Lianne George: Ikea: Swedish for invincible

It's a bright Tuesday afternoon in Canton, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, where at least 150 people have skipped out on work to partake in the most hotly anticipated local event in recent memory. Some of the group -- from Grand Rapids, Toledo, Windsor and beyond -- have been here camping out since Sunday night. They've erected dozens of multicoloured tents and lined them up along the periphery of an enormous concrete building. They've brought portable stereo systems, laptops, plastic tables, coolers, books, blankets, Xboxes, dogs, and babies. Only 18 hours until the main event which, given the level of anticipation, might well be a Bob Seger concert or a Christian rock convention. Instead, it's something twice as good: the grand opening of the world's 236th Ikea store, the first one in the state of Michigan.

Ikea store inaugurations are fun-filled, family-friendly and choreographed to within an inch of their lives. By 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, thousands of people are wrapped around the building. In the parking lot, a DJ is spinning Love Train by the O'Jays, while Ikea staff distribute Frisbees, visors, and umbrellas, until yellow and blue permeate every corner of the crowd -- like a little piece of Sweden carved out right here in Canton. A balloon artist makes hats and animals for the kids. Mrs. Michigan 2006, in a brocade suit and an oversized tiara, waves metronomically at the crowd. "I'm a big fan, too, and I can't wait to get inside," she says. There is a live band, a Billy bookcase-building contest, a Swedish log-cutting ceremony, and the singing of the U.S. and Swedish national anthems. At 9 a.m., the doors finally open. People are literally dancing into the showroom.

Ikea is not so much a furniture store as it is an economic and cultural phenomenon. While other retailers have to scheme and kowtow to lure shoppers, Ikea only has to plunk itself down in some remote locale and its devotees will make pilgrimages, travelling for hours, just to join the throngs. In 2004, when Ikea opened its first store in Saudi Arabia, over 20,000 people turned up, inciting riots and ultimately resulting in the deaths of three men who were trampled. In early 2005, when the company opened its largest U.K. store in north London, the crowd, eager for a crack at a discounted leather sofa, quickly turned violent and sent six to the hospital.

But here in Canton, despite the 40-odd police officers surveying the scene, the mood is one of elation. Inside, dozens of staffers, in their blue-and-yellow uniforms, welcome customers with noisemakers, cheering and hooting and doling out high-fives. Salespeople hand out big yellow shopping bags and Ikea catalogues (there are 160 million copies printed in 25 different languages each year). Colourful signage lays out the rules of Ikea's unique shopping system: the golf pencils, the shopping lists, the information tags, the self-serve warehouse. First-time customers -- or "Ikea Virgins," as company insiders call them -- are overwhelmed by the prices. "Look at this sink," gushes one middle-aged woman. "Twenty-nine bucks! For my mud room! I gotta tell Virgil to come here."

Shoppers the world over complain about the quality of Ikea merchandise, the crowded parking lots, and the incomprehensible assembly instructions, and yet the global appetite for the retailer is insatiable. Ikea currently has more than 90,000 employees, in 34 countries. Last year, international sales of the privately held company topped US$18.3 billion, up 17 per cent over 2004. For millions of shoppers -- whether in North America, Europe, Asia, or the Middle East -- fumbling with an Allen key to assemble a Lack chipboard coffee table ($19.99), or a Dunö floor lamp ($44.99), has become a rite of passage, and a unifying experience, particularly among students and young families. Online, there are Ikea fan sites, where enthusiasts -- called "Tokigs" (Swedish for fans) -- compare notes, gush over new products, and lobby for Ikea stores in their home city, state or country. "They're so dominant in that particular field that they really are a category killer," says Toronto-based retail analyst Richard Talbot of Talbot Consultants International. Even if there were a credible competitor on the horizon, he says, "there's really not much room for anybody else." Ikea may well be the perfect 21st-century brand.

