PALO ALTO, CALIF.
A year ago, a group of terrorists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked the United States using box cutters as their weapons and citing extremist versions of Islamic fundamentalism as their cause.

Today, the Bush administration and Congress are focused almost solely on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, with almost no reference whatsoever to his ideology.

This narrow focus has only a loose relationship to the grander vision of "securing freedom's triumph" that President Bush has outlined as the mission of American foreign policy in the new millennium.

As currently framed, the debate about Iraq has produced three dangerous distortions. First, the discussion has confused the means-ends relationship between weapons of mass destruction and regime change. Suddenly, both hawkish Republicans and antiwar Democrats now have asserted that the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is the new paramount objective in the war on terrorism.

For the hawks, regime change is the means to achieving this objective. Those less eager to go to war assert that this same goal can be achieved by other means, such as sending in the weapons inspectors or even by a surgical strike against weapons facilities.

Both sides of this debate are focused on the wrong objective. Regime change – democratic regime change – must be the objective. If over the next years and decades, a democratic regime consolidates in Iraq, then it will not matter to the United States if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not.

Does anyone in the United States know how many weapons of mass destruction the British or French have? Does anyone even lose much sleep over the fact that Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons and launch vehicles capable of reaching the US in a matter of minutes?

Specialists are rightly worried about the safety and security of Russian weapons, but most Americans no longer make plans for what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. It was not a robust nonproliferation regime, coercive weapons inspections, or a preemptive war against the Soviet Union that produced this shift in our attitudes about Russia's weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was regime change in the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Someday, the same will be true in Iraq. Israel already destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons program once in 1981, delaying but not eliminating the threat. The real objective of any strategy toward Iraq, therefore, must be the creation of a democratic, market-oriented, pro-Western regime.

The singular focus on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – not unlike the misplaced focus on arms control during the cold war – prevents the US from pursuing a grander strategy that could secure the more important objective of democratic regime change. Moreover, many of the means for achieving this objective are nonmilitary by nature, an aspect forgotten in the discussion.

A second distorting consequence of the current debate is that we have become obsessed with one leader, one country, and one category of weapons, none of which were involved directly in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Iraqi dictatorship (and not simply President Hussein) is certainly part of the problem, but Iraq cannot be the only front of the war on terrorism. In fact, victories on other fronts could create momentum for the Iraqi regime's demise. Ronald Reagan's strategy for defeating communism did not begin with a military invasion of the Soviet Union, but rather aimed first to roll back communism in peripheral places like Poland, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Imagine how isolated Hussein would be if democratic regimes took hold in Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan.

A third distortion of the debate is the near silence about the kind of regime the Bush administration plans to help build in Iraq after the war. The Bush administration is busy making the case against Hussein, but has devoted much less attention to outlining the plan for a new regime in Iraq. Will it be one state or three, a federal or unitary state, governed by the US or the United Nations? How many decades will occupation last?

We need to have the same "frenzied" debate about Iraq's reconstruction that is now being devoted to Iraq's deconstruction. A serious discussion of the postwar regime in Iraq will help inspire support in Congress, the international community, and within Iraq. Now is the time to be concrete about future blueprints.

To be credible, the message of change must also be directed at other dictators in the region. The probabilities of fanatics coming to power in Pakistan and using weapons against American allies are greater than the probabilities of Hussein doing the same.

Without reform, revolution in Saudi Arabia is just as likely as an Iranian attack on American allies. Failure to define a grand strategy of transformation in the region will condemn American soldiers to fighting new dictators like Hussein over and over again.

At the Gleneagles summit in July 2005, the heads of state from the G-8 countries - the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom - called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the African Development Bank to cancel 100 percent of their debt claims on the world's poorest countries. The world's richest countries have agreed in principle to forgive roughly $55 billion dollars owed by the world's poorest nations. This article considers the wisdom of the proposal for debt forgiveness, from the standpoint of stimulating economic growth in highly indebted countries. In the 1980s, debt relief under the "Brady Plan" helped to restore investment and growth in a number of middle-income developing countries. However, the debt relief plan for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) launched by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1996 has had little impact on either investment or growth in the recipient countries. We will explore the key differences between the countries targeted by these two debt relief schemes and argue that the Gleneagles proposal for debt relief is, at best, likely to have little effect at all. Debt relief is unlikely to help the world's poorest countries because, unlike the middle-income Brady countries, their main economic difficulty is not debt overhang, but an absence of functional economic institutions that provide the foundation for profitable investment and growth. We will show that debt relief may be more valuable for Brady-like middle-income countries than for low-income ones because of how it leverages the private sector.

