Since World War II, no state has suffered so cruel a reversal of fortunes as Israel. Admired all the way into the 1970s as the state of "those plucky Jews" who survived against all odds and made democracy and the desert bloom in a climate hostile to both liberty and greenery, Israel has become the target of creeping delegitimization. The denigration comes in two guises. The first, the soft version, blames Israel first and most for whatever ails the Middle East, and for having corrupted U.S. foreign policy. It is the standard fare of editorials around the world, not to mention the sheer venom oozing from the pages of the Arab-Islamic press. The more recent hard version zeroes in on Israel's very existence. According to this dispensation, it is Israel as such, and not its behavior, that lies at the root of troubles in the Middle East. Hence the "statocidal" conclusion that Israel's birth, midwifed by both the United States and the Soviet Union in 1948, was a grievous mistake, grandiose and worthy as it may have been bat the time.

The soft version is familiar enough. One motif is the "wagging the dog" theory. Thus, in the United States, the "Jewish lobby" and a cabal of neoconservatives have bamboozled the Bush administration into a mindless pro-Israel policy inimical to the national interest. This view attributes, as has happened so often in history, too much clout to the Jews. And behind this charge lurks a more general one-that it is somehow antidemocratic for subnational groups to throw themselves into the hurly-burly of politics when it comes to foreign policy. But let us count the ways in which subnational entities battle over the national interest: unions and corporations clamor for tariffs and tax loopholes; nongovernmental organizations agitate for humanitarian intervention; and Cuban Americans keep us from smoking cheroots from the Vuelta Abajo. In previous years, Poles militated in favor of Solidarity, African Americans against Apartheid South Africa, and Latvians against the Soviet Union. In other words, the democratic melee has never stopped at the water's edge.

Another soft version is the "root-cause" theory in its many variations.

Because the "obstinate" and "recalcitrant" Israelis are the main culprits, they must be punished and pushed back for the sake of peace. "Put pressure on Israel"; "cut economic and military aid"; "serve them notice that we will not condone their brutalities"-these have been the boilerplate homilies, indeed the obsessions, of the chattering classes and the foreign-office establishment for decades. Yet, as Sigmund Freud reminded us, obsessions tend to spread. And so there are ever more creative addenda to the well-wrought root-cause theory. Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argues that what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians is a "tremendous obstacle to democratization because it inflames all the worst, most regressive aspects of Arab nationalism and Arab culture." In other words, the conflict drives the pathology, and not the other way around-which is like the streetfighter explaining to the police: "It all started when this guy hit back."

The problem with this root cause argument is threefold: It blurs, if not reverses, cause and effect. It ignores a myriad of conflicts unrelated to Israel. And it absolves the Arabs of culpability, shifting the blame to you know whom. If one believes former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the Arab-Islamic quest for weapons of mass destruction, and by extension the war against Iraq, are also Made in Israel. "[A]s long as Israel has nuclear weapons," Ritter opines, "it has chosen to take a path that is inherently confrontational....Now the Arab countries, the Muslim world, is not about to sit back and let this happen, so they will seek their own deterrent. We saw this in Iraq, not only with a nuclear deterrent but also with a biological weapons deterrent...that the Iraqis were developing to offset the Israeli nuclear superiority."

This theory would be engaging if it did not collide with some inconvenient facts. Iraqis didn't use their weapons of mass destruction against the Israeli usurper but against fellow Muslims during the Iran-Iraq War, and against fellow Iraqis in the poison-gas attack against Kurds in Halabja in 1988-neither of whom were brandishing any nuclear weapons. As for the Iraqi nuclear program, we now have the "Duelfer Report," based on the debriefing of Iraqi regime loyalists, which concluded: "Iran was the preeminent motivator of this policy. All senior-level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq's principal enemy in the region. The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary."

Now to the hard version. Ever so subtly, a more baleful tone slips into this narrative: Israel is not merely an unruly neighbor but an unwelcome intruder. Still timidly uttered outside the Arab world, this version's proponents in the West bestride the stage as truth sayers who dare to defy taboo. Thus, the British writer A.N. Wilson declares that he has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Israel, through its own actions, has proven it does not have the right to exist. And, following Sept. 11, 2001, Brazilian scholar Jose Arthur Giannotti said: "Let us agree that the history of the Middle East would be entirely different without the State of Israel, which opened a wound between Islam and the West. Can you get rid of Muslim terrorism without getting rid of this wound which is the source of the frustration of potential terrorists?"