At 311,000 square-feet -- with 56 room settings and three full model homes -- the Canton store is "mid-sized" by Ikea standards, according to store manager Mark McCaslin. In some ways, Ikea outlets are not unlike casinos -- they're a totally immersing experience. Stores provide no windows, no easy escape hatches, and continuous waves of sensory information. The showrooms are designed to keep consumers on the move along a carefully charted pathway. As long as they follow the arrows on the floor, they will potentially see everything on offer. "Whether you're in Beijing or Sydney or Stockholm or Canton, it's the same products, the same store concept," says Ikea's public affairs director Joseph Roth. All around the store, there is evidence of the company's unrelenting "Swedephilia." Ikea relies on there being something inherently non-threatening -- and wholesome and sensible -- about the Swedes. Instead of trying to be all things to all people like so many other brands, Ikea is Swedish. To all people. Products are assigned Scandinavian proper names -- kitchens are named for boys, bedrooms for girls, beds for Swedish cities, and bathrooms for Norwegian lakes. (Some products vary slightly from one country to the next. For instance, a children's desk originally named Fartful -- Swedish for "speedy" -- didn't hit the right note in the English-speaking world.) Ikea restaurants dish out more than 150 million Swedish meatballs a year. And in Smaland, which they've named the kids' play area, kids can jump in "lingonberry balls" and hide behind giant clogs. One can imagine the warehouse staffed by woodland nymphs.

Watching Ikea Virgins examine the merchandise is a study in consumer anthropology. The fact that there is no sales staff hovering means that people's customary shopping inhibitions diminish a little. They're encouraged to test the mattresses, lie down, touch everything. "We're not jumping on you," says McCaslin. "If you're looking at a sofa, no one's jumping on you to say, 'Do you want to take this home today?' You can sit on it, play on it for an hour if you want to. We encourage you to ask us if you have questions. And there are information booths around." Kids can roam as they please, so parents are free to become fully absorbed in the bright and cozy individual room settings, scooping up two-dollar vases and other life props they didn't know they needed. In its first five days, the Ikea Canton store welcomed some 100,000 people, an impressive feat considering the entire population of Canton is only 83,000.

Ikea devotion stems as much from the constancy of the brand as anything else. Perhaps no other company has been as single-minded in its vision and as innovative in its execution. Ikea was the first truly global lifestyle brand -- the first to attempt to coordinate everything in your life from your Mörkedal bed to your Linjär kitchen cabinets and your Skänka saucepan -- setting the stage for style gurus like Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. "Ikea was first to do it as a one-stop shop from the beginning," says Talbot,"whereas Roots, for example, really started in leather goods, but then expanded into lower-end fashion and things like vitamins, furnishings and even an airline. The problem is that when you say Roots, you think leather stuff. It's tough to push brands around. But Ikea started out that way from day one. That's brilliant." And unlike other value-priced home outfitters, like Wal-Mart or Target, who sell products that shoppers could quite easily find elsewhere, Ikea brand products are exclusive to its stores.

Ikea was also the first to democratize interior design by demanding high-style products that anyone could conceivably afford. "Any architect can design a desk that will cost 5,000 krona," founder Ingvar Kamprad once wrote. "But only the highly skilled can design a good, functional desk that will cost 100 krona." As such, in many cases, the company's designers will start with a price point first. "It can be as simple as, 'We would like a 50 cent glass. How can we make it?' " says McCaslin, who has been with the company since 1998. "And then we ask, 'How can we produce the volume so we can continue to sell it for 50 cents?' " At any given time, the stores carry about 10,000 products, 20 per cent of which are replaced with new designs each year. "In some cases, like with textiles, we might change six times a year," says McCaslin. "Our textile business has become more timely to keep up with what the new fashion trend may be."

Ikea's philosophy of stringent economy is reflected everywhere in the store, but especially in the products themselves. The design is always simple, with straight, clean lines. In Scandinavia, the theory goes, daylight and space are at a premium. The native design is therefore conceived to brighten up interiors and make the best possible use of available space. Because of its pared-down, minimalist pieces, Ikea furniture is aesthetically dummy-proof. No matter what you buy -- whether it's from Ikea's "young Swede," "country," "traditional Scandinavian" or "modern" collection -- you are guaranteed it won't look offensive. In fact, its top-selling items -- including the Glimma tea lights and the Billy bookcase -- are among its most unremarkable. "I think in Canada, Ikea has been a huge taste-shifter," says Canadian furniture designer Patty Johnson, who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design. "In some ways, it's sort of brought residential furniture design to the fore, but it's also infantilized people. They make it seem so easy and complete, and I think they feed into the North American taste of wanting things immediately. There's no sense of building something over time or buying a few good pieces and waiting. They've branded themselves as being good taste, but they don't explain why. And design sort of remains enigmatic to people."

