While the flutter of a butterfly's wing might not be quite enough to disrupt the international economy, it does not take more than a few flutters to spook traders, bankers and governments into interlinked financial crises. The vulnerability of advanced national economies to international disruption was demonstrated first in 1914, and again in 1929. It could find a new demonstration in the case of China today--or the near future.
Before 1914, people had been told that international economic interdependence made major war impossible. They discovered this was untrue. They found that "globalized" economies don't prevent war. Typically, when the time comes, they spread chaos, not peace.
Consider China.
Today the world economy is more integrated than ever before. The promotion of international financial deregulation started out in the 1990s as an American strategy for expanding investment and profits for Wall Street. Few thought through the consequences that globalization could have for unsophisticated economies and financial systems. These have included much social and political destruction, as well as the deployment of new energy for growth in many of these nations. The dangers of interdependence were ignored at the start. This proved a mistake.
We may have seen nothing yet. China is now a huge and inexperienced player in the globalized game. Sheer scale now gives it immense, intricate and largely unregulated--or at least uncontrolled--involvement in the world economy and leverage over it. This is because all has been connected up.
The elements of a possible multiple crisis are well known. The first is American dependence upon Asia's--particularly Japan's and China's--purchase of American state and private debt. A halt to this investment in U.S. debt could devastate the American economy.
The halt seems unlikely, since Asian investors are caught in a dilemma. Withdrawal from dollar investments will speed the fall of the dollar, devaluing their investments quickly rather than slowly.
A few days ago, a rumor that China might reduce its dollar holdings gave the market a bad few hours. Nonetheless, it is reported that while China's foreign currency holdings have been increasing, its dollar exposure is not increasing.
Next, China's economy depends on continuing Western, and especially American, outsourcing of production and import of manufacturing sourced in China, although in this respect it is probably the least vulnerable of the new Asian industrial countries. Its foreign investment is largely from overseas Chinese, who will not shift out of China.
The third source of potential international disruption is China's globalization of its raw-materials purchases and sources. Recent large Chinese trade missions to Latin America and Africa, and the virtual takeover by China of the industrial raw-materials exports of certain countries, like Australia, mean that disruption of the Chinese economy in the future could disrupt a large segment of the world economy.
Is a crisis likely? There are signs of a bubble mentality in the outside world's attitude toward China. Its economy and soaring trade importance inspire analysts to wonderment and superlatives, despite the well-known fact that much of China's statistical growth is a result of speculative real estate development.
IHT.COM

George W. Bush

When the fruit sellers at the Tel Aviv market shout "the boss has gone crazy!" they mean that they are selling their merchandise at ridiculously low prices.
In the world's capitals, a similar cry is now being heard: "The boss has gone crazy!"--but it is not about the price of tomatoes. It refers to the new situation, after the reelection of George W. Bush for four more years.
In many places, Bush is seen as a crazy cowboy, the kind who rides into town shooting in all directions. He has attacked Afghanistan. He has attacked Iraq. His neo-con handlers want to attack Syria and Iran in the next phase. They want to establish subservient regimes everywhere ("promoting democracy in the Middle East"), station permanent American garrisons in the region and control the world's oil market, and--last but not least--help Ariel Sharon to fulfill his plans.
Now, in his second term of office, Bush can do pretty much as he pleases.
The Middle Eastern rulers have drawn this conclusion with impressive speed. Every one of them rushed for cover in the nearest political cave, until the danger is over.
- The Syrian ruler, Bashar Assad, has started a peace offensive, to the sound of a hundred angelic trumpets.
- The Egyptian ruler, Husni Mubarrak, has suddenly discovered that Sharon is his long-lost brother, a man of peace from the cradle onwards. He now presents himself as Bush's viceroy in the Middle East.
- The Jordanian ruler, King Abdallah II, is making similar noises (after taking the opportunity to clip the wings of his younger brother.)
- And the Palestinians are uniting behind Abu Mazen, who is favored by President Bush.
One can examine, for example, the Syrian hope. Assad Jr. is proposing negotiations without preconditions. Will Sharon accept it?
Like his predecessor, Ehud Barak, Sharon would not dream of giving the Golan back. Even if he had been ready to do this (as he is not), he would not dare to propose the evacuation of the dozens of settlements there.
Sharon remarked contemptuously that Assad talks about peace only because of the American pressure. (So what? Isn't this the perfect opportunity to achieve peace?)
Sharon rejected the Syrian offer out of hand. Assad offers peace without preconditions? Good, but we have some of our own: first of all, he must drive all the leaders of the Palestinian organizations out of Damascus and disarm Hizbullah in Lebanon. That means that Assad must give up every single one of the few cards he holds, before negotiations can even begin. One has to be pretty naive to believe that then Sharon would then give up even one single settlement. The more so since Bush has given a clear-cut order: don't talk with the Syrians, don't make it difficult for me to attack them if I decide to do so.
Therefore, all the hope is now concentrated on the Palestinian front. If Abu Mazen is elected President of the Palestinian Authority next month, will real negotiations start?
The boss has gone crazy? The last thing he will do is to put pressure on Sharon.
Uri Avnery
AVNERY-NEWS.CO.IL

