-hawks) should answer is whether they truly continue to believe we should have stayed in Vietnam. If they answer affirmatively, then the next question is how long, and at what cost, and until how many were dead? It is a question that ought to be posed not only to President Bush but also to his would-be successor, John McCain, who still insists that we could have won the Vietnam War -- if only we had been willing to accept and inflict many more casualties. Paradoxically, the Arizona senator, who suffered torture as a prisoner of war, spent years promoting normalized relations with Vietnam, where he too hopes for peaceful reform.

Both Bush and McCain still believe that we should be willing to accept and inflict more casualties in Iraq -- so perhaps should they also be asked how long that war should continue, and what price in lives and dollars would still be consistent with "victory." If 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese were not enough, then how many do they think should die in Iraq before we seek a negotiated conclusion?

Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer (www.observer.com). To find out more about Joe Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Genetic breakthrough that reveals the differences between humans

Scientists hail genetic discovery that will change human understanding

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Published: 23 November 2006

Scientists have discovered a dramatic variation in the genetic make-up of humans that could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what causes incurable diseases and could provide a greater understanding of mankind.

The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome - the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual "letters" of the genome.

It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.

Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or "book of life", is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.

The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought - which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases.

The studies published today have found that instead of having just two copies of each gene - one from each parent - people can carry many copies, but just how many can vary between one person and the next.

The studies suggest variations in the number of copies of genes is normal and healthy. But the scientists also believe many diseases may be triggered by an abnormal loss or gain in the copies of some key genes.

Another implication of the finding is that we are more different to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, than previously assumed from earlier studies. Instead of being 99 per cent similar, we are more likely to be about 96 per cent similar.

The findings, published simultaneously in three leading science journals by scientists from 13 different research centres in Britain and America, were described as ground-breaking by leading scientists.

"I believe this research will change for ever the field of human genetics," said Professor James Lupski, a world authority on medical genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

Professor Lupski said the findings superseded the basic principles of human genetics that have been built up since the days of Gregor Mendel, the 19th century "father" of Mendelian genetics, and of Jim Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA double helix in 1953.

"One can no longer consider human traits as resulting primarily from [simple DNA] changes... With all respect to Watson and Crick, many Mendelian and complex traits, as well as sporadic diseases, may indeed result from structural variation of the genome," Professor Lupski said.

Deciphering the three billion letters in the sequence of the human genome was once likened to landing on the Moon. Having now arrived, scientists have found the "lunar landscape" of the genome is very different from what they expected.

Matthew Hurles, one of the project's leaders at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, said the findings show each one of us has a unique pattern of gains and losses of entire sections of our DNA.

"One of the real surprises of these results was just how much of our DNA varies in copy number. We estimate this to be at least 12 per cent of the genome - that has never been shown before," Dr Hurles said.

Scientists have detected variation in the "copy number" of genes in some individuals before but the sheer scale of the variation now being discovered is dramatic.

"The copy number variation that researchers had seen before was simply the tip of the iceberg, while the bulk lay submerged, undetected," Dr Hurles said.

"We now appreciate the immense contribution of this phenomenon to genetic differences between individuals," he said.

The studies involved a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the genomes of 270 people with Asian, African or European ancestry. It was important to include as wide a sample of the human gene pool as possible.

They found that 2,900 genes could vary in the number of copies possessed by the individuals. The genes involved multiple copies of stretches of DNA up to a million letters of the genetic code long.

"We used to think that if you had big changes like this, then they must be involved in disease. But we are showing that we can all have these changes," said Stephen Scherer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

But it is also becoming apparent that many diseases appear to be influenced by the number of copies of certain key genes, said Charles Lee, another of the project's leaders at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

"Many examples of diseases resulting from changes in copy number are emerging. A recent review lists 17 conditions of the nervous system alone, including Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's, that can result from such copy number changes," Professor Lee said.

"Indeed, medical research will benefit enormously from this map, which provides new ways for identifying genes involved in common diseases," he said.

Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, the medical charity that funded much of the research, said: "This important work will help to identify genetic causes of many diseases."

The key questions answered

What have scientists discovered today?

They have found that each of us is more different genetically than we previously believed. Instead of being 99.9 per cent identical, it may turn out to be more like 99 per cent identical - enough of a difference to explain many variations in human traits. Instead of having just two copies of every gene - one from each parent - we have some genes that are multiplied several times. Furthermore these "multiple copy numbers" differ from one person to another, which could explain human physical and even mental variation.