Still, revenue growth suggests that shoppers are more than willing to defer to Ikea's all-encompassing approach to style. To date, no other retailer has effectively managed to mimic Ikea's no-frills aesthetic. And even if someone were to create a knock-off concept, they almost certainly couldn't compete with Ikea's pricing. Ensuring its customers the lowest possible price is built into every decision Ikea makes. Designers, for example, have learned to save on production by sourcing cheap, unconventional materials. In the early days, according to British writer Elen Lewis, author of Great Ikea! A Brand for All the People, "there are stories of Kamprad visiting wood factories and examining the offcuts to see what could be made from them." In the late '60s, the company introduced its first sofa made of a particleboard base. Another sofa, designed in 1985, was produced at a cut rate by a shopping cart manufacturer that made its wire framework. "In the 1990s," Lewis writes, "Ikea sold one line of picture frames fashioned out of rubber cuts from a Volvo factory."

Ikea also revolutionized distribution -- one of the most costly components of any retail business -- with the advent of flat-packing technology, which helps it save on transportation costs by fitting more products onto a pallet. "We lower our prices every year, because every year we do more volume," says McCaslin, strolling through the Canton showroom. "For instance, when I opened the Chicago store in '98, this pack of Boomerang hangers was $8.50. Now, it's $3.49. We practise reverse inflation." This, according to Ikea's own internal mythology, is just one of the benefits of being a privately held company. "If we were a public company, we would probably charge $8.50, because that's what we could get," he says. "But this way, we can go into Russia, where we may not make money for a long time, but it's the right thing to do. We're there to help those families make a better everyday life for the many."

The final, and perhaps most important piece of the Ikea puzzle is its retail concept. To begin with, the company saves millions on real estate by purchasing enormous plots of land outside major cities. Beyond that, they rely heavily on shoppers' initiative -- to travel the distance to the store, to locate merchandise with little help, to load heavy pieces into their own cars, and to assemble the products themselves at home. Signs around the store provide feel-good reminders that all of the manual labour helps keep the prices down. Customers can feel that they are pouring their sweat into something beneficial for their families, their wallets, and in some obscure way, the earth. To top it off, they're invited to reward themselves with a delicious 50-cent Ikea hot dog on their way out. "There was a theory inside the company that Ikea is good for people's sex lives," says Lewis, "because it's about the man being able to regain his hunter-gatherer instincts in a modern world of equality. So his manly instincts drive him to put furniture together and be perceived in a different, more traditional light than is normal in his home."

The Ikea philosophy and aesthetic seems to have sprung, fully formed, from the mind of its founder, 80-year-old Ingvar Kamprad, in the early '40s. Kamprad started the company -- named for his initials, plus the farm (Elmtaryd) and the village (Agunnaryd) in southern Sweden where he grew up -- at the age of 17. Originally, Ikea was a catalogue-based company, which sold fountain pens, wallets, watches and other home accessories via mail order. In 1953, Kamprad opened the first Ikea retail store among the lakes and forests of Almhult, which still functions as Ikea's corporate nerve centre. His concept spread quickly because of his steadfast devotion to the lowest price. Despite accumulating an estimated personal fortune of US$53 billion, Kamprad is notoriously, perhaps pathologically cheap. In Great Ikea!, Elen Lewis enumerates some of the many popular myths about Kamprad: that he recycles his tea bags, that he drives a rusted out Volvo, and that, when he takes a drink from a hotel mini-bar, he replaces it with another he buys at the supermarket at a much lower price.

By extension, Ikea corporate culture is rabidly anti-extravagance. "Once and for all, we have decided to side with the many," Kamprad wrote in 1976 in a quasi-Maoist document he titled "The Testament of a Furniture Dealer." Staff of all levels are expected to travel economy class, stay in cheap motels and, whenever possible, use public transportation. Observers have long inferred a fascistic quality in its corporate structure, Lewis notes, ranging from the heavy-seeming ideological indoctrination of its employees, to the uniforms they wear, to the fact that every single one of them, regardless of rank, is a "co-worker." In this sense, they are not unlike mammoth U.S. retailer Wal-Mart, with its reliance on massive suburban stores, parsimonious corporate culture, and obsession with low prices.

And yet, while Wal-Mart is widely reviled and seen as emblematic of the tyranny of mass retailing, Ikea strolls merrily along, the lovable Swedish cousin to America's ravenous corporate invader. In 1994, after Kamprad was discovered to have attended Nazi party meetings in Sweden in the late '40s, he delivered a weepy public apology. He begged forgiveness, which evidently was granted, proving once again that Ikea is a Teflon brand. Nothing sticks to it: not the founder's Nazi past or his admitted alcoholism. Not even the company's Byzantine financial structure, which a recent Economist article paints as an elaborate scheme to avoid paying corporate taxes.

