Israel remains by far the most powerful military state in the Middle East. It has somewhere between 200 and 500 nuclear weapons and an estimated 50 Jericho-II long-range missiles capable of carrying them across the Middle East (or into the heart of Western Europe, for that matter). It is acquiring new weapons all the time, most recently two more nuclear-armed Dolphin submarines (bringing its total to five) and ninety F16I fighter aircraft capable of reaching Iran without needing to be refuelled in mid-air. Its surveillance and early warning network includes its own Ofek-3 military satellite and data provided from the US satellite network. Its Arrow anti-ballistic missile system is the most advanced in the world. By contrast, Iran has a small number of short- and medium-range missiles (actual range and capacity to reach Israel uncertain) and an obsolete air force. While it is developing nuclear energy it does not have nuclear weapons, and neither is there any evidence that it is developing them.

The Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Dr Mohamed el Baradei, has been under sustained pressure from the United States, exercised directly and through the UN Security Council, and has criticised Iran for failing to implement transparency measures connected with the ‘one remaining major issue, namely clarification of the cluster of allegations and Secretariat questions relevant to possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programs’. The allegations have been made largely on the basis of ‘documents’ stored in a laptop computer obtained by the CIA from the Iranian opposition group Mujahidin-i Khalq (MEK). The veracity of any documents coming from such a source is obviously questionable: there is a clear parallel between these ‘documents’ and the ‘intelligence’ provided by the Iraqi National Congress purporting to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Iran claims the ‘documents’ are forgeries and is being asked to prove that they are without being allowed to see them. According to Dr Baradei, ‘the agency received much of the information concerning the alleged studies only in electronic form and it was unfortunately not authorised to provide copies to Iran’.

However, the IAEA head has concluded time and time again that there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. In the report he presented to the IAEA Board of Governors on 2 June this year, he noted that ‘the agency has been able to continue to verify the nondiversion of declared nuclear material in Iran’. In the context of the allegations made by the United States, he emphasised that ‘the agency currently has no information — apart from the uranium metal document — on the actual design or manufacture by Iran of nuclear material components or of other key components of a nuclear weapon. Likewise, the agency has not seen indications of the actual use of nuclear material in connection with the alleged studies’. The ‘uranium metal document’ was passed on to Iran in a bundle of documents on centrifuges made available by the Pakistan nuclear scientist Dr A. Q. Khan. According to the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter:

Far from being a ‘top secret’ document protected by Iran’s security services it was discarded in a file of old material that Iran provided to the IAEA inspectors. When the IAEA found the document Iran allowed it to be fully examined by the inspectors and answered every question posed by the IAEA about how the document came to be in Iran.

In a report issued in November 2007, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), representing all US intelligence bodies, asserted that Iran had a nuclear weapons program until late 2003. This itself is questionable, but what is relevant to the current situation is the NIC’s main conclusions: ‘we assert with moderate confidence [that] Tehran has not restarted its nuclear program as of mid- 2007’ and ‘we continue to assert with moderate to high confidence that Iran currently does not have a nuclear weapon’. Furthermore, even if Iran did want to produce a weapon, ‘we judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015’. This compares to the claim by Israel that Iran would be capable of producing a nuclear weapon some time in 2009.

None of these very salient facts and findings have made any difference to the campaign being directed against Iran by the United States and Israel. Unilaterally and through the UN Security Council, the United States is threatening Iran with even more punitive economic sanctions and possibly the use of force (‘all options remain on the table’) unless it abandons its uranium enrichment program in return for political and economic ‘incentives’. Against this background, some more salient points need to be emphasised:

1. The current crisis was initiated by the United States and Israel. They began threatening Iran with military attack in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. Iran has warned in response that if it is attacked it will strike back, in accordance, of course, with its right under international law to defend itself.

2. The demand that Iran abandon its uranium enrichment program has no basis in any treaty, convention or law. The IAEA is striving to establish a regime for the multilateral supervision of uranium enrichment but has not yet been able to put it together. All countries with a nuclear development program remain free to enrich their own uranium.