Why does this matter?

One practical benefit is that it could lead to a new understanding of some of the most difficult, incurable diseases. Although it adds an extra layer of complexity to our understanding of the human genome, the discovery could lead eventually to new insights and medical treatments of conditions ranging from childhood disorders to senile dementia. Scientists are predicting for instance that the knowledge could lead to new diagnostic tests for such diseases as cancer.

How was this discovery made?

Scientists have developed sophisticated methods of analysing large segments of DNA over recent years. "In some ways the methods we have used are 'molecular microscopes', which have transformed the techniques used since the foundation of clinical genetics where researchers used microscopes to look for visible deletions and rearrangements in chromosomes," explained Nigel Carter of the Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

What genes are copied many times and why?

There are just under 3,000 genes in the human genome, which consists of about 3 billion "letters" of the DNA code. The scientists found that more than 10 per cent of these genes appear to be multiplied in the 270 people who took part in the study. They do not know why some genes are copied and some are not. One gene, called CCL3L1, which is copied many times in people of African descent, appears to confer resistance to HIV. Another gene involved in making a blood protein is copied many times in people from south-east Asia and seems to help against malaria. Other research has shown that variation in the number of copies of some genes is involved in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Are there any other practical applications?

The scientists looked at people from three broad racial groups - African, Asian and European. Although there was an underlying similarity in terms of how common it was for genes to be copied, there were enough racial differences to assign every person bar one to their correct ethnic origin. This might help forensic scientists wishing to know more about the race of a suspect.

Who made the discovery and where can we read more about it?

Scientists from 13 research centres were involved, including Britain's Sanger Institute in Cambridge, which also took a lead role in deciphering the human genome. The research is published in Nature, Nature Genetics and Genome Research.

American right wing policy linked to global HIV death increases

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

American right wing policy linked to global HIV death increases
by Chris in Paris - 11/22/2006 04:55:00 AM

Do we really need to re-visit the Dark Ages again? We do have plenty of advanced science despite what many in the GOP think and if they believe in god, didn't god give us the gift of science to help others? It sickens me when I think about the Republican half-baked programs to stop AIDS which reject science and focus time, not to mention millions and millions of US taxpayer money, on talking about abstinence. Now their favorite example of success, Uganda, is witnessing an increase in HIV as they increase their focus on Bush's extremist Christian abstinence program.

Why does the GOP want to sit back and promote silly theory (like the theory that dragged us into Iraq) that continues to fail and let these people die? Talk about abstinence, sure, but how about focusing on real results and real science instead of this insanity? Good grief, I hope Congress takes a serious look at this quackery and makes some changes. Continuing this policy is at best hateful, at worst, contributing to millions of deaths and parentless children. Maybe it's time some of these clowns visit places like Africa and actually see the end result of their policy because it is not a pretty sight.

The spread of the HIV/Aids pandemic continues unabated, with the number of people infected rising once more in some countries which had been thought to be beating the disease, according to the UN.

There are now 39.5 million living with HIV infection, according to the annual UNAIDS report, released ahead of World Aids Day on December 1, and 4.3 million of those were infected in 2006. That is 400,000 more than were infected in 2004.

And Bush's showcase country, Uganda...

The reasons for the increase are not clear, but there has been a shift in the message from Uganda's leadership. Between the early 1990s and early 2000s, HIV prevalence fell sharply in major cities among pregnant women - the group most commonly monitored because they have contact with health services - as President Yoweri Museveni worked to raise awareness of the dangers of HIV and put the authority of his office behind condom use.

But in recent years the message on condoms has been diluted in favour of greater emphasis on sexual abstinence until marriage - in line with the thinking of the Bush administration, which is spending millions of dollars on HIV prevention and treatment. Critics say many women are not in a position to abstain from sex and that many are infected by their husbands.

Beyond Belief 2006

Beyond Belief 2006

A Free-for-All on Science and Religion

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

BEYOND REDUCTIONISM

Two fine authors, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have written recent books, The God Delusion and Breaking the Spell arguing against religion. Their views are based on contemporary science. But the largest convictions of contemporary science remain based on reductionism.