Anti-globalization activists denounce Nike and McDonald's for cultural imperialism -- for standardizing taste and destroying regional customs by economic force of will. Yet Ikea manages to hover under the radar, even as it grows quickly and quietly around the world like a weed. Ikea, after all, is the people's furniture company -- a democratic, demographic-spanning force that, on the surface, opposes principles of greed and waste that taint other corporations. While retailers like Starbucks colonize urban landscapes by opening a franchise on every corner, Ikea's stores exist, by necessity, on the periphery of cities. Ikea doesn't even advertise very much since Kamprad reportedly sees it as a waste of money. Instead, the brand engenders a sort of universal affection, much of which stems from the company's forcefully trumpeted Swedish heritage.

In fact, it's likely that Ikea's success is rooted in its own elaborate, ingenious set of contradictions. It is democratic in that it provides the illusion of choice (of mixing and matching), and yet its dominance has meant that personal taste at home has never been so homogenous. The company is sprawling, and yet it retains its "little guy" charm. And it is celebrated as a "green" company even though it virtually created the concept of disposable furniture, in the same way H&M and Zara have popularized disposable fashion. If a person tires of her Ikea room, she can just toss it all out and start again for as little as $1,000. "I think the design quotient is very, very high," says designer Patty Johnson, "but I think sometimes the quality is lacking. Ikea products are so pared-down, so minimal in some ways. But at the same time, they kind of stand out because of their cheapness. As someone who, in my practice, has always aimed to design and make things of very high-quality, that have a kind of longevity, I guess I have a problem with that. You wouldn't pass it down along generations. It wouldn't make it to the next generation." Which, if you're Ikea, is the beauty of it.

August 08, 2006

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20060814_132020_132020

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Brian D. Johnson: Oliver Stone finds redemption in the ruins

As a photographer prepares to shoot Oliver Stone in a Toronto hotel room, his personal groomer is issuing specific instructions on just how he should be lit. She says photographers are always trying to make the director look dark and moody, but his new movie, World Trade Center, is so uplifting that he should be shown "in a positive, hopeful light." It's easy to see how the 60-year-old filmmaker -- with his heavy-set features, jet-black hair and overbearing eyebrows -- could be typecast as a force of darkness. Over the course of a career that includes such landmarks as Platoon, Wall Street, JFK and Nixon, Stone has acquired a reputation for making unsubtle dramas thick with political conspiracy. And initially, the notion of an Oliver Stone picture called World Trade Center made a lot of people nervous -- including Michael Peña, who stars as one of two cops trapped in the rubble of the twin towers, and Scott Strauss, the NYPD officer who helped rescue Peña's character in real life. Strauss says that when he first heard Stone was making the movie, "I was right away, 'Uh oh!' Red flags were popping up everywhere. This is not going to be good."

But both Peña and Strauss -- in Toronto last week with Stone to promote the movie -- changed their minds. And with good reason. World Trade Center is not a conspiracy thriller, nor does it carry a political message. It's a heroic tale of survival scrupulously based on the true story of two New York Port Authority cops, Will Jimeno (Peña) and John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage), who were buried in debris when the towers collapsed. The action cuts between a pocket in the rubble, where the men are trapped, and the outside world, where their wives cling to hope. The film plays as grand Hollywood epic with a swelling score. From rhapsodic scenes of Manhattan coming to life in the dawn light of Sept. 11 to horrific vistas of devastation, there's an operatic sense of spectacle. But Stone's approach is more delicate than might be expected. We don't see a plane hitting the twin towers, just its shadow sweeping over the windows of a midtown skyscraper.

World Trade Center is radically different from United 93, the recent film about the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania -- an ensemble drama shot with such documentary realism you forget you're watching a movie. WTC never lets you forget. As events unfolded on Sept. 11, everyone kept saying it was like a movie, and now that response comes full circle: WTC is a cross between a disaster picture and an old-fashioned combat drama, framed as a heroic memorial.