3. Iran’s nuclear program dates back to 1957. It acquired its first reactor (from the United States) in 1967 and signed up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. It allows IAEA inspections of all its nuclear facilities. Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, ignoring nineteen resolutions passed by the IAEA or the UN General Assembly since 1987 calling on it to put its nuclear installations under IAEA supervision. All Arab states have signed up to the NPT and have shown their readiness on numerous occasions to turn the Middle East into a nuclear free zone. Israel has not responded positively to any of these initiatives. It has reportedly threatened to use nuclear weapons at least once (in the first week of the October War in 1973, when Israeli positions in the occupied Sinai were overwhelmed by Egyptian forces). It has launched at least one military attack on a nuclear installation (Iraq’s Osirak reactor, destroyed in 1981. In September 2007 Israeli aircraft bombed a site in northern Syria which Israel claims was a nuclear ‘facility’. This was denied by Syria. The IAEA inspected the site in June this year but has not yet issued a report on what might have been there).

4. Whatever criticism might be made of its abuses of the human rights of its own people, Iran has no record of external aggression to justify the accusation that it is a standing menace to regional and possibly world order. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 it has attacked no other country. It does not occupy the land of any other state or people. Israel, by contrast, has invaded Lebanon twice (1982 and 2006), occupying the southern part of the country from 1978 until driven out by Hizbullah in 2000. It has ignored all UN resolutions demanding that it withdraw from the occupied Golan Heights and the Palestinian territories seized in 1967. Its policies in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank (that part of it not swept up into ‘greater Jerusalem’) have been characterised by numerous international human rights organisations as racist and inhumane. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in its attacks on Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank since the 1967 War.

The military preparations for an attack on Iran have been completed, but serious divisions within the US administration, and opposition from senior military commanders, have increasingly thrown the focus on to what Israel will do. Writing in The New York Times on 18 July, the Israeli historian Benny Morris asserted that Israel ‘will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months’. If the attack fails ‘an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable’, turning Iran into a ‘nuclear wasteland’. The idea is apocalyptic madness, but the view that Iran must be forced to abandon nuclear development whatever the cost is being expressed virtually every other day by senior figures in the Israeli military, intelligence and political establishment.

While Israel naturally wants to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, it is clear that hysteria over Iran’s nuclear development is being deliberately whipped up to justify an attack which both the United States and Israel want anyway. Through economic sanctions and clandestine surveillance and sabotage operations, it might even be said that the United States is already at war with Iran. It declared a trade embargo in 1979 and has tightened sanctions several times in recent years, orchestrating its actions through the UN Security Council. The EU has been fully supportive. A particular target has been Iran’s national bank (Bank Melli), which withdrew US$75 billion in deposits from European financial institutions just ahead of a freeze on Iranian assets ordered by European governments. Undoubtedly Iran has been damaged by the sanctions, but to a degree the withdrawal of European companies from Iran under US threats has simply opened up opportunities for Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and Arab investors. Since 2005 the volume of China’s trade with Iran is estimated to have nearly doubled (from US$10 billion to $18.5 billion).

In an attempt to tighten the screws even further, a resolution was introduced into the US House of Representatives in May calling on the President not just to tighten financial and commercial sanctions but to impose ‘stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains and cargo entering or departing Iran [and] prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program’. The resolution has not yet been put to the vote but clearly such a blockade would be no less than an overt act of war.

US policies towards Iran in terms of the ‘national interest’ would seem to be both contradictory and counterproductive. Through sanctions, the United States has cut itself off from the rich prizes of Iran’s privatisation program, which now allows 100 per cent foreign ownership of Iranian corporations (including those presently owned by the state) and the transfer out of the country of all profits. Indeed, just as one motive for the invasion of Iraq might have been to short-circuit the redevelopment of the oil industry by Chinese, Algerian, French and Russian concerns, so it might be said that sanctions against Iran are not so much connected with nuclear development as intended to cut off the flow of Iranian state assets into other hands until the achievement of ‘regime change’ opens them up to the United States. While seeking broad support for sanctions, the United States has aroused the deep suspicion of both Russia and China by its aggressive policies in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Central Europe. Military bases, oil resources and existing or projected pipelines are the dots that need to be connected in the matrix of US interests across this vast region. Russia and China are going along with the demands being made of Iran for the time being, but behind the facade of concerted UN Security Council action they both maintain a strong relationship with the Iranian government. They have no reason to weaken it for the sake of the United States and Israel.