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

BEYOND REDUCTIONISM [11.13.06]
Reinventing The Sacred
By Stuart A. Kauffman

Introduction

Stuart A. Kauffman studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology:

"While it may sound as if 'order for free' is a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution, it's not so much that I want to challenge Darwinism and say that Darwin was wrong. I don't think he was wrong at all. I have no doubt that natural selection is an overriding, brilliant idea and a major force in evolution, but there are parts of it that Darwin couldn't have gotten right. One is that if there is order for free — if you have complex systems with powerfully ordered properties — you have to ask a question that evolutionary theories have never asked: Granting that selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization of complex systems — that is, this order for free — and natural selection? There's no body of theory in science that does this. There's nothing in physics that does this, because there's no natural selection in physics — there's self organization. Biology hasn't done it, because although we have a theory of selection, we've never married it to ideas of self-organization. One thing we have to do is broaden evolutionary theory to describe what happens when selection acts on systems that already have robust self-organizing properties. This body of theory simply does not exist." (Chapter 20, "Order for Free", The Third Culture, 1995)

In the following essay, Kauffman frames a new scientific world view of emergence and ceaseless creativity, which, he notes, is "awesome in what has come to pass in reality, and God enough for me and many, where God is the creativity of the universe, yielding a global ethics of respect for all life, the planet, awe, wonder and spirituality cut free from a transcendent God."

— JB

STUART A. KAUFFMAN is a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy. He is also the leader of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) which conducts leading-edge interdisciplinary research in systems biology.

Dr. Kauffman is also an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization, and Investigations.