The very idea of a Jewish state is an "anachronism," argues Tony Judt, a professor and director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. It resembles a "late-nineteenth-century separatist project" that has "no place" in this wondrous new world moving toward the teleological perfection of multiethnic and multicultural togetherness bound together by international law. The time has come to "think the unthinkable," hence, to ditch this Jewish state for a binational one, guaranteed, of course, by international force.

So let us assume that Israel is an anachronism and a historical mistake without which the Arab-Islamic world stretching from Algeria to Egypt, from Syria to Pakistan, would be a far happier place, above all because the original sin, the establishment of Israel, never would have been committed. Then let's move from the past to the present, pretending that we could wave a mighty magic wand, and "poof," Israel disappears from the map.

Civilization of Clashes

Let us start the what-if procession in 1948, when Israel was born in war.

Would stillbirth have nipped the Palestinian problem in the bud? Not quite. Egypt, Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon marched on Haifa and Tel Aviv not to liberate Palestine, but to grab it. The invasion was a textbook competitive power play by neighboring states intent on acquiring territory for themselves. If they had been victorious, a Palestinian state would not have emerged, and there still would have been plenty of refugees. (Recall that half the population of Kuwait fled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's "liberation" of that country in 1990.) Indeed, assuming that Palestinian nationalism had awakened when it did in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Palestinians might now be dispatching suicide bombers to Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere.

Let us imagine Israel had disappeared in 1967, instead of occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which were held, respectively, by Jordan's King Hussein and Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Would they have relinquished their possessions to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and thrown in Haifa and Tel Aviv for good measure? Not likely. The two potentates, enemies in all but name, were united only by their common hatred and fear of Arafat, the founder of Fatah (the Palestine National Liberation Movement) and rightly suspected of plotting against Arab regimes. In short, the "root cause" of Palestinian statelessness would have persisted, even in Israel's absence.

Let us finally assume, through a thought experiment, that Israel goes "poof" today. How would this development affect the political pathologies of the Middle East? Only those who think the Palestinian issue is at the core of the Middle East conflict would lightly predict a happy career for this most dysfunctional region once Israel vanishes. For there is no such thing as "the" conflict. A quick count reveals five ways in which the region's fortunes would remain stunted-or worse:

States vs. States Israel's elimination from the regional balance would hardly bolster intra-Arab amity. The retraction of the colonial powers, Britain and France, in the mid-20th century left behind a bunch of young Arab states seeking to redraw the map of the region. From the very beginning, Syria laid claim to Lebanon. In 1970, only the Israeli military deterred Damascus from invading Jordan under the pretext of supporting a Palestinian uprising. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Nasser's Egypt proclaimed itself the avatar of pan-Arabism, intervening in Yemen during the 1960s. Nasser's successor, President Anwar Sadat, was embroiled in on-and-off clashes with Libya throughout the late 1970s. Syria marched into Lebanon in 1976 and then effectively annexed the country 15 years later, and Iraq launched two wars against fellow Muslim states: Iran in 1980, Kuwait in 1990. The war against Iran was the longest conventional war of the 20th century. None of these conflicts is related to the Israeli-Palestinian one. Indeed, Israel's disappearance would only liberate military assets for use in such internal rivalries.

Believers vs. Believers: Those who think that the Middle East conflict is a "Muslim-Jewish thing" had better take a closer look at the score card: 14 years of sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon; Saddam's campaign of extinction against the Shia in the aftermath of the first Gulf War; Syria's massacre of 20,000 people in the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold of Hama in 1982; and terrorist violence against Egyptian Christians in the 1990s. Add to this tally intraconfessional oppression, such as in Saudi Arabia, where the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect wields the truncheon of state power to inflict its dour lifestyle on the less devout.

Ideologies vs. Ideologies: Zionism is not the only "ism" in the region, which is rife with competing ideologies. Even though the Baathist parties in Syria and Iraq sprang from the same fascist European roots, both have vied for precedence in the Middle East. Nasser wielded pan-Arabism-cumsocialism against the Arab nation-state. And both Baathists and Nasserites have opposed the monarchies, such as in Jordan. Khomeinist Iran and Wahhabite Saudi Arabia remain mortal enemies. What is the connection to the Arab-Israeli conflict? Nil, with the exception of Hamas, a terror army of the faithful once supported by Israel as a rival to the Palestine Liberation Organization and now responsible for many suicide bombings in Israel. But will Hamas disband once Israel is gone? Hardly Hamas has bigger ambitions than eliminating the "Zionist entity." The organization seeks nothing less than a unified Arab state under a regime of God.