Israel’s determination to block Iran is more likely to arise from its central place in the strategic alliance with Syria and Hizbullah than from its nuclear development. In the past decade Hizbullah has inflicted a string of defeats on Israel and the United States; firstly, by forcing Israel out of occupied southern Lebanon in 2000; secondly, by forcing Israel to call off its attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006; thirdly, by successful diplomacy inside Lebanon which has ended in the formation of a government declaring in a cabinet communique ‘the right of Lebanon’s people, the army and the resistance to liberate all its territories in the Sheba’a farms, Kfar Shuba Hill and Ghajar [a town on the armistice line]’; fourthly, by compelling Israel to negotiate to secure the return of the remains of captured Israeli soldiers. The reported installation of missiles in the Lebanese mountains now gives Hizbullah the capacity to shoot down Israeli aircraft violating Lebanese air space. The organisation already has anti-ship missiles which could be used against the Israeli warships inside Lebanon’s territorial waters in the event of another crisis.

While planning for the next war with Hizbullah, Israel has simultaneously sought to isolate Syria and engage with it through Turkish mediation. The prize dangled before Bashar al Assad is the possibility that Israel might be willing to return the Golan Heights. Neither approach seems to have worked. President Assad was warmly received on his recent visit to Paris and signalled through a visit to Tehran not long afterwards that he has no intention of abandoning the strategic alliance with Iran and Hizbullah for the sake of negotiations with a collapsing Israeli government. Whether the corrupt Olmert actually had the power to hand back the Golan, whether any of his successors would even be willing to relinquish it, are other questions.

The central arch of what Israel regards as a multilayered threat to its existence is Iran. The fact that there is no evidence showing Iran is moving in the direction of nuclear weapons development has been smothered in the flow of war propaganda. By asserting that Iran’s nuclear program is a ‘danger to peace’ (Angela Merkel), that ‘I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon’ (Barack Obama), that Iran must ‘suspend its nuclear program and accept our offer of negotiations or face growing isolation and the collective response not of one nation but many nations’ (Gordon Brown), that ‘an Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable to my country’ (Nicolas Sarkozy), numerous heads of governments and contenders for high office are playing into the hands of those calling for war. So does Condoleezza Rice’s remark that ‘we don’t say yes or no to Israeli military operations’. Given the influence the United States could wield to prevent an Israeli attack, her statement is tantamount to yet another green light being flashed in Israel’s direction.

Numerous other signals are pointing in the direction of an attack some time before George Bush leaves office in January, unless Iran accepts the package of ‘incentives’ being offered in return for the abandonment of its uranium enrichment program. But so far it has made it plain it will not back down. There is almost no talk in the media of civilian casualties or the contamination of the environment arising from a military attack on a nuclear installation. It is surreal that we should even have to think about such a nightmare, but the nightmare is the reality the world is now facing.

Jeremy Salt teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Bilkent, Ankara.

It was May, and Barack Obama had come to Portland to speak ahead of the Oregon primary. The campaign, unprecedented in American political history, had been effectively over for weeks, Hillary Clinton’s last chance destroyed by a disappointing result in Indiana. Her insistence on staying in the campaign had given the contest a near unbearable intensity, a sense of expectation, above and beyond the intrinsic fascination of Barack Obama himself. Though Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s policies 2were essentially identical — a minimal social market welfare program combined with a liberal national security state — the contest had split the Democratic voters of the country, less between black and white or male and female than between old liberals and new ‘progressives’, between those who saw the task at hand as selecting a dependable candidate to go toe to toe with the Republican candidate against those who believed that loftier ideas and a fresh approach were worth fighting for. Southern whites and industrial states tended to prefer Hillary; Democrats from the new industries, from the inner cities and the exurbs tended to prefer Obama.