Stuart A. Kauffman's Edge Bio Page

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Jaron Lanier

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BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED A great divide splits contemporary society between those who believe in a transcendent God, and those, including myself, who do not. In the West, and now throughout the world, the massive advances of science since Galileo and Newton have given birth to secular society. In the Christian and Jewish segments of the Abrahamic religions, the theistic God who intervened in the affairs of the world gave way in the Enlightenment to a Deistic God who wound up the universe, set the initial conditions, and allowed Newton's laws to carry on. This God no longer entered into the affairs of man. In the theistic tradition, God became either the God of the gaps, where science had yet to hold sway, or, contrary to science, God intervened in the running of the cosmos. In the West, those who hold to a view of a theistic God, including the Christian fundamentalists of such power in the United States, find themselves in a cultural war with those who do not believe in a transcendent God, whether agnostic or atheistic. This war is evidenced by the fierce battle over Intelligent Design being waged politically and in the court systems of the United States. While the battleground is Darwinism, the deeply emotional issues are more fundamental. These include the belief of many religious people that without God's authority, morality has no basis. Literally, for those in the West who hold to these views, part of the passion underlying religious conviction is the fear that the very foundations of Western society will tumble if faith in a transcendent God is not upheld. The majority of the Abrahamic peoples are Muslims. I know the Islamic world poorly, but believe that their fundamentalism again in part lies in these moral issues. Beyond that, reductionism, wrought by the successes of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Planck, and Schrodinger, and all that has followed, preeminently in physics, has, as I will expand upon in a moment, left us in world of fact — cold fact with no scientific place for value. "The more we know of the cosmos, the more meaningless it appears", said Stephen Weinberg in Dreams of a Final Theory. For example, Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, wrote a mid 20th century book entitled hopefully: The Place of Value in a World of Fact. And just a few days ago, a conversation with a humanist professor at the University of Pennsylvania astonished me with her account of how we are again a meaningless world in the post modern world view rampant in the North American humanities. On the other side of this vast divide than those who hold to a transcendent God and His authority for meaning and values, are the innumerable secular humanists, children of the enlightenment and contemporary science, who hold firmly to reality as revealed by science, find values in their love for their families and friends, a general sense of fairness and a morality that needs no basis in God's word. Yet we secular humanists have paid an unspoken price for our firm sense that (reductionist) science tells us what is real. First, we have no well wrought scientific basis for our humanity — despite the interesting fact that quantum mechanics on the Copenhagen interpretation assumes free willed physicists who choose what quantum features to measure and thereby change the physical world. The two cultures, science and humanities, remain firmly un-united. And equally important, we have been subtly robbed of our deep capacity for spiritualism. We have come to believe that spirituality is inherently co-localized with a belief in God, and that without such a belief, spirituality is inherently foolish, questionable, without foundation, wishful thinking, silly. In turn, we lack a global ethic to constitute the transnational mythic value structure that can sustain the emerging global civilization. We tend to believe in the value of democracy and the free market. We are largely reduced to consumers. Here it is telling that Kenneth Arrow, brilliant Nobel Laureate in economics and friend, took part in a commission to "place a value" on preservation of National Parks and was stymied in his attempt to find a way to calculate that value based on utility to citizens. Thus, even in our enjoyment of the wild, we are reduced to consumers in our currant Weltanschauung. Two fine authors, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have written recent books, The God Delusion and Breaking the Spell arguing against religion. Their views are based on contemporary science. But the largest convictions of contemporary science remain based on reductionism. I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind. Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System. Reductionism Like any other world view, reductionism is hard to pin down. The modern world view of reductionism clearly grows from the success of modern physics, but finds its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, that all is made of earth, air, fire, and water, or from atoms. Roughly, reductionism is the view that, as Nobel Laureate Stephen Weinberg eloquently puts it, the "explanatory arrows always point downward", from society to small groups to individuals to organs to cells to chemistry to physics and ultimately to something like Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory, a single set of laws, elegant in their form, like General Relativity, which, in Weinberg's sense, explains all. A large majority of contemporary scientists are reductionists. If pressed, most would roughly say that the behavior of complex wholes is nothing more that the laws governing the behaviors of the parts and their interactions. An example well known in physics is the purported successful reduction of classical thermodynamics to statistical mechanics. Here temperature is equated with the mean kinetic energy of particles, pressure with the energy transfer to bounding walls, and the famous second law of thermodynamics is equated with a "flow" of an isolated thermodynamic system from less to more probable macrostates. I have used the caveat "purported" because — an issue too technical to go into here — the reduction requires the truth of the "ergodic hypothesis" and there is some evidence that it might be false. With reductionism comes the conviction that a court proceeding to try a man for murder is "really" nothing but the movement of atoms, electrons, and other particles in space, quantum and classical events, and ultimately to be explained by, say, string theory. Beyond Reductionism We begin with the growing doubt among many physicists themselves that reductionism itself suffices. Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson wrote a famous article, "More is Different", some decades ago, arguing that reductionism is wonderful, but not enough. A computer computing a complex algorithm can be made of transistors or water buckets — it is able to run on multiple physical platforms. Hence reducing the computer to any particular physical basis is insufficient to explain the computer. The drift away from reductionism among physicists is most pronounced among solid state physicists, who deal with such things as metals, glasses, spin glasses, and systems with many "broken symmetries". Robert Laughlin, solid state physicist and Nobel laureate, argues strenuously against the full efficacy of reductionism in A Different Universe. The physicists who hold out for a firm reductionism are, like Weinberg himself, largely high energy particle physicists, seeking that final theory — say string theory. But it is precisely in the province of string theory itself, that doubts are arising. The early hope was that a single string theory would be found that would explain quantum gravity and all the known particles and forces. Such a single string theory would be the answer to Weinberg's dream of a final theory. But at present, it appears that there are as many as 10 to the 500th power string theories. Hope for a single theory is fast fading and a number of high energy physicists are abandoning reductionism in the sense of finding such a single theory. Thus, Leonard Susskind, in the Cosmic Landscape, suggests a multiverse of "pocket universes", each with a randomly chosen string theory, and a landscape over these "pocket universes" with respect to those whose laws are life friendly. As a critical side note, part of Susskind's move is an attempt to explain the roughly 23 physical constants in physics like the speed of light, the ratio of electron to proton mass, and so on. No one knows where these constants come from or how to explain them. Weinberg himself uttered the "A" word — anthropic. According to this idea, there are many universes, and only those with constants that support the evolution of intelligent life would have such life to wonder at the values of the constants. In short, many, but not all physicists, are giving up on the adequacy of reductionism alone as a scientific principle to explain the properties of the world. In its stead a new scientific world view is just starting to come into view: Emergence. Emergence Roughly speaking emergence breaks into two sub-views, epistemological and ontological emergence. The former says that complex systems are too complex to be explained by reductionistic practices, but that ontologically, reductionism holds. The ontological view is that new entities with their own properties and causal powers arise and are part of the furniture of the universe. I hold strongly to this view and will present a number of cases that appear to support it. 1) The origin of life and its non-reducibility to physics. We do not, in fact, know how or where life started, although most scientists believe that life on earth started on earth some 3.8 billion years ago, shortly after the planet cooled enough for liquid water to form. As an alternative, life might have started elsewhere and arrived here through space, Crick's Panspermia concept. There are several alternative views about how life emerged on earth, none established. In short summary: The first view notes the remarkable properties of the DNA and RNA double helix, and hopes that a single strand of RNA can serve as a template primer to add A, U, C and G nucleotides to Watson Crick match those of the template and be ligated into proper 3'-5' phosophodiester bonds to replicate the template, then the two strands melt apart, and cycle again. Forty years of hard work have not succeeded for good chemical reasons. Most now doubt that life started this way. The second view is the "RNA World" view. It was discovered that RNA molecules can not only carry genetic information, but act as enzymes, speeding chemical reactions. Work is underway to create an RNA enzyme, or ribozyme, that can copy any RNA molecule including itself. The probability that an RNA molecule can catalyze a given reaction is roughly 10 divided by 10 raised to the 15th power. It is conceivable that such a molecule can arise by chance, but it faces the difficulty that were it to copy itself and make errors, those error copies would be more error prone than the initial copy, and a run away error catastrophe might ensue. In short, such a molecule might not be stable in evolution. The third view is the "lipid" view, in which hollow spheres of bilayered lipids, called liposomes, can grow and divide. This has been demonstrated experimentally. It may plausibly be part of the origin of life. The fourth view is my own and that of Freeman Dyson, and may also be part of the origin of life. I noted that cellular life is based on collective autocatalysis, where catalysis is the speeding up of a chemical reaction. Thus imagine two polymers, A and B, where each catalyzes the formation of the other out of fragments of the other. That is collective autocatalysis. No molecule catalyzes its own formation, rather the set as a whole is collectively autocatalytic, and achieves catalytic closure. Cells are collectively autocatalytic today. Reza Ghadiri has made collectively autocatalytic small protein systems, and Gunter von Kiederowski has made collectively autocatalytic DNA systems. Thus self reproduction of polymers has been achieved experimentally by good chemists in a lab. My own theory starts with stating this as a possibility then goes on the ask whether, in a large set of polymers that can act as substrates and products of reactions and also act as catalysts of those very reactions, one would expect such autocatalytic sets to arise "spontaneously". Strikingly, the answer can be yes, depending upon the ratio of reactions among the polymers