[Infowarrior] - OT: The Rise of The Rest

[Richard Forno]

Fareed Zakaria is one shrewd analyst/journalist.  This is an exerpt  
from his well-written cover story in Newsweek this week, and is worth  
sharing.


May 12, 2008
The Rise of the Rest

It's true China is booming, Russia is growing more assertive,  
terrorism is a threat. But if America is losing the ability to dictate  
to this new world, it has not lost the ability to lead.

By Fareed Zakaria

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/newsweek/051208.html

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At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar  
world. But along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social,  
cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from  
American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business,  
ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different  
from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from  
many places and by many peoples.

The post-American world is naturally an unsettling prospect for  
Americans, but it should not be. This will not be a world defined by  
the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else. It is the  
result of a series of positive trends that have been progressing over  
the last 20 years, trends that have created an international climate  
of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

I know. That's not the world that people perceive. We are told that we  
live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear  
proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal  
immigrants all loom large in the national discourse. Al Qaeda, Iran,  
North Korea, China, Russia are all threats in some way or another. But  
just how violent is today's world, really?

A team of scholars at the University of Maryland has been tracking  
deaths caused by organized violence. Their data show that wars of all  
kinds have been declining since the mid-1980s and that we are now at  
the lowest levels of global violence since the 1950s. Deaths from  
terrorism are reported to have risen in recent years. But on closer  
examination, 80 percent of those casualties come from Afghanistan and  
Iraq, which are really war zones with ongoing insurgencies—and the  
overall numbers remain small. Looking at the evidence, Harvard's  
polymath professor Steven Pinker has ventured to speculate that we are  
probably living "in the most peaceful time of our species' existence."

Why does it not feel that way? Why do we think we live in scary times?  
Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information  
has been exploding. The last 20 years have produced an information  
revolution that brings us news and, most crucially, images from around  
the world all the time. The immediacy of the images and the intensity  
of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype. Every  
weather disturbance is the "storm of the decade." Every bomb that  
explodes is BREAKING NEWS. Because the information revolution is so  
new, we—reporters, writers, readers, viewers—are all just now figuring  
out how to put everything in context.

We didn't watch daily footage of the two million people who died in  
Indochina in the 1970s, or the million who perished in the sands of  
the Iran-Iraq war ten years later. We saw little of the civil war in  
the Congo in the 1990s, where millions died. But today any bomb that  
goes off, any rocket that is fired, any death that results, is  
documented by someone, somewhere and ricochets instantly across the  
world. Add to this terrorist attacks, which are random and brutal.  
"That could have been me," you think. Actually, your chances of being  
killed in a terrorist attack are tiny—for an American, smaller than  
drowning in your bathtub. But it doesn't feel like that.

The threats we face are real. Islamic jihadists are a nasty bunch—they  
do want to attack civilians everywhere. But it is increasingly clear  
that militants and suicide bombers make up a tiny portion of the  
world's 1.3 billion Muslims. They can do real damage, especially if  
they get their hands on nuclear weapons. But the combined efforts of  
the world's governments have effectively put them on the run and  
continue to track them and their money. Jihad persists, but the  
jihadists have had to scatter, work in small local cells, and use  
simple and undetectable weapons. They have not been able to hit big,  
symbolic targets, especially ones involving Americans. So they blow up  
bombs in cafes, marketplaces, and subway stations. The problem is that  
in doing so, they kill locals and alienate ordinary Muslims. Look at  
the polls. Support for violence of any kind has dropped dramatically  
over the last five years in all Muslim countries.

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