Portland, a one-time logging and fishing town that had become, according to one commentator, ‘the capital of alternative America’ was, despite its small black population, Obama central. Come November, they would have turned out for a brown-billed duck had the Democrats selected one, and they would even have turned out for Hillary, despite the dispiriting prospect of a Democratic dynasty replacing a Republican one. But Obama’s candidacy meant for the first time in a generation there wassomeone that left-liberals could get unambiguously, unrestrainedly excited about. Even George McGovern, the 1972 anti-war candidate, had been, after all, a standard issue white guy Senator from South Dakota. Bill Clinton, the first baby-boomer candidate, transformed the electoral campaigningby playing sax on a late night TV show and was a mesmerising speaker to small groups, but he was tarnished long before the third party candidacy of Ross Perot lifted him to the White House.

In Obama people had something else — a man whose candidacy seemed historic not merely by virtue of his identity but by his unique oratorical and personal style, a mix of civil rights agitation, Southern Baptist oratory and community organising motivational speaking that floated free of any concrete political narrative, whether of nation or class. Short on actual policy, it irritated the professional political class as much as it inspired those who heard it, the poor or well-off, the well-connected and the marginalised. Speaking of bringing America together, of transcending narrow political games, his stump speech always led up to the same climax: ‘We are the people we have beenwaiting for, and our time is now’. Hearing it live it was impossible not to be moved, to be stirred within.

Though the primary campaign would stagger on for weeks more, until Hillary’s campaign expired in a whimper after Puerto Rico (a primary for an island whose people cannot vote), that speech in Portland was essentially its culmination. By July, with the nomination secured, Obama was widely criticised for moving towards the centre. The criticism was inexact — politically he had always been of the centre. What he had done was move from heaven to earth, supporting a federal wiretapping bill, advocating the death penalty for child rapists, supporting a Supreme Court pro-gun decision, and in general doing anything to prevent himself from being outflanked on the Right and characterised as a weak liberal. The move didn’t affect his positive poll ratings, where he outpolled Republican candidate John McCain by5–6 per cent. But for many of Obama’s supporters, the switch was like the air being let out of a balloon. Fundraising dropped, and many openly expressed their disappointment in blogs, even on the candidate’s website. The Obama campaign, always slick, appeared to many now to be little but that. When the Obama family appeared for an interview that included Barack and Michelle Obama’s two girls under ten, viewers were simultaneously captivated and disarmed, even though Obama’s excuse, ‘it was a spur of the moment thing’, manifestly failed to fit the circumstances — the interview crew were flown out to Montana to film it — or the medium, the cable channel Access Hollywood.

Nothing that Obama did was out of the ordinary for an ambitious politician reaching out from his Democratic base to a broader America, yet the sense that this betrayal, this disappointment, was deeper than all the rest was palpable. Such disappointments adumbrated the gap in American political and social life that Obama’s candidacy, his person and his vision, had filled, however briefly, and explained, in its negation something about the predicament of contemporary American life.

* * *

When the primary season began in January, around 70 percent of Americans felt the country was ‘going in the wrong direction’, and around 25 per cent approved of theleadership of George W. Bush. Through the spring and into the summer, as gas prices soared, food prices rose, and the sub-prime mortgage crisis begin to close down whole neighbourhoods, the ‘wrong direction’ figure rose to around 85 per cent. When gas hit $4 a gallon, and as the unmistakeable signs of a recession became visible, the changed conditions began to bite into American daily life. Jobs began to reverse month on month and key early indicators of tightened circumstances — a plummet in restaurant takings, for example, and a rise in fast food sales — manifested in sudden price wars between the major chains, which saw $2 hamburgers slashed to $1 or less, a measure of the slender margins by which many Americans were living. The bailout of Bear Stearns and other Wall Street banks, followed by the larger bailout of the general mortgage provider companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, coincided with a crisis point for many people — the inability to afford the gas necessary to commute to work or the shops in the vastly spread out, poorly serviced outer-suburbs and exurbs that had sprung up around American cities in the last twenty years. Though the candidates of both parties go out of their way to present policies that are ‘tax-neutral’ or tax-cutting for anyone earning less than a$250,000 a year, more than 50 per cent of American households earn less than $50,000 a year, and 20 per cent less than $25,000. For a full half of the population, life is a continuous vigilance against sudden costs — medical not covered by insurance, car repair — that might suddenly blow a hole in a tight budget, catapulting them into unresolvable debt. For that last quarter, life has simply been a round of trade-offs — food for gas, gas for heating, hearing for medicine, medicine for food, and round it goes again. The true impact of the recession was that it was squashing that second quartile into the first — real poverty was reaching right up into the middle class.