in the system to the polymer diversity itself, and the distribution of catalytic capacities for those reactions among the same set of polymers. In simple models, as the diversity of polymers increases, so many reactions are catalyzed that autocatalytic sets form spontaneously with high probability. This part of the theory remains to be tested, but can by use of libraries of random DNA, RNA and proteins. The fifth view is metabolism first. Morowitz believes that metabolism can form autocatalytic cycles on its own, and indeed it does, and that metabolism and autocatalysis arose first. Clearly none of the theories above is adequate. But one gets the firm sense that science is moving in on possible routes to the origin of life on earth. If some combination of the metabolism, polymer autocatalysis and lipid first view can be formulated and tested in a new "Systems Chemistry", we may find the answers we seek. Suppose we do. It will be a scientific triumph of course. But if such self reproducing and, via heritable variations, evolving systems are formed, are they ontologically emergent with respect to physics? I believe the answer is yes. Darwin taught us about natural selection and evolution. He did not know the basis for self reproduction or heritable variation. But given these, evolution by natural selection follows. Such evolving life forms would be subject to Darwin's law, which arises only for entities capable of self reproduction and heritable variation. This seems clearly to be ontological emergence, not reducible to physics. Like Anderson's computer able to run on transisitors or buckets of water, Darwin's natural selection can run on multiple physical platforms, where the entities under selection have their own causal powers, and natural selection cannot be reduced to any specific physical platform. Indeed, it is possible that minor changes in the constants of the physicists would still yield universes in which life, heritable variation and natural selection would obtain. Note that while the physicist might deduce that a specific set of molecules was self reproducing, and had heritable variations and instantiated natural selection, one cannot deduce natural selection from the specific physics of any specific case(s), or even this universe, alone. In short, Darwin's natural selection is a new law operating on the level of self reproducing entities with heritable variation, regardless of the physical underpinning. In contrast to Weinberg's claim, here the explanatory arrows point upward from molecules to the evolution of living systems of molecules via natural selection. 2) Agency: You are now reading this article, presumably on purpose. You are able to act on your own behalf. You are the clearest example we have of agency. It is utterly remarkable that agency has arisen in the universe — systems that are able to act on their own behalf. Systems that modify the universe on their own behalf. Out of agency comes value and meaning. This article either is, or is not interesting to you, hence is or is not valuable. It may change your world view, hence have deep meaning. It becomes interesting to ask what the minimal physical system is that can act as an agent. In Investigations, I sought to answer this, by proposing that a minimal molecular agent is a system which can reproduce itself and carry out at least one work cycle in the thermodynamic sense. I will not go into the ramifications of this, which are puzzling and I hope important. On this account, a bacterium, swimming up a glucose gradient, and performing work cycles, is an agent, and glucose has value and meaning for the bacterium, without assuming consciousness. Of course it is natural selection that has achieved this coupling. But teleological language has to start somewhere, and I am willing to place it at the start of life. Either here, or later in the evolutionary pathways, meaning and value arise in the biosphere. They too are ontologically emergent. We have a natural place for value in a world of fact, for the world is not just fact: agents act on the world and actions are not just facts, for the action itself is a subset of the causal consequences of what occurs during an act, and that relevant subset cannot be deduced from physics. 3) We are, in fact, conscious. That is, we have experiences of the world. The philosophers call these "qualia". For years, philosophers of mind have tried to argue that such experiences are "ghosts in the machine". This is just false. We are, in fact, conscious. Whatever explains consciousness, it is clearly ontologically emergent. There are three radically different views on the cause of consciousness, none known to be true. The first in the West, is that mind derives from direct connection to the mind of God — St. Augustines view, and to my astonishment, not far from that of Schrodinger, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics. In Tibetan Buddhism, consciousness is continuous, and thus underwrites reincarnation. The second, predominant view among cognitive scientists is that consciousness arises when enough computational elements are networked together. In this view, a mind is a machine, and a complex set of buckets of water pouring water into one another would become conscious. I just cannot believe this. I cannot however disprove it, but I can offer arguments against it. On this view, the mind is algorithmic. With Penrose, in The Emperor's New Mind, I believe that the mind is not algorithmic, although it can act algorithmically. If it is not algorithmic, then the mind is not a machine and consciousness may not arise in a classical — as opposed to possibly to a quantum — system. Penrose bases his argument on the claim that in seeking a proof a mathematician does not follow an algorithm himself. I think he is right, but the example is not felicitous, for the proof itself is patently an algorithm, and how do we know that the mathematician did not subconsciously follow that algorithm in finding the proof. My arguments start from humbler conditions. Years ago my computer sat on my front table, plugged into a floor socket. I feared my family would bump into the cord and pull the computer off the table, breaking it. I now describe the table: 3 x 5 feet, three wooden boards on top, legs with certain carvings, chipped paint with the wood surface showing through with indefinitely many distances between