The book is intended for a wide audience and has been written in a style which is readily accessible to people from many different disciplines.

Cappelen Akademisk Forlag (a leading Norwegian Publisher) are pleased to announce the publication of a new and highly challenging book on the rise of New Public Financial Management (NPFM) reforms. Edited by Olov Olson, James Guthrie and Christopher Humphrey, the book is the outcome of a unique two year collaborative project involving 24 senior accounting academics from eleven different countries, including Australia, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States of America. The book is intended for a wide audience and has been written in a style which is readily accessible to people from many different disciplines. As John Meyer, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, observes in his foreword to the book: "This book is about the rise and international impact of a social movement trying to reform public management around the world along rational and rationalistic lines. The roots of the movement are in professional accounting, especially in the private sector, and has gained considerable force in the last two decades, and has had widespread effects on the ways public organizations are perceived, on policies governing them, and sometimes on organizational practices.

In 1992, a year before his death, Yasusuke Murakami published in Japanese An Anti-Classical Political-Economic Analysis: A Vision for the Next Century (English translation, Stanford, 1996). A work that distilled decades of research and thought by a distinguished economic theorist turned social scientist and philosopher, it sold more than 25,000 copies in Japan despite its highly scholarly nature. The book enjoyed such immediate recognition because it offered a sanguine vision for the community of nations and because Murakami's vision was supported by acute insights on, and seminal analyses of the crucial issues relating to economic growth, equality, peace, and cultural diversity we face at the end of the twentieth century.

This volume presents nine essays - by five political scientists, three economists, and a historian - that critically evaluate the vision and analyses in Murakami's book by focusing on his two key contributions. The first is "polymorphic liberalism," a new type of liberalism that reflects the needs of both developed and developing economies and the realities of the diversity of cultures; the second is "developmentalism," a long-term, multifaceted policy intervention in catch-up economic growth. The volume also contains, as appendixes, two essays that further a more complete understanding of Murakami's book: a brief summary of Murakami's "new economics," his replacement for neoclassical economics, and a discussion of England as the first developmentalist success.

All the essays deal, in one way or another, with Murakami's answers to such questions as: What new world order must be created to best provide peace and security to nations? What shared beliefs or principles can help evolve this new world order that is menaced by regional wars and serious international confrontations caused by political, economic, and ethnic-cultural conflicts? How will the character of industrialization change, and what must we do to best respond to changes that are likely to increase political and economic interdependence among nations? And what roles must the United States, the European Union, and Japan play to secure world peace, to maintain an orderly international trade regime, and to reduce disparity in nations' income and wealth?

On 26-27 January 1996, the National Endowment for Democracy's International Forum for Democratic Studies and the Pacific Council on International Policy convened a one-and-a-half-day conference on democratic development and economic growth in East Asia and Latin America. The conference sought to shed light on the relationship between constructing democratic governance and building market economies in both regions.Participating in the meeting were 18 eminent scholars from Asia, Latin America, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Not all participants were able to attend the second day's morning session. About 30 additional scholars, business and community leaders, and members of the press attended as observers. Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, gave the luncheon address. (Names in italics in this report are identified in the appendix.)

This report summarizes the presentations and comments made during the conference. While every effort has been made to portray accurately the range of opinions expressed, space and organizational considerations have required omissions and paraphrasing. This report was written by Chappell Lawson, a graduate student in political science at Stanford University, and edited by the International Forum for Democratic Studies and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Any errors in fact or interpretation should be attributed to the author and editors.

The conference and this report were made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to the International Forum for Democratic Studies and grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the General Service Foundation, and the James Irvine Foundation to the Pacific Council on International Policy. The funders do not take responsibility for any statements or views expressed in this document. The views expressed in this report do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Forum for Democratic Studies, or the Pacific Council on International Policy. Photocopies may be made. When using any part of this document, please cite the International Forum for Democratic Studies and the Pacific Council on International Policy. This report was produced by Debra Liang-Fenton, Conferences & Publications Coordinator of the International Forum.