Yet Americans have been through recessions before. More than modern Western Europeans or Australians, theyare used to a reversal of economic circumstance impacting on everyday life. But this current episode is different —there is a wider sense of anxiety about, a dominant mood In Obama people had something else — a man whose candidacy seemed historic not merely by virtue of his identity but by his unique oratorical and personal style, a mix of civil rights agitation, Southern Baptist oratory and community organising motivational speaking that floated free of any concrete political narrative, whether of nation or class. of bewilderment. The recession feels to many both particular and general — oil prices, which may be the result of speculative gouging, are also the expression and reminder that cheap gas, and the world built upon it, is coming to an end. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite recent lower levels of violence in the former, seem pointless and purposeless, a symbol of a lack of American will and clear direction. The relentless tide of illegal immigrants across the porous Mexican–US border could betaken as a tribute to American primacy, but instead feels like the multitudinous third world pressing up against the borders. The immense control apparatus established by the Bush administration and centred on the Department of Homeland Security continues to extend its power, recently musing on the possibility of having all American airline passengers wear an electronic bracelet that cabin staffcould switch on to disable the wearer. And as the Olympics approach, everyone is talking about China and its phenomenal growth rate. The country may be the largesteconomy and most powerful military in the world, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way on the ground.

But nor are such macro conditions, relayed through the media, the sole or even principal determinant of how apeople feels about itself. Though commentators such as Fareed Zakharia in his recent book The Post-American World focus at length on the effects of mass realisation that history is beginning to tilt in another direction and favour other players, he typically overestimates the effect that things of moment to a global affairs commentator will have on people whose lives are more bounded by local life and conditions. Here is where one finds a deeper, and in the US media, substantially unexamined transformation of daily life over the last two decades. Even as late as the 1980s, the United States was substantially an industrial and manufacturing economy, with life based around the suburbs recognisably attached to large cities, or to mid-size towns. Over the 1990s and into the current decade, a combination of global economic change, weakened labour unions and loosened zoning laws would see changes in all these features that would add to a definite yet under-reflected upon change in the way of life. As high-paid full-time industrial jobs gave way to casualised, short-timed and split-shifted labour; as core productive jobs were increasingly replaced by service jobs; as malls began to wholly replace high streets, and mega chain-stores began to replace independent concerns; as both cities and towns began to sprawl out of any recognisable central form, social life, built around a way of life grounded and bounded in space and time, began to attenuate. A host of works such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, or James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowherehave explored this, but the very idea of it barely breaks through into the spheres of media which have become, in part due to that very transformation, principle arenas of interchange.

Other societies have gone through this, of course, but few have been committed so thoroughly to the process of uprooting the previous conditions of life. The protection of trade unions, social security or urban planning extended elsewhere have been absent from the American transformation, and the absence of each has exacerbated the other. As workplaces have diminished in importance, so have local trade unions and sources of an alternative view of the idea that workplace flexibility brings free choice. As downtowns, high streets and town centres have ceased to be centres of social life, the memory of their meaning starts to be lost. As jobs disappeared in the 1990s, a massive effort to portray welfare as enslaving was launched, as was the revival of a notion of puritan persistence and faith in providence replaced the by idea of a state with obligations to its citizens.

The result of this social vacuum was that new sources, not merely of information but of meaning and value formation, moved into the centre of life. By their very nature, the mass unidirectional media — the cable news channels, the major networks, talk radio — succeed by purveying a concrete vision of life that is at odds with the decontextualised form by which they reach out to an entire nation. For FOX news channel or Rush Limbaugh’s radio show this was ‘American values’ standing up against the political correctness of liberalism and multiculturalism. What did it matter that the town centre had been destroyed, when the spirit of the small town subsisted on the thousands of stations of the Clear Channel network? What did the absence of a local context matter when the values of neighbourliness and plain common sense persisted on ‘The O’Reilly Factor’?