Few issues have roiled the waters of Turkey's march to membership in the European Union as did Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's attempt to criminalize adultery last autumn.
Perhaps he felt that, after having changed so many of his own country's laws to suit Europe, he might be free to give a nod to his conservative religious right without censure from the busybodies of Brussels.
But no. The reaction from Europe was immediate and indignant. Criminalizing adultery wasn't consistent with European values, and so Erdogan backed down.
Silly old Erdogan. Didn't he know how important adultery is to European values? If European civilization began with the glory that was Greece, then Homer's "Iliad" enthroned the adultery that launched a thousand ships onto the mainland of what is, after all, now Turkey.
Geoffrey Chaucer set the tone in "The Canterbury Tales." Shakespeare followed suit with "Othello," in which just the suspicion of adultery drove the Moor to murder his wife.
In Richard Wagner's "WalkŸre," Sieglinde forsakes her husband for Siegmund. And to make matters worse, both are sired by Wotan, who deserted his wife, Fricka, to achieve it!?
Italy's Giovanni Casanova de Seingalt wrote a memoir that contained much history and literature--it became the rage of Europe--but today his name is mentioned only in the context of his seductions and adultery.
And where would French literature be without Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le Noir," and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," by Choderlos de Laclos?
In more recent times, D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" broke new ground.
It is hard to imagine what Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene would have done without adultery. Milan Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being" and Turkey's own Orhan Pamuk, in his new novel "Snow," both play on adulterous themes. It would take a thousand columns to list a fraction of the adulterers in European literature.
And Europe doesn't merely read about it. Adultery plays a major role in politics, too.
At times it has seemed that the opposition Conservative Party here in Britain has been fueled by adultery down the years. More than 40 years ago, as a young reporter, I was assigned to help a more senior colleague get the goods on a Tory minister named John Profumo, whose adultery was complicated by the fact that his mistress had slept with a Soviet military attachŽ.
Today's London tabloids had no sooner finished dissecting the amorous affairs of Boris Johnson, a Tory member of Parliament, when the headlines announced: "Blunkett's Affair With a Married Woman," referring to the Labour government's home secretary, David Blunkett--a scandal complete with DNA tests to determine the parentage of his mistress's child.
It is indicative of these modern times, however, that his job does not seem to be threatened by his adulterous behavior so much as the charges that he improperly used his office to obtain a visa for his mistress's nanny. Turks, take note.
And across the channel, did not President Fran�ois Mitterrand father a child out of wedlock? And did she not attend, with her mother, the president's funeral, alongside his widow? How is Turkey going to manage in the European Union if it is going to get strict about adultery?
But I leave the last word on the subject to Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, who declared that he did not want to be the first Prince of Wales not to have a mistress. At least that's what Diana, Princess of Wales, claimed he said.
H.D.S. Greenway
GLOBE.COM

Onlookers watch the smoke billowing from the US consulate in the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah, Dec. 6. (Reuters File Photo)