Reactionary Utopia vs. Modernity: A common enmity toward Israel is the only thing that prevents Arab modernizers and traditionalists from tearing their societies apart. Fundamentalists vie against secularists and reformist Muslims for the fusion of mosque and state under the green flag of the Prophet. And a barely concealed class struggle pits a minuscule bourgeoisie and millions of unemployed young men against the power structure, usually a form of statist cronyism that controls the means of production. Far from creating tensions, Israel actually contains the antagonisms in the world around it.

Regimes vs. Peoples: The existence of Israel cannot explain the breadth and depth of the Mukhabarat states (secret police states) throughout the Middle East. With the exceptions of Jordan, Morocco, and the Gulf sheikdoms, which gingerly practice an enlightened monarchism, all Arab countries (plus Iran and Pakistan) are but variations of despotism-from the dynastic dictatorship of Syria to the authoritarianism of Egypt. Intranational strife in Algeria has killed nearly 100,000, with no letup in sight. Saddam's victims are said to number 300,000. After the Khomeinists took power in 1979, Iran was embroiled not only in the Iran-Iraq War but also in barely contained civil unrest into the 1980s. Pakistan is an explosion waiting to happen. Ruthless suppression is the price of stability in this region.

Again, it would take a florid imagination to surmise that factoring Israel out of the Middle East equation would produce liberal democracy in the region. It might be plausible to argue that the dialectic of enmity somehow favors dictatorship in "frontline states" such as Egypt and Syria-governments that invoke the proximity of the "Zionist threat" as a pretext to suppress dissent. But how then to explain the mayhem in faraway Algeria, the bizarre cult-of-personality regime in Libya, the pious kleptocracy of Saudi Arabia, the clerical despotism of Iran, or democracy's enduring failure to take root in Pakistan? Did Israel somehow cause the various putsches that produced the republic of fear in Iraq? If Jordan, the state sharing the longest border with Israel, can experiment with constitutional monarchy, why not Syria?

It won't do to lay the democracy and development deficits of the Arab world on the doorstep of the Jewish state. Israel is a pretext, not a cause, and therefore its dispatch will not heal the self-inflicted wounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Nor will the mild version of "statocide," a binational state, do the trick-not in view of the "civilization of clashes" (to borrow a term from British historian Niall Ferguson) that is the hallmark of Arab political culture. The mortal struggle between Israelis and Palestinians would simply shift from the outside to the inside.

My Enemy, Myself

Can anybody proclaim in good conscience that these dysfunctionalities of the Arab world would vanish along with Israel? Two U.N. "Arab Human Development Reports," written by Arab authors, say no. The calamities are homemade. Stagnation and hopelessness have three root causes. The first is lack of freedom. The United Nations cites the persistence of absolute autocracies, bogus elections, judiciaries beholden to executives, and constraints on civil society. Freedom of expression and association are also sharply limited. The second root cause is lack of knowledge: Sixty-five million adults are illiterate, and some 10 million children have no schooling at all. As such, the Arab world is dropping ever further behind in scientific research and the development of information technology. Third, female participation in political and economic life is the lowest in the world. Economic growth will continue to lag as long as the potential of half the population remains largely untapped.

Will all of this right itself when that Judeo-Western insult to Arab pride finally vanishes? Will the millions of unemployed and bored young men, cannon fodder for the terrorists, vanish as well-along with one-party rule, corruption, and closed economies? This notion makes sense only if one cherishes single-cause explanations or, worse, harbors a particular animus against the Jewish state and its refusal to behave like Sweden.(Come to think of it, Sweden would not be Sweden either if it lived in the Hobbesian world of the Middle East.)

Finally, the most popular what-if issue of them all: Would the Islamic world hate the United States less if Israel vanished? Like all what-if queries, this one, too, admits only suggestive evidence. To begin, the notion that 5 million Jews are solely responsible for the rage of 1 billion or so Muslims cannot carry the weight assigned to it. Second, Arab-Islamic hatreds of the United States preceded the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. Recall the loathing left behind by the U.S.-managed coup that restored the shah's rule in Tehran in 1953, or the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1958. As soon as Britain and France left the Middle East, the United States became the dominant power and the No. 1 target. Another bit of suggestive evidence is that the fiercest (unofficial) anti-Americanism emanates from Washington's self-styled allies in the Arab Middle East, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Is this situation because of Israel-or because it is so convenient for these regimes to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" (as Shakespeare's Henry IV put it) to distract their populations from their dependence on the "Great Satan"?

Take the Cairo Declaration against "U.S. hegemony," endorsed by 400 delegates from across the Middle East and the West in December 2002. The lengthy indictment mentions Palestine only peripherally. The central condemnation, uttered in profuse variation, targets the United States for monopolizing power "within the framework of capitalist globalization," for reinstating "colonialism," and for blocking the "emergence of forces that would shift the balance of power toward multi-polarity." In short, Global America is responsible for all the afflictions of the Arab world, with Israel coming in a distant second.