This basic switch dominated much of the politics of the 1990s, helped to a degree by the particular political form of American left-liberalism which, lacking a strong Marxist base, was ill-equipped to deal with issues affecting people on a class, as opposed to gender or race basis. Though Bill Clinton had begun with some left-liberal instincts, he was keenly aware that his victory had been based on the votes that Ross Perot, running on a right populist platform, had taken from George H. W. Bush. After the 1994 recapture of Congress by an assertively right-wing Republican Party, Clinton swiftly moved to the Right. Essentially the period from 1994 to now has been dominated by this process of simultaneous dismantling of American community and its ideal reconstitution in the more abstract spheres of the media.

The media was not the only place where a distilled and distinct form of community could be found. The other wasin religion, and fundamentalist Christianity in particular, which underwent a substantial expansion in the 1990s.Though it had been a growing political force since the 1973Supreme Court Roe vs Wade decision established abortion as a right, its boundaries had hitherto been fairly solid —confined to the communities, southern and western, in which it had originally developed as a form of Baptism. By the 1990s, and especially into the 2000s, both church attendance and the belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible had skyrocketed. Politically, the effect was felt as are lentless series of direct voter propositions added to ballots in an attempt to skirt the letter of Roe vs Wade, takeovers of school boards in an attempt to put creationist/intelligent design ideas on the syllabus, and the simultaneous construction of a nationwide home schooling network. Though some have suggested the numbers are exaggerated, by 2004 it appeared that a clear majority of Americans had major doubts about evolution and scientific proof, and a significant minority are ‘young earth creationists’, believing the planet to be no more than 10,000 years old. Though the degree to which evolution had ever been accepted by many Americans from the South is not clear, the figures represented a clear decline from the 1960s.Yet the new wave of religious literalism was occurring not despite an increasingly scientific society but because of it. A willingness to believe in the most directly contrary and literal story became a mark of faith and commitment, a source of identity and meaning. The United States was undergoing one of the greatest passages into irrationalism of any modern society in history.

Churches, especially the burgeoning megachurches, became the concentrated social correlate of the cable media. As the globally focused CNN lost ground to the ranting, populist FOX News, a certain new formation within the culture fell into place. For an increasingly decentred society, it offered a concrete grounding that offered to withstand any transformation of the actual way of life. Furthermore, it offered to stand as a rock in the midst of further attenuation of stable frameworks, so that the process could continue. The megachurches themselves often found themselves in cheap real estate areas in the exurbs, close to the strips of fast food outlets. Their vast size makes them unsuitable for small congregations as it reverses the effect, overawing the living congregation with empty space; thus last year, before Christmas, a day when people don’t want to drive long distances, some churches quietly announced that they would not be holding a Christmas Day service, and that people should instead pray at home. It is difficult to imagine a more explicit clue about the form of one’s worship. In offering a form of belief, they privilege the ecstatic over the abiding, the experiential and visceral over the mundane. A literal and simplified creed is essential to such an operation.

But not everyone is culturally or personally suited to the literalist message of religion and or tradition. For many people, the hole in American life that had begun growing in the late 1980s became a gaping one in the 1990s. And it is to many in that predicament that Barack Obama speaks. His mix of oratory and liberal reasonableness confused commentators and blindsided his opponents because they had never seen a form of liberal spirituality before. Obama is spoken of as a new JFK; in fact he is more like a new FDR, speaking of having nothing to fear but fear itself. ForAmerican politics, the religious types did the prophetic oratory; liberals talked in a secular language of rationalism.

This brilliant stroke on Obama’s part would appear to be part of one of the most knowing and calculated political strategies of recent decades. It is part and parcel of who Barack Obama is and where he came from. Born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and an American mother, both liberated from more limited roles by the 1960s, he grew up in Indonesia with a stepfather, and then returned to Hawaii before studying in California and New York. As he notes in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, that globalised, hybrid Gen X existence was difficult to deal with during his adolescence, and a sense of being in the world was further problematised by a couple of years at Occidental College, California, where the various strands of the ’60s and ’70s — black liberation, new left Marxism, Fanon, post-structuralism — were part of the mix. At Columbia Obama by all accounts spent a year reading Nietzsche, the Bible and the existentialists, among other authors, and in Chicago he came into contact with the organization founded by Saul Alinsky, the grand old man of community organising. Unlike many black politicians, Obama’s organising work wasn’t exclusively focused on black communities — a lot of it was focused on mixed communities ravaged by the collapse of the Chicago steel industry. There he applied Alinsky’s theory that people will only begin to take some control of the process of changing their lives when the system has so failed to honour its obligations to them that an anomie or despair has set in. At that point, said Alinsky, you can reach them.