The Islamic militant attack on the US Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Monday is evidence that a major showdown with the Saudi government is in the works. The Saudi rulers are now at the receiving end of what al-Qaeda-practiced militant jihadism has in mind: to bring down that dynasty, and an end of the era in which the birthplace of Islam sounded nothing more than the personal fiefdom of the Saudi family.
What al-Qaeda wants to achieve is a contradiction of the compact of 1745 between the Saudi dynasty and Mohammad Abdel Wahhab. Al-Qaeda seems to have concluded that the focus of its objective on the Arabian Peninsula is to bring an end to Saudi rule. Tactically speaking, al-Qaeda appears bent on carrying out such operations periodically, largely to demonstrate to its supporters in the kingdom that it can strike at will and at points of its own choosing. In this sense, the selection of the US Consulate contains a huge symbolic message.
Three powerful forces operate on the Saudi rulers today. The first one is related to Wahhabism. The aforementioned compact of 1745 obligates them to remain loyal to the ideals of Islamic purity delineated by Wahhabism. That is not a problem if the doctrine of militant jihad is not applied on the Saudi government itself. Any attack on the Saudi government and its personnel becomes a violation of the spirit and letter of the compact. The second force operating on the Saudi government is the United States. In this instance, the pressure is on it for moderation and even revision of militant jihadi doctrine in order to make it least hostile toward the US and the West, to put it rather simplistically. The third force is al-Qaeda, which is the product of Saudi political and social milieu. Yet its global vision is heavily influenced by the militant doctrine of jihad promoted enthusiastically by Washington in the 1980s in order to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden received his first practical lessons on Islam's role and place in the world in Pakistan and Afghanistan during that decade.
Saudi rulers' own perspectives regarding militant jihad were largely focused on expelling the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s. After that, the major purpose of their political and religious activities in Central Asia, or even in such countries as Indonesia and the Philippines, was to promote Wahhabi Islam, not necessarily militant jihad.
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the US started an era when Saudi Arabia was eventually forced to revisit its lackadaisical approach toward militant jihad. Since the US became a victim of it, it also demanded a major doctrinal revision of it. However, it is easier said than done. The doctrine of militant jihad is not something that can be tinkered with at will, or supported/opposed based on changing political objectives and realities.
As the US and Saudi bureaucrats argue and bicker over these legal issues, al-Qaeda seems bent on operating on the basis of its own version of global jihad, whose two chief purposes are to overthrow the Saudi government and continue to harm the US, its citizens and its assets anywhere and everywhere. The Saudi-al-Qaeda conflict, though it has not yet reached its final stage, has undeniably reached a point of no return. It will have to result either in the eradication of al-Qaeda or the end of the Saudi regime. No one knows that better than the Saudi government.
ATIMES.COM

In the first day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree. Not knowing Osama's address, Rummy hastened to 'Potamia--and a mess, exhorting his pal Cheney,
"Let's bomb Baghdad again, golly gee!"
On the second day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me two dead-ender turtle doves (Colin and Kofi), flowers and chocolates from the ninny Chalabi, and a billion Arabs mad at me.
On the third day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me three French henpeckers and imaginary W.M.D. And 300 tons of lost explosives going BOOM! everywhere.
Rummy tried for a Vin Diesel movie, when he should have heeded General Shinseki.
On the fourth day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me four cuckoo birds--Wolfie, Perle, Feith and Condi.
The cost of empire on the cheap will be steep.
How did Rummy get a job guarantee?
On the fifth day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me five Pentagon rings.
Rummy wanted to go down in history by transforming the military. But many G.I.'s feel cheated, that their forces and matŽriel are depleted.
Stop Loss and Stuff Happens, by Jiminy!
On the sixth day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me six German shepherds teeth a- baring.
A hooded man attached to wires, Abu Ghraib and Army liars, Red Cross in the dark about dogs that liked to bark.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me regime change that wasn't free, our troops sitting ducks for I.E.D. (Improvised Explosive Devices, dear me) Rummy is another sort of I.E.D. (Instant Excuses for Disaster,
"I'm an old man, don't you see?")
On the eighth day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me eight Osama videotapes.
The Bushie fever with Saddam left Osama free to scram. Invading Iraq was an Xmas gift for bin Laden--a recruiting lift.
On the ninth day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me Iran and North Korea on a nuclear buildup spree.
Nine mullahs a-proliferating, as our military's straining.
The Bushies were fixated on Iraq, but Saddam's weapons were merely the mock.
On the tenth day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me ten Gitmo lawyers a-leaping.
What cares he about civil liberty?
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me eleven generals a-hyping that the war is just dandy, while our spooks are warning that civil war and theocracy are a-borning as the Kid in the Oval feels free to consult a Higher Authority.
Burkas, turbans and beards you'll see after the puppet Allawi.
Maureen Dowd
NYTIMES.COM