This familiar tale has an ironic twist: One of the key signers is Nader Fergany, lead author of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report. So even those who confess to the internal failures of the Arab world end up blaming "the Other." Given the enormity of the indictment, ditching Israel will not absolve the United States. Iran's Khomeinists have it right, so to speak, when they denounce America as the "Great Satan" and Israel only as the "Little Satan," a handmaiden of U.S. power. What really riles America-haters in the Middle East is Washington's intrusion into their affairs, be it for reasons of oil, terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction. This fact is why Osama bin Laden, having attached himself to the Palestinian cause only as an afterthought, calls the Americans the new crusaders, and the Jews their imperialist stand-ins.

None of this is to argue in favor of Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor to excuse the cruel hardship it imposes on the Palestinians, which is pernicious, even for Israel's own soul. But as this analysis suggests, the real source of Arab angst is the West as a palpable symbol of misery and an irresistible target of what noted Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami has called "Arab rage." The puzzle is why so many Westerners, like those who signed the Cairo Declaration, believe otherwise. Is this anti-Semitism, as so many Jews are quick to suspect? No, but denying Israel's legitimacy bears an uncanny resemblance to some central features of this darkest of creeds. Accordingly, the Jews are omnipotent, ubiquitous, and thus responsible for the evils of the world.

Today, Israel finds itself in an analogous position, either as handmaiden or manipulator of U.S. might. The soft version sighs: "If only Israel were more reasonable..." The semihard version demands that "the United States pull the rug out from under Israel" to impose the pliancy that comes from impotence. And the hard-hard version dreams about salvation springing from Israel's disappearance.

Why, sure-if it weren't for that old joke from Israel's War of Independence: While the bullets were whistling overhead and the two Jews in their foxhole were running out of rounds, one griped, "If the Brits had to give us a country not their own, why couldn't they have given us Switzerland?" Alas, Israel is just a strip of land in the world's most noxious neighborhood, and the cleanup hasn't even begun.

The Presidential election campaign is in the home stretch. Neither the President nor Senator Kerry has secured a decisive advantage.

Iraq is now the central issue of debate, as one would expect, since the war is going badly, and the economy is reasonably robust. The debate is finally beginning to focus on substantive differences between the candidates after a summer in which they mainly exchanged personal attacks on their respective Vietnam records. Their strategies are now clear: Bush will challenge Kerry's steadiness and consistency; Kerry will challenge the necessity of the campaign in Iraq and the competence of the administration's efforts there. But while their diagnoses of the situation differ, their proposals for dealing with what is clearly a mess are not so clearly differentiated. Both propose to seek additional help from members of the international community; both emphasize the need to train and arm Iraqi security forces; and both are hopeful that elections will enhance the legitimacy of Iraqi leaders, fortify their efforts to dry up the insurgency, and allow American forces to be reduced and eventually withdrawn.

Historically, wars have been unkind to presidents on whose watch they occurred. The Korean War reduced Harry Truman's popularity so dramatically by 1952 that he gave up his quest for a second full term. The Vietnam War drove Lyndon Johnson from office, despite impressive domestic achievements. Victory in the Gulf War of 1991 sent George H.W. Bush's approval ratings soaring, but within a year he was defeated by an obscure Arkansas governor.

Yet President Bush still clings to a narrow lead in the polls. Why?

Senator Kerry has argued that the Iraqi campaign is a "war of choice." Perhaps so. But Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring war on the United States nearly a decade ago. Whatever the outcome in Iraq, war with Islamic extremists will continue. And American voters remain nearly evenly divided as to whether John Kerry has the steadfast character and consistent judgment they want in a wartime leader.

Uneasiness about the financial and human costs of the war is growing. Casualty figures in Iraq are high compared to the numbers killed or wounded in post-cold war American interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Yet, those earlier conflicts involved humanitarian interventions in which Americans perceived little strategic stake. However, military personnel killed in Iraq - now more than 1000 - still number less than a third of the civilians who perished in New York and Washington on 9/11. And ours is a volunteer military that is highly motivated.

When confronted by an attack, Americans have consistently taken the fight to the enemy, engaging them in combat as far from our shores as possible. The president has portrayed the campaign in Iraq as an integral feature of the war on terrorism. To at least a number of voters, the absence of any terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 provides evidence that his approach, while not without significant costs, is working.