Alinsky’s approach appears to have filled out in Obama the questions of identity he had pursued throughout his life — pursued because his complicated background had given him no choice but to. For Obama, what had become of paramount importance was the question of the will, of the purposive self. Where did it come from? Could it be lost? Could it be regained? If meaning and purpose were not supplied by a given background, how could they be found? In other words, Obama speaks to the American people so successfully because he is effectively using the dilemmas of his own life as the framework with which to deal with the country — he is effectively treating the Presidential campaign as a nationwide community organising project. What he understood — that Hillary could not and John McCain does not appear to — is that talking in terms of either Clinton’s prosaic ‘solutions for America’ or McCain’s boilerplate triumphalism does not acknowledge the degree of despair, defeat and failure of will among many Americans. These are the people, long since given up on any sense that they belong to the system in any way, that Obama is hoping to draw back in, and deliver him a victory that will turn a half-dozenRepublican ‘Red’ states into Democrat ‘Blue’, thus reshaping American politics and setting the Democrats upto be the ‘American’ party for two decades.

Whether this would make any substantial difference remains to be seen. Obama’s gearshift into a moreconventional politics reminded people of what they should have already known — that he is innovating tactically within a standard political framework. What is of interest is what the success of his strategy tells us about America today, and why a young, mildly leftish black man leading acrowd down to the water in Oregon should be so freighted with significance.

Guy Rundle is an Arena Publications editor.

Just as the reporters in our daily press can’t get their heads around Germaine Greer’s argument that the collapse of culture means the bleakest kind of personal and social devastation, so morally serious discussion of any issue is extremely hard to find in Australian public discourse. John Martin ponders this great lack in the Australian psyche in the first essay in this issue of Arena Magazine in relation to Aboriginal connection to country. The national unwillingness to enter into other worlds, to feel and see them from the inside, has particularly Australian determinants. But history and geography grant us leave of our better senses. Martin says that Australians have no taste for tragedy, which is a shocking indictment.

In fact we settle for received views of the world and accept inferior status, notwithstanding our occasional anti- Americanism and on-tap nationalism. But as an outpost of what Empire exactly are we the wide-eyed underling?

Empires everywhere, it seems, are on the move again. It may not be wise to disavow for much longer knowledge of how that big old world works. Georgia and Iran may be much closer than we think. And it’s probably not a good idea to make slant-eye jokes about our northern neighbour. This is not to even raise the morally serious questions of the fate of peoples beyond our ken, how they perceive the world, or against what claims or threats they pose their own, but merely to suggest that it may also be in our interest to ask such questions.

Of course there is a complication here. There are questions to ask of and about empires other than the one we find ourselves in, as well as such questions about the peoples hidden from view within them (the Chinese, on the one hand, and the colonised peoples of Tibet and Uighur, on the other). Empire by its nature hides difference from the outside world, even if it doesn’t always kill it. In fact some empires have been known to let flourish a great variety of cultures, even for long periods of time, and this has to remain a possible intermediate goal in some situations given geopolitical realpolitik, where the stakes can be very high indeed in ethnic/cultural and humanitarian terms.

A central problem in all this is that the modern colonising attitude, inextricably guided by hubristic notions of progress and supremacist nationalism, underwrites the fate of minorities as primitive peoples who must be advanced. This is the same problem whether you are a supremacist American (Australian), Chinese or Russian. Despite our cultural differences, we all have in common a modernity of assumptions, and it is these, first and foremost, that are dangerous and need first and foremost to be challenged.

Superpower, or imperial, power plays come a close second in terms of danger, and actually come first if we expand our concerns away from oppressed minorities to the flow-on effects for entire regions and globally. Strategic destabilisation has long been an American art form, and it is clear in the cases of both Tibet and Georgia that American hands are not clean. Unless of course, you simply believe in the liberal democratic mission of the United States to bring democracy into dark places; and you have the kind of mind that does not baulk at the colossal dissonance of arguments for sovereignty in some places (Georgia — Bush denounces Russian denial of Georgian sovereignty) and not in others (Iraq — sovereignty is relative).

There is no doubt that Russian Empire is on the move. Who can doubt its own historical inclination to empire, and to brutal repression under Putin (think of Grozny); but who, too, could doubt that American meddling in Georgia and elsewhere within the old Soviet sphere of influence has not pushed Russia into action, as premeditated as it seems likely to have been. With Georgia launching its offensive against South Ossetia while Putin was in Beijing, and a visit by Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi only days before fighting began, we have to understand that not only friendship between ‘like democracies’ has been a factor in US aid to Tbilisi, but that a set of more broad-ranging plans are also in action. Interestingly, the intervention, and Russian counter, has had fabulous consequences for American influence in Poland and Slovakia, with Poland finally signing up — days after the Russian retort — to have US ‘missile defences’, which is to say forward missile launching pads, erected on its soil. Ostensibly for the protection of Europe against Iranian missiles, the Polish government has now made it conditional that the missiles face Russia — which is what the Russians of course believed their primary purpose to be all along.

Humiliation at the hands of the West is, interestingly, cited as motive for both Chinese and Russian muscle-flexing in the present period. Historical precedents suggest the dangers of national humiliation for international affairs (and minority peoples), but the circumstances today are hardly comparable with anything in the past. How ordinary Chinese people interviewed for Olympics coverage stated again and again that this was China’s chance to overcome a hundred years of humiliation suggests a successful campaign to heighten grossly nationalistic (not patriotic) feeling. There is a population there willing to die for its (media-generated?) imagined community. In the Russian context, the same refrain seems a slim cover for its more immediate need to bolster its borders against an encircling NATO (now with missiles facing Moscow) and to ensure control of the carriage of energy resources, the basis of Russia’s growing hold over Europe and desire to keep links to the Middle East open. (Consult a map to see just how close these protagonists are to vital oil, gas and shipping routes, and the Middle East generally.)

As the empires face off, the primary concern is energy: for access to it for production and more generally ‘growth’; for the power and dollars associated with its sale and transmission; for the commodities to which it is dedicated. Russia is resource rich, and may be even more so as the polar ice thaws; China is a powerhouse of production for an envious world’s insatiable consumption without adequate power sources of its own; American empire is increasingly desperate, a shadow of its former self, but nevertheless with plenty to lose and everything to gain in securing oil through the tutelage of client states, whose people believe they will receive democracy in return for the dangerous game of aligning themselves with Western freedom. It is hard to imagine a more ominous conjunction of competing pretensions and imperatives.

It is not long into the fabled ‘American century’ and it is already collapsing. Guy Rundle argues in this issue of Arena Magazine that American culture has been emptied out into ersatz forms of media-driven community. John Hinkson charts a second stage in America’s sub-prime crisis in the context of the US scramble to secure its economic future. As economic and geopolitical pressures build, the question of what this dangerous situation might all be for hardly emerges. For the American way, some have said, for the moral compass provided by free-acting markets and their agents; but in fact the strongest element in this depressing scenario is a common interest shared by these competing empires.

Which Empire? There are three superstates with (neo-) colonial pretensions, emerging or receding, on the world scene; but in a more general sense, Empire refers to a government of feeling; an exercise of power over actions and desire. Through repression or seduction these superpowers are intent on producing or maintaining a way of life built on unsustainable economic and environmental assumptions, and on universalising cultural mores associated with the spread of a contagious form of hightech capitalism. None of the elements add up, unless, perhaps, you are master of the ultimate chess game. For ordinary people the struggle and strategy will have to take a different form, and surely a rejection of the basic assumptions that give Empire, in the broader sense, legitimacy: a rejection of our collective kowtowing to a mysterious power that explodes the particulars of community and denies more subterranean channels of cultural identity and social meaning.

Alison Caddick