"United 93 was a brilliant cinéma-vérité," says Stone. "This is a more traditional Hollywood movie. You get involved with four characters. It's like a Wyler movie, or a Ford or a Capra." The director, whose voice has the honeyed timbre of a late-night deejay, is accustomed to defending himself. "I've been pigeonholed as a conspiracy theorist, and even worse, someone fabricating history, which I really resent," he says. "Movie after movie, we've tried to get the truth based on the facts. And we've been killed for it. The harder you try, the more you get killed. The irony of my career is that I probably tried the hardest on Alexander to be the most accurate to history. I got kudos from scholars, and we got killed by critics."

This film may represent a redemption. Two decades after Platoon tried to cauterize the wounds of Vietnam, WTC aims to do the same for 9/11. "If we were raped that day," says Stone, "and if we've created armour around ourselves out of fear, the best place to start is with the day itself. You go to the psychiatrist, he says to you, 'Who raped you, how did it happen?' Relive the day and start the process of getting over the fear."

But Stone made Platoon 18 years after the war had ended; 9/11 is a much fresher trauma. Yet he insists it's not too soon. "I think it's way too late," he says. "Five years after Cambodia, they did The Killing Fields. That was very powerful. You shouldn't wait too long. People forget, memories are fractured. I had 60 cops and firemen out there fighting over who did what. There was practically a mutiny on the set because the firemen said, 'We saved John.' If they made World Trade Center in a few years, it might be a completely different movie. With Pearl Harbor you'd think we won the damn battle the way it was photographed. That's what happens when you get Pentagon approval. You distort history."

Commemorating the deadliest assault on America since Pearl Harbor, WTC plays like a war movie, right down to its final dedication to "those who fought, died or were wounded on that day." And some of its characters treat the attack as a call to arms. But Stone says it's wrong to see the rescue workers as soldiers, or to appropriate their heroism for the war on terror, as the Bush administration has done.

Strauss, who's portrayed onscreen by Stephen Dorff, does not concur. He felt like he was fighting a war. "We had a city to protect," says the former NYPD officer -- a charismatic figure with a crisp military manner and clear blue eyes the calibre of Paul Newman's. "We were under attack. The Marines weren't stationed in Lower Manhattan. It was us. It was the New York City cops or nobody. We had the machine guns, we had the sniper rifles. We were gearing up for hand-to-hand combat, 'cause we didn't know what was going to happen next. There were fighter jets flying over us. We didn't know if they were ours. We didn't know what was happening in the rest of New York, or the rest of the world."

The rescue work was "incredibly dangerous all day long," adds Strauss, who admits he was "petrified" when he climbed through the hole in the rubble to reach Will Jimeno. The passage was so tight, the policeman had to leave his gear behind. "I took my gun belt off and passed it back and I said goodbye to my wife and kids in my mind. I didn't think I was coming out. We were going in to die. But if it cost us our lives, it cost us our lives. You had to go in. There was no turning back."

Jimeno and McLoughlin were among just 20 trapped responders who were pulled out of the debris alive. On a rescue mission in the concourse of the World Trade Center, they became victims themselves when the south tower collapsed. The men spent 24 hours buried beneath six metres of rubble, seriously injured. With them was Jimeno's partner, Dominick Pezzulo, who was initially unhurt. As he struggled to free Jimeno, the second tower collapsed and Pezzulo was crushed by a slab of concrete. Moments before he died, Pezzulo told Jimeno he loved him and discharged his firearm overhead in the hope someone might hear. Pinned under debris, Jimeno and McLoughlin couldn't see each other, but they could talk. And that's what they did to keep from fading away as night fell.

The reality of the hole was worse than it looks in the movie, says Strauss. "Will was much more tightly compacted. He looked like he'd been poured out of a dump truck. We had to twist ourselves around I-beams and debris to get to him." Pointing to the legs of a small coffee table in the hotel room, Strauss says he had to crawl through openings no wider than that. "We were choking on dust and smoke. There were times when I was on top of Will and couldn't see him." But when Strauss complained to the film crew that the set didn't look grim enough, they told him, "Nobody's going to look at a black screen."

When your two leads have to spend most of the movie buried in a hole acting from the neck up, it poses a challenge. "This was not an easy film," says Stone. "This is two heads in a jar. Originally it was too much hole. We cut it down to 35 minutes of hole. And we put more light in. You don't want to oppress the audience. You have to live with a manageable tension."

The movie breaks the claustrophobic gloom by cutting to the anguished wives (played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal) and their families. "We created antidotes to the hole," says Stone. "The movie is a battle between light and dark. The men are slipping into the dark, into Hades, and the light is what brings them back. The wives are living in the light. But the wives die in their own cages at home, in these houses, which become like holes as the light closes down and the day runs out. Those two wives had to accept that their husbands were not coming home."