Victory at the polls may be a dubious prize. Whoever is sworn in on January 20, 2005 will face daunting choices. American options in Iraq range from the "potentially disastrous" to the "extremely distasteful." We cannot simply walk away. And a host of other dilemmas - e.g. nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea, a Middle East peace process that has gotten off track, strains in the trans-Atlantic relations, a multilateral trade round that has lost momentum - demand urgent attention. Beyond this, the next president will be hampered by a gigantic fiscal deficit and a military that is stretched thin. In short, he will have few easy choices. It makes one wonder why politicians yearn for this job.

President Bush has claimed a renewed mandate, and has begun to reshuffle his national security team. Condi Rice will move to State; Steve Hadley will move up at the NSC. Rich Armitage and Jim Kelly, who have borne much of the day-to-day responsibility for U.S. policy in Asia, are leaving along with Colin Powell. What might we expect of the Bush administration in its second term?

Generally speaking, continuity rather than change is likely to be the watchword in foreign policy. Above all, the Middle East and South Asia are likely to remain the principal preoccupations of American concerns. In Iraq, Washington will seek to acquit its commitments - to hold elections, train Iraqi security forces, and accelerate reconstruction projects - with whatever measure of dignity and honor it can muster in the face of excruciatingly difficult choices. With Yassar Arafat's death, American engagement in Israeli-Palestinian issues is destined to increase. And Iran's bid for nuclear weapons will continue to challenge the United States and Europe.

Thus Asia will not have pride of place on the Bush agenda. Yet it will continue to command Washington's attention. Why? Because it is in Asia that the interests of the great powers intersect most directly. Asia is the world's most dynamic economic area, and it is becoming more tightly integrated. Washington cannot afford to neglect South and Southeast Asia, for in these areas Islam presents a relatively moderate face. And North Korea, of course, poses a direct and growing challenge to the administration's nonproliferation policy.

Fortuitously, the United States is better positioned in Asia than in most other regions. Our military presence remains sizable and retains mobility and flexibility. Our economy continues to generate solid demand for Asian exports and is a robust source of direct investment. While criticism of American policy is widespread in the region, it is not expressed with the virulence that is seen in Europe and the Middle East. Above all, Washington has cultivated the Asian great powers assiduously, and has managed to improve relations with Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, and New Delhi - a substantial accomplishment. It remains to be seen whether it can work in concert with others to ameliorate the sources of discord on the Korean Peninsula and over the Taiwan Straits.

The United States, to be sure, confronts some daunting challenges in Asia. If the U.S.-Japan alliance is in excellent condition, defense cooperation with Seoul remains troubled by the sharp divergence in U.S. and Korean perspectives on North Korean aims and strategy. Nor have we found a solid basis for pursuing with Pyeongyang's neighbors a coordinated approach to the six-nation talks. Regional economic cooperation is taking shape along pan-Asian rather than trans-Pacific lines. Developments in the Middle East threaten to "Arabize Islam" in Southeast Asia. And the "Johnny One Note" quality of American diplomacy - i.e. its preoccupation with international terrorism - often plays poorly against Beijing's more broadly based effort to provide regional leadership.

Nor is America unconstrained in its policy efforts in the region. Our military forces are stretched thin globally, impelling some downsizing of deployments in Asia. Huge fiscal deficits loom, and with growing bills falling due in both Iraq and Afghanistan, resources available for policy initiatives elsewhere are likely to be tight. The president has succeeded in pushing negotiations with North Korea into a multilateral framework, yet Washington is being pressed by its negotiating partners to adopt a more conciliatory posture. The democratization of Asian nations, while welcome, does not automatically facilitate U.S. diplomatic objectives. Recent elections in South Korea and Taiwan were decisively shaped by a new generation of voters. Governments in Seoul and Taipei are increasingly accountable, yet viewed from the United States, they are not extraordinarily sensitive to Washington's views, let alone deferential to its lead.

With these considerations in mind, one should expect President Bush and his foreign policy team to continue cultivating close ties with the Asian powers. Whether Washington can effectively utilize those relationships to roll back North Korea's nuclear program and avert crises in the Taiwan Straits will depend heavily on its relationships with the governments in Seoul and Taipei. And at the moment South Korea appears determined to expand economic ties with the North virtually without reference to Pyeongyang's nuclear activities. Taipei remains preoccupied with efforts to assert its own identity while counting on American protection.

In the end, of course, foreign policy rarely sees carefully laid plans bear fruit. Someone once asked a new British prime minister, Harold MacMillan, what would drive foreign policy in his government. He answered without hesitation, "Events, dear boy, events." I expect the same may be true for Mr. Bush.

From the September/October 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs.

As the war on terrorism continues, statistics on terrorist attacks are becoming as important as the unemployment rate or the GDP. Yet the terrorism reports produced by the U.S. government do not have nearly as much credibility as its economic statistics, because there are no safeguards to ensure that the data are as accurate as possible and free from political manipulation. The flap over the error-ridden 2003 Patterns of Global Terrorism report, which Secretary of State Colin Powell called "a big mistake" and which had to be corrected and re-released, recently brought these issues to the fore. But they still have not been adequately addressed.

Now-common practices used to collect and disseminate vital economic statistics could offer the State Department valuable guidance. Not long ago, economic statistics were also subject to manipulation. In 1971, President Richard Nixon attempted to spin unemployment data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and transferred officials who defied him. This meddling prompted the establishment of a series of safeguards for collecting and disseminating economic statistics. Since 1971, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress has held regular hearings at which the commissioner of the BLS discusses the unemployment report. More important, in the 1980s, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive that permits a statistical agency's staff to "provide technical explanations of the data" in the first hour after principal economic indicators are released and forbids "employees of the Executive Branch" from commenting publicly on the data during that time.

The State Department should adopt similar protections in the preparation and dissemination of its reports. In addition to the global terrorism report, the State Department is required by Congress to report annually on international bribery, human rights practices, narcotics control, and religious freedom. Gathering and reporting data for congressional oversight is presently a low-level function at the State Department. The department rarely relies on high-quality, objective data or on modern diagnostic tests to distinguish meaningful trends from chance associations. Adopting safeguards against bias, both statistical and political, would enable Congress to better perform its constitutional role as the White House's overseer and allow the American public to assess the government's foreign policy achievements.

A PATTERN OF ERRORS

Congress requires that the State Department provide each year "a full and complete report" that includes "detailed assessments with respect to each foreign country ... in which acts of international terrorism occurred which were, in the opinion of the Secretary, of major significance." The global terrorism reports are intended to satisfy this requirement, but, over time, they have become glossy advertisements of Washington's achievements in combating terrorism, aimed as much at the public and the press as at congressional overseers.

The 2003 global terrorism report was launched at a celebratory news conference in April. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Ambassador J. Cofer Black, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, outlined some remaining challenges, but principally they announced the Bush administration's success in turning the terrorist tide. Black called the report "good news," and Armitage introduced it by saying, "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight." The document's first paragraph claimed that worldwide terrorism dropped by 45 percent between 2001 and 2003 and that the number of acts committed last year "represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969." The report was transmitted to Congress with a cover letter that interpreted the data as "an indication of the great progress that has been made in fighting terrorism" after the horrific events of September 11.

But we immediately spotted errors in the report and evidence contradicting the administration's claims. For example, the chronology in Appendix A, which lists each significant terrorist incident occurring in the year, stopped on November 11-an unusual end to the calendar year. Clearly, this was a mistake, as four terrorist attacks occurred in Turkey between November 12 and the end of 2003. Yet it was impossible to tell whether the post- November 11 incidents were inadvertently dropped off the chronology and included in figures in the body of the report or completely overlooked.

More important, even with the incomplete data, the number of significant incidents listed in the chronology was very high. It tallied a total of 169 significant events for 2003 alone, the highest annual count in 20 years; the annual average over the previous five years was 131. How could the number of significant attacks be at a record high, when the State Department was claiming the lowest total number of attacks since 1969? The answer is that the implied number of "nonsignificant" attacks has declined sharply in recent years. But because nonsignificant events were not listed in the chronology, the drop could not be verified. And if, by definition, they were not significant, it is unclear why their decrease should merit attention.

On June 10, after a critical op-ed we wrote in The Washington Post, a follow-up letter to Powell from Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and a call for review from the Congressional Research Service, the State Department acknowledged errors in the report. "We did not check and verify the data sufficiently," spokesman Richard Boucher said. "... [T]he figures for the number of attacks and casualties will be up sharply from what was published."

At first, Waxman accused the administration of manipulating the data to "serve the Administration's political interests." Powell denied the allegation, insisting that "there's nothing political about it. It was a data collection and reporting error." Although there is no reason to doubt Powell's explanation, if the errors had gone in the opposite direction-making the rise in terrorism on President George W. Bush's watch look even greater than it has been-it is a safe bet that the administration would have caught them before releasing the report. And such asymmetric vetting is a form of political manipulation.

Critical deficiencies in the way the report was prepared and presented compromised its accuracy and credibility. Chief among these were the opaque procedures used to assemble the report, the inconsistent application of definitions, insufficient review, and the partisan release of the report. These deficiencies resulted in a misleading and unverifiable report that appeared to be tainted by political manipulation.

It is unclear exactly how the report was assembled. The report notes that the U.S. government's Incident Review Panel (IRP) is responsible for determining which terrorist events are significant. It says little, however, about the panel's members: how many there are, whether they are career employees or political appointees, or what affiliations they have. Nor does it describe how they decide whether an event is significant. Do they work by consensus or majority rule? What universe of events do they consider?

The State Department announced a decline in total terrorist attacks, which resulted from a decline in nonsignificant events. But without information about the nonsignificant events, readers were essentially asked to blindly trust the nameless experts who prepared it.

The report's broad definitions, moreover, are sometimes too blunt to help classification. Terrorism is defined as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." The report specifies that an international terrorist attack is an act committed by substate actors from one nation against citizens or property of another. An incident "is judged significant if it results in loss of life or serious injury to persons, major property damage, and/or is an act or attempted act that could reasonably be expected to create the conditions noted."

But hardly any explanation was provided about how the IRP distinguishes significant from nonsignificant events. When is property damage too minor for an event to be significant? How are nonsignificant events identified? Is the IRP responsible for making these determinations too? Has the source and scope of their information changed over time? The corrected 2003 report, the first to list individual nonsignificant acts, defines as "major" property damage that exceeds $10,000. It does not indicate, however, whether that criterion applied to previous reports.

Admittedly, measuring international terrorism is no easy task. Even scholarly reckonings are not free from subjective judgment, and there are inevitably close calls to be made. The most one can hope for in many cases is consistent application of ambiguous definitions.

Unfortunately, in the global terrorism reports the rules have been applied inconsistently. Many cross-border attacks on civilians in Africa have not been included in the reports, for example, even though similar attacks in other regions have been. The report for 2002, moreover, counts as significant a suicide attack by Chechen shaheeds (Islamist martyrs) against a government building in Moscow that killed 72 people. Yet none of the numerous suicide attacks by the Chechen "black widows" that terrorized Russia and killed scores in 2003 was tallied as an international terrorist attack in the latest report. After one such attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, "Today, after a series of recent terrorist attacks, we can say that the bandits active in Chechnya are not just linked with international terrorism, they are an integral part of it." If the State Department considers such attacks domestic, rather than international, it should do so consistently from one year to the next.

Another problem is that the staff that prepared the 2003 global terrorism report did not participate in releasing it; in fact, they have yet to be identified. High-level Bush administration officials presented the report to the media, using it to support White House policies and take credit for the alleged decline in terrorism. Even after the report's flaws were recognized, they continued to spin the figures. When the corrected version was released, Black repeated that "we have made significant progress," despite being pressed to acknowledge that last year the number of significant attacks reached a 20-year high. Given the war on terrorism's central role in the upcoming presidential election, such presentation gives the appearance that the report is being manipulated for political gain.

The State Department has tried to explain the report's flaws using language eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration's justification of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Spokesman Boucher told reporters that previous claims that the war on terrorism was succeeding had been based "on the facts as we had them at the time [and] the facts that we had were wrong." Even Powell partook in the spinning. On the one hand, he announced that "the [original] narrative is sound and we're not changing any of the narrative." On the other hand, he acknowledged, "We will change the narrative wherever the narrative relates to the data."

To his credit, Powell instructed those responsible for preparing the report to brief Waxman's staff on the procedures they had used and the origins of their mistakes. Based on a summary of the briefing by Waxman's staff, much has come to light. Authority for compiling the list of attacks was shifted from the CIA to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), an organization created in May 2003 to "merge and analyze all threat information in a single location." The TTIC provided information to the IRP, which, it was disclosed, consists of representatives from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. A TTIC representative chaired the meetings and could cast a vote to break ties on the classification of an event as significant or nonsignificant.

At least this year, chaos prevailed. The IRP's members changed from meeting to meeting-when they attended the meetings at all. The CIA employee responsible for the database left but was never replaced; in mid-process, an outside contractor who entered data was replaced by another contractor. Because of technical incompetence, the report relied on the wrong cutoff date.

Arithmetic errors were rampant. Larry Johnson, a retired CIA and State Department professional, discovered that the total number of fatalities in the chronology exceeded the number listed in the statistical review in Appendix G. According to Black, the errors resulted from "a combination of things: inattention, personnel shortages and database that is awkward and is antiquated and needs to have very proficient input be made in order for to be sure that the numbers will spill then to the different categories that are being captured [sic]." The debacle is more like an episode of the Keystone Kops than a chapter from Machiavelli, but even that analogy is not very comforting.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Despite the data's limitations, the chronology of significant events in the 2003 global terrorism report yields important information about terrorism's trends, its geographical characteristics, and its magnitude.

Time-series analysis, which seeks to discern trends in given phenomena over time, requires a consistent approach to collecting data. The State Department's terrorism report presents time-series analysis, but by focusing on the total number of attacks it misleadingly combines verifiable data on significant events with nonverifiable data on insignificant ones. And because, as TTIC director John Brennan admitted, "many nonsignificant events occur throughout the world that are not counted in the report," one must also be concerned about consistency in the measurement of the total number of terrorist events. Even if the nonsignificant events were listed (and thus could be verified), trends in significant events are more relevant because they track events that, by definition, are more important. Accurately measuring these trends is a prerequisite for understanding the factors that underlie them and the policies that shape them. In fact, an analysis of the revised report reveals that the number of significant attacks increased from 124 to 175, or by 41 percent, from 2001 to 2003-a significant fact indeed.

The detailed chronology also allows analysts to cumulate terrorist events for each country and cross-classify them according to the country where they occurred and the perpetrators' country of origin. These figures can then be related to the countries' characteristics, yielding information that can help policymakers devise strategies to address terrorism's root causes. Using the global terrorism reports for the years 1997-2002, the authors of this article have previously found that terrorists tend to come from nondemocratic countries, both rich and poor, and generally target nationals from rich, democratic countries.

The State Department has rightly emphasized that the threat of terrorism remains serious, but a close examination of its data helps put the magnitude of the threat in perspective. In 2003, a total of 625 people--including 35 Americans--were killed in international terrorist incidents worldwide. Meanwhile, 43,220 died in automobile accidents in the United States alone, and three million died from AIDS around the world. Comparative figures, particularly when combined with forecasts of future terrorism trends, can help focus debate on the real costs people are willing to bear--in foregone civil liberties and treasure--to reduce the risk posed by terrorism.

CHANGING TRACKS

The State Department currently uses, and Congress accepts, nineteenth-century methods to analyze a twenty-first-century problem. To prevent errors of the type that riddled the 2003 global terrorism report, Congress has two alternatives. It could reassign the State Department's reporting responsibilities to a neutral research agency, such as the GAO (the General Accounting Office, recently renamed the Government Accountability Office) which routinely uses appropriate statistical practices. The problem is that the GAO has little foreign policy expertise and does not necessarily have access to the (sometimes classified) information that goes into the reports. Alternatively, Congress could keep the reports within the State Department's purview but demand that its practices for data collection and analysis be improved and that the reports be insulated from partisan manipulation.

If responsibility remains within the State Department, Congress should establish a statistical bureau in the department to ensure that scientific standards are respected in all reports, thereby elevating the status of data-gathering and statistics there. The bureau would promote consistency, statistical rigor, and transparency. When appropriate, it could seek input from the scientific community. And, while respecting classified sources, it could also insist that sufficient information be released to independent analysts for verification.

To overcome conflicts of interest facing political appointees who issue government reports, the State Department should adopt rules similar to those that govern the production and dissemination of key economic indicators. Career staff who prepare the reports should be given an hour to brief the media on technical aspects of the data, during which time political appointees would be precluded from making public comments. (After the hour elapses, it is expected that political appointees would offer their interpretations.) Career staff should be protected so they can prepare mandated reports without interference from political appointees and then present them for review by the statistics bureau. Once the reports are finalized, but before they are publicly released, they should be circulated to designated political appointees who need to prepare for their release. Disclosure dates should be announced long in advance to prevent opportunistic timing by political appointees.

Last October, in a candid memorandum to top aides that was leaked to the press, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted, "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?" The statement was a stinging acknowledgment that the government lacks both classified and unclassified data to make critical policy decisions. It is also a reminder that only accurate information, presented without political spin, can help the public and decision-makers know where the United States stands in the war on terrorism and how best to fight it.

The workshop with this title was organized on November 19-20 by the European Forum at SIIS and it gathered leading German historians from Stanford, other U.S. universities, and from Germany. The workshop will produce an edited volume next year, said Amir Eshel, Stanford professor and co-convenor of the European Forum.

In the context of the Iraq Wars, references to totalitarianism multiplied across the political, cultural, and intellectual spectrum. For every equation of Saddam with Hitler, another followed projecting the Nazi past onto the American present. The German experience with totalitarianism in the twentieth century is particularly intriguing. The Weimar Republic witnessed the rise of both Communist and National Socialist movements, with revolutionary aspirations, in the wake of which, ultimately, two dictatorial political systems followed. To be sure, the two cases are not symmetrical; East Germany was unthinkable without Russian occupation and the Cold War.

In light of the renewed totalitarianism discourse, a review of this past seemed more urgent than ever.