points on the chipped flecks, two cracks, one crack seven feet from the fireplace, eleven feet from the kitchen, 238,000 miles from the moon, a broken leaf on the mid board of the top…..You get the idea that there is no finite description of the table — assuming for example continuous spacetime. So I invented a solution. I jammed the cord into one of the cracks and pulled it tight so that my family would not be able to pull the computer off the table. Now it seems to me that there is no way to turn this Herculian mental performance into an algorithm. How would one bound the features of the situation finitely? How would one even list the features of the table in a denumerably infinite list? One cannot. Thus it seems to me that no algorithm was performed. As a broader case, we are all familiar with struggling to formulate a problem. Do you remotely think that your struggle is an effective "mechanical" or algorithmic procedure? I do not. I also do not know how to prove that a given performance is not algorithmic. What would count as such a proof? So I must leave my conviction with you, unproven, but powerful I think. If true, then the mind is not a machine. The third view of mind and consciousness, which I tentatively favor, is that it is related to quantum behavior. The standard physicist's answer is that quantum effects cannot occur at body temperature. Indeed, Schrodinger says this, then says of consciousness, "I am become God". However, recent theorems in quantum computing, and facts about cells cast doubt on this conclusion. The theorems show that, if measurements are made and work is done on a quantum computer, its qubits can remain "quantum coherent" when they should "decohere" towards classical behavior. Thus, if work is done on a system, parts of it may remain quantum coherent at body temperature in principle. But cells do thermodynamic work and might be able to carry out such measurements and work to maintain some variables quantum coherent. Second, cells are crowded by proteins and other molecules, and the water between these molecules is largely ordered, not like an ordinary liquid. This may permit quantum coherence physically in cells. No one knows. It seems worth investigation in its own right. Meanwhile, my approximate theory is that mind is acausal, quantum mechanics is acausal on the familiar Born interpretation of the Schrodinger equation, (to the grief of Einstein), that consciousness is due to a special state where a system is persistently poised between quantum and classical behavior, that the emergence of classical behavior in the mind-brain system, perhaps by decoherence, is the "mind making something actual" happen in the physical world, and — big jump — that consciousness itself consists in this quantum coherent state as lived by the organism. This is a long jump, but not impossible. I don't even think it is stupider than other theories of consciousness, and may be true. Whatever the case, consciousness is ontologically emergent in this universe. The Biosphere and Human Culture are Ceaselessly Creative in Ways that Cannot be Foretold. The third, rather astonishing theme that is emerging in this new world view is that the biosphere and human culture are ceaselessly creative in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable and presumably non-algorithmic or machine like. I begin with Darwinian adaptations and preadaptations. Were one to ask Darwin what the function of the heart is, he would have replied, "To pump blood". That is, the causal consequence of the heart for virtue of which it was selected by natural selection is pumping blood. But the heart makes heart sounds. These are not the function of the heart. Thus, the function of the heart is a subset of its causal consequences and must be analyzed in the context of the whole organism in its selective environment. Again this says that biology cannot be reduced to physics, for while the string theorist might (actually could not) deduce all the properties of a given heart, he/she would have no way to pick out as the relevant property that of pumping blood. But it is that property that accounts for the existence of hearts in the biosphere. Now a Darwinian preadaptation is a causal consequence of a part of an organism of no selective significance in the normal environment, but which might be of use in some odd environment, hence become the subject of natural selection. Here the organ was "preadapted" for this novel function in the biosphere. A fanciful example concerns the squirrel Gertrude who happened to have a single Mendelian dominant mutant that gave her flaps of skin from arms to legs on both sides. (Darwinian preadaptations need not rely on new mutations in general, but I use them for my friend Gertrude, who lived 65,394,003 years ago in Guatemala.) Gertrude was so ugly that the rest of the squirrels would not play or eat with her. She was in a magnolia tree eating lunch sadly and alone when Bertha, an early owl in a neighboring pine, spied Gertrude, thought "Lunch", dived towards Gertrude horrid claws extended…..Gertrude was terrified. Suddenly she jumped from the tree, arms and legs flung wide. "Ghaaaa!" cried Gertrude, then looked, incredulous, as she flew. And she escaped the befuddled Bertha. Well, Gertrude became a heroine in her clan, was married in a lovely civil ceremony to a handsome squirrel not a month later, and thanks to her dominant mutation, all their children had similar flaps of skin. And that is how flying squirrels came to exist in the biosphere. I like Gertrude a lot. It is critical that virtually any extant feature of an organism can become the subject of natural selection in the appropriate environment, and typically, if selected, a novel functionality arises in the biosphere and universe. Now the critical question: Do you think you could say ahead of time, or finitely prestate, all possible Darwinian preadaptations of, say species alive now, or even humans? I have not found anyone who thought the answer was yes. I do not know how to prove my claim that the answer is "No", but part of the problem is that we cannot finitely prestate the relevant features of all possible selective environments for all organisms with respect to all their features. But the failure to prestate the possible preadaptations is not slowing down the evolution of the biosphere where preadaptations are widely known. Thus, ever novel functionalities come to exist and proliferate in the biosphere. The fact that we cannot prestate them is essential, and an essential limitation to the way Newton taught us to do science: Prestate the relevant variables, forces acting among them, initial and boundary conditions, and calculate the future evolution of the system…say projectile. But we cannot prestate the relevant causal features of organisms in the biosphere. We do not know now the relevant variables! Thus we cannot write down a set of equations for the temporal evolution of these variables. We are profoundly precluded from the Newtonian move. In short, the evolution of the biosphere is radically unknowable, not due to quantum throws of the dice, or deterministic chaos, but because we cannot prestate the macroscopic relevant features of organisms and environments that will lead to the emergence of novel functions in the biosphere with their own causal properties that in turn alter the future evolution of the biosphere. Thus, the evolution of the biosphere is radically creative, ceaselessly creative, in way that cannot be foretold. I find this wonderful. I believe this fact means that the evolution of the biosphere is non-algorithmic. It cannot be simulated, certainly with continuous spacetime and quantum mechanics playing a role. The same Darwinian preadaptations occur in the evolution of the economy. The story concerns engineers trying to invent the tractor. They would need a massive engine block. They tried it on chasse after chasse, all of which broke. Finally one of the engineers said, "The engine block itself is so massive and rigid that we can use the engine block itself as the chasse." And that is how tractors are made. Now the rigidity of the tractor was a Darwinian preadaptation, a causal feature useful for a new function. Its discovery was a true invention. But this means that the technological evolution of the econosphere is also not finitely prestatable, nor presumably algorithmic. It too is ceaselessly creative, expanding from some 1000 goods and services say 50,000 years ago to perhaps 10 billion today. And human culture, in general, is ceaselessly creative as the biosphere and culture expand into what I call the Adjacent Possible. Here the point is that, at levels of complexity above the atom, the universe has not had time to make all possible complex objects, such as all proteins length 200. The universe, at these levels of complexity, is on a unique trajectory. So when my friend Gertrude flew, she changed the material and behavioral features of the evolving universe. So did Picasso. In short, in wondrous ways, these our universe, biosphere, econosphere, and culture are ceaselessly creative and emergent. The two cultures, science and humanities, stand united in this world view. Meaning and value have a scientific base. And ethics? At a recent meeting on science and religion on Star Island, we heard more than one lecture on animal emotions and the sense of fairness in chimpanzees. Group selection, we were told, is now making its way into evolutionary biology. With it, natural selection can get its grip on behaviors that are advantageous to the group, like fairness, so it emerges. Far from evolution being anathema to ethics, evolution is the first source of human morality. But not the last, for we can argue whether we should want what we want. God and a Global Ethic God is the most powerful symbol we have created. The Spaniards in the New World built their churches on the holy sites of those they vanquished. Notre Dame sits on a Druid holy site. Shall we use the God word? It is our choice. Mine is a tentative "yes". I want God to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours. What do we gain by using the God word? I suspect a great deal, for the word carries with it awe and reverence. If we can transfer that awe and reverence, not to the transcendental Abrahamic God of my Israelite tribe long ago, but to the stunning reality that confronts us, we will grant permission for a renewed spirituality, and awe, reverence and responsibility for all that lives, for the planet. Does one know that such a transformation of human sensibilities will happen? Of course not. But the sense of justice matured in the Abrahamic tradition from 10 eyes for an eye, to an eye for an eye, to love thine enemy as thyself. Then can a heightened consciousness bring about a global ethic? I believe so. I believe, I hope correctly, that what I have sketched above is true, points to a new vision of our co-creating reality, that it invites precisely an enhancement of our sense of spirituality, reverence, wonder, and responsibility, and can form the basis of a trans-national mythic structure for an emerging global civilization. Co-Evolving Traditions To ever succeed, this new view needs to be soft spoken. You see, we can say, here is reality, is it not worthy of stunned wonder? What more could we want of a God? Yes, we give up a God who intervenes on our behalf. We give up heaven and hell. But we gain ourselves, responsibility, and maturity of spirit. I know that saying that ethics derives from evolution undercuts the authority of God as its source. But do we need such a God now? I think not. Nor do we need the spiritual wasteland that post-modernism has brought us. Beyond my admired friend Kenneth Arrow, natural parks are valuable because life is valuable on its own, a wonder of emergence, evolution and creativity. Reality is truly stunning. So if you find this useful, let us go forth, as was said long ago, and invite consideration by others of this new vision of reality. With it, let us recreate spiritual community and membership. Let us go forth. Civilization needs to be changed. References: Anderson, P. 1972. More is different. Science 177: 393–396. Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Dennett, D. 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Viking Adult, NYC. Laughlin. 2005. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down. Basic Books, NYC. Kauffman, S. 2000. Investigations. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Schrödinger, E. 2946. What is Life? Macmillan, NYC. Susskind, L. 2006. The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. Little, Brown and Company, NYC. Weinberg, S. 1992. Dreams of a Final Theory. Vintage Books, NYC.

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