Some of the movie's most improbable scenes are based on fact, such as Jimeno's vision of a glowing Jesus holding a bottle of water. And the story of how the two men were found is stranger than fiction. Dave Karnes, a former Marine from Connecticut, digs out his old uniform, gets a fresh buzz cut from the barber, drives his Porsche to Ground Zero, bluffs his way through the barricades and starts combing the ruins with a flashlight after many of the rescuers have given up for the night. As portrayed by Michael Shannon in the movie, Karnes comes across as a vigilante GI Joe action figure -- a born-again Christian soldier who says things like "We're going to need some good men out there to avenge this." Stone says he had to resist pressure to cut that line. "But he represents a significant amount of the American population's reaction to this event, which is revenge."

After previewing the movie, the filmmakers put a postscript in the credits to indicate that Karnes actually existed. "People thought we added the Marine story to hype up the movie," says Stone. "But when you see the guy, he is larger than life. He would be regarded as a nutbag by some. But he found them. There was something weird about this whole story. It's like a movie. It cries to be told. And it would be a crime not to tell it."

But for some people, it was the other way around. Dominick Pezzulo's widow accused Jimeno and McLoughlin of cashing in on the tragedy by selling their story to Paramount. And she accused Paramount of exploiting her husband's death with a graphic scene of him being crushed by debris -- the studio softened the scene after her protests. Controversy also erupted last year when Gyllenhaal said that America was "responsible in some way" for the 9/11 attacks.

With some reluctance, Stone expressed similar views in our interview. But as a filmmaker for once he has resisted the role of provocateur. Pulled in by the power of a strong story -- based on testimony far more tangible than the phantoms of history that swirl through Nixon and JFK -- he finally lets drama trump politics, and surrenders to the most elemental form of Hollywood myth-making. Ironically, he's made a movie that might be equally appreciated by George W. Bush and Michael Moore. Which raises a point: as a monument to American heroism, could WTC bolster the pro-Iraq war sentiments that Stone finds so regrettable?

"Well, that's exactly the question," says Stone. "That's the divide. Platoon could be misunderstood the same way. Certain people could use this movie to say we have to fight the war. But that's not what it says. If we look at the world today, five years later, the consequences of that day are far worse than that day. More people have died worldwide from terror. If we behave a certain way abroad, there's going to be payback. We have public beheadings on video, a climate of fear, enormous debt, a basic undermining of the American constitution. That's another movie."

In fact, Canadian Paul Haggis (Crash) is preparing to direct a film based on Against All Enemies, the bestselling exposé of pre-9/11 misinformation by former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke. It's exactly the kind of conspiracy tale you would expect to wind up as an Oliver Stone movie. And Stone does not rule out revisiting Sept. 11 with a more provocative film: "If I find a way in, I'll do it." But for now he's out to promote an uplifting movie.

The photographer has him pose beside the hotel room window. His handler hovers right behind the camera, expressing her approval, as Stone's face is flooded with light.

http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=20060807_131472_131472

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Jonathon Gatehouse: Defiant in Lebanon

The tour starts promptly at 11 a.m. A daily half-hour dash through the ruined streets of Dahiyah, the south Beirut stronghold of Hezbollah, to inspect the latest damage inflicted by Israeli bombs. Herded by shouting bearded militants, the sweating members of the international press slip and skid over piles of rubble, past blasted-out shops and cleaved buildings. At Harat Hreik, the crossroads that used to house Hezbollah's media operations -- now an expanse of jagged concrete latticed with downed hydro wires -- two men are busy hanging a white banner from the ruins. "We will not bow down. We will not surrender. We will not give up," says its Arabic writing. The streets are filled with the dusty remnants of nearby apartments and offices: a collection of stuffed animals, an upholstered armchair, a binder of business cards, and a DVD of Disney's 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue. Hezbollah claims that it evacuated the area shortly after it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers July 12, and that none of its members have yet been killed in the bomb attacks that shake Beirut several times a day. But the stench that wafts through the neighbourhood testifies that something lies rotting under the debris.

The ringmaster for this unruly carnival, a former Montrealer named Hussein Nabulsi, keeps things moving. "We have the faith, we have the determination, we have the will to win," he shouts as the cameras and microphones struggle to keep pace. It's a tightly scripted affair. Local residents who have ventured into the danger zone to retrieve their possessions immediately have pictures of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, thrust into their hands by the watching militants. A truck piled high with Peavey speakers rolls around the corner and blasts a soundtrack of radical Islamic fight songs. And when the group starts to lag, Nabulsi screams that Israeli jets are on their way and turns heel -- exactly the same way he did before the cameras of an American network the day before. The tour ends with an invitation to return tomorrow -- same hour, same place -- and a plea. "Especially for CNN, please be on time. This is the third time you've come late."

It's an impressive show, and one that speaks volumes about Hezbollah's organizational strength. As Israeli efforts to cleanse south Lebanon of Nasrallah's radical Shia militia enter their third week, there's little evidence that the air raids, shelling, and cross-border incursions are having the desired effect. Katyusha rockets continue to rain down on the towns and cities of northern Israel where they have injured scores and killed close to 20. On the other side of the border, the civilian death toll has topped 400, as hospitals throughout Lebanon fill with the wounded, nearly half of them children. The government estimates that 750,000 people -- some 20 per cent of the country's population -- have fled their homes, and the United Nations has declared a humanitarian crisis. Yet Hezbollah's casualties are reportedly light. And even if Israel is succeeding in inflicting heavy damage on the battlefield, the group's command and control structure appears to be intact. Nasrallah surfaces almost daily for television interviews, refining his terms for a ceasefire, and serving notice to his domestic critics. "We will hold some accountable and forgive others," he told al-Jazeera.

As the fighting drags on, the emerging consensus within Lebanon is that, far from being weakened, Hezbollah may well come out of its latest skirmish with Israel stronger than ever. "If anybody thinks that the poor, frightened and displaced people of the south are going to start marching in the streets of Beirut against Nasrallah, they are kidding themselves," says Timur Goksel, who spent 24 years as a senior adviser to UNIFIL, the world body's "interim" peacekeeping force, established in 1978 and still in place along the Israeli-Lebanese border. The Hezbollah leader's modest ways, personal charisma, and above all, defiance of Israel, have won him the loyalty of the vast majority of Lebanon's 1.5 million Shias. Long disenfranchised in the country's sectarian politics, they are unlikely to abandon the only effective voice they've got.

The prospects of lasting military success against Hezbollah is perhaps even dimmer, says Goksel. "I've been watching these guys since their first days in Lebanon and I have yet to pinpoint a single base," he says. "Their weapons are kept at home and in caves. They don't have a military formation -- they come together for operations, and then they disperse." Israel tried diligently to stamp them out over its two decades of occupation. Similar bombing campaigns in 1993 and 1996 also failed. When the dust settled after the latter, nicknamed "Operation Grapes of Wrath" by the Israelis, Goksel remembers watching Hezbollah members travel from house to house in southern villages, replacing shattered doors and windows, dressed in T-shirts bearing the slogan "Medina Construction Company."

There is no question Hezbollah's actions have upended the delicate balance of Lebanon's heavily sectarian politics. But as civilian casualties climb, public anger over the timing of the group's brazen raid to kidnap the soldiers has been replaced by a general rage against Israel -- and its allies. When UN emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, met with local non-governmental organizations in Beirut, the anti-Western sentiment was palpable. "I could speak to you in English and tell you about our troubles," said one aid worker. "But that's the language of the Americans and the British -- the people who are doing this to us -- so today I will speak only in Arabic." The room filled with applause.

Reports that the United States is rushing to fulfill an Israeli order for more 5,000-lb. "bunker buster" smart bombs have not been lost on the Lebanese public, and most especially the supporters of Hezbollah. In the Christian communities in the mountains west of Beirut, where hotels and apartments that usually cater to tourists are packed with refugees from the south, the resentment is even hotter. "The bombs that are killing us were made in America. We hope that the children of Bush all get what they deserve -- death," says Johana Goune, an evacuee from Bint Jubayl, near the Israeli border. Goune and her younger children came north, leaving her husband and two older sons behind to fight. "We are all Hezbollah, men, women and children." She gestures at the dark-haired 9-month-old boy her neighbour is holding. "He will grow up and go back and fight the Israelis. We will really become terrorists now."

Karim Makdisi, a professor of political studies at the American University of Beirut, warns that the country is on the verge of the abyss. "In the matter of one week, Israel destroyed everything Lebanon has been trying to build up over the past 10 years." Billions of dollars of damage has been done to the road network, airport, power grid and other infrastructure. The tourist trade, envisioned as the panacea for the country's shaky economy, is now gone for the foreseeable future. Unemployment, already between 20 and 30 per cent, is sure to climb.

And Lebanon's only functioning national institution, the army, has been boxed into a corner. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has vowed that defence forces will engage the Israelis if they carry through on their threat to invade and take control of a wide swath along the border -- a fight the Lebanese will almost certainly lose. It's not really a matter of choice; to do otherwise is to risk splintering the army, whose ranks are 40 per cent Shia. Meanwhile, the Israelis, who continue to demand that Lebanese forces take control of the south and disarm Hezbollah, are hammering away at the very people they are asking to help. Air strikes against Lebanese bases and outposts have already killed 12 soldiers, and last week the Israelis took out a bridge in Baabda, a hilltop neighbourhood outside the capital that is home to the military headquarters, several generals and the presidential palace. "It's like the godfather putting the severed head of a horse in the bed," says Makdisi. "It's not a subtle message."

The crumpled carcass of the Mercedes sits a good 50 m up the road. Nonetheless, when the bomb sliced through the overpass, twisting the thick steel reinforcing cables into a delicate spiderweb, the heat of the explosion was enough to sear the paint off the doors. There are traces of blood on the driver's airbag, but it's hard to get a straight answer as to whether this is the spot, just outside Sidon, where 17 people died, or whether it was farther up the highway, towards the still-burning power plant. No one has much time to keep track of such things these days. "The Israelis have hit all of the water tanks, some of the petrol stations, the bridges and all of the roads out of town except one," says the mayor, Dr. Abdul Rahman Bizri. "We repaired the roads two or three times but they just kept bombing them, so we gave up."

The drive from Beirut, 45 km to the north, used to take half an hour along the new coastal highway. Now it's a three-hour trip over mountain roads clogged with refugees. There are often nine or more people packed into each dusty car. Some have extra passengers sitting in the trunk. Most of the battered vehicles have strips of white material tied to or fluttering from their windows, although the evidence suggests they function more as a placebo than a guarantee of safe passage.

The streets of the port city are lined with billboards advertising luxury boat tours to Egypt, Rhodes or Cyprus aboard the Orient Queen ("Cruise Beyond Your Dreams"). The ship was last seen ferrying 1,000 Americans at a time out of Beirut's much more secure harbour. (A clear object of envy for Canadian evacuees, who spent the better part of a week standing dockside in the hot sun waiting for a place on one of the 250-person ferries initially contracted by the federal government. Although Ottawa did later find larger vessels, the evacuation got off to a rocky start. In its first week, it moved 8,700 people, less than a quarter of the 39,000 Canadians registered with the embassy.)

It's a measure of how bad things are farther down Lebanon's coast that some 40,000 refugees have stopped in Sidon, which, while spared the brunt of the fighting, is clearly not off the Israeli military's list of targets. They fill the city's schools, sleeping 50 or 60 to a classroom. Khali Boustani and his family are camped out in the parking lot of one primary school. Their ancient Volvo no longer has its windows, blown out by the force of a bomb blast on the road out of Tyre, another 30 km down the coast. That trip, off-roading around craters, fording rivers, now takes a nerve-racking five hours, as Israeli planes buzz high above all the while. "They were shooting at our house every day," he says. "We didn't have any choice but to leave."

Inside the school, children's drawings are taped to the windows. Seven-year-old Miriam Balhas has drawn her house before -- under a smiling sun with flowers out front -- and after, being bombed by a jet with a Star of David insignia. Ola Najdi's drawing shows a tank and a body lying on the road, covered in orange flames. "It's what he saw on the way out of his village," explains a volunteer.

Dr. Ali Jaber, the region's chief medical officer, says the hospitals in Tyre and Sidon are coping the best they can with the hundreds of wounded, but are running short of medication for people with chronic illnesses like diabetes, cancer and heart disease. His bigger problem these days is finding space to the store the corpses. The morgues are full and refrigerated trucks are in short supply. The hospital in Tyre already had one mass burial last week, laying more than 100 bodies "temporarily" to rest. "We're having difficulty disposing of bodies because the families can't be contacted," says Jaber.

Many fear the chaos in the south will spread throughout the country. The sectarian rifts that led to 15 years of civil war have only lately been papered over. The kind of effort to confront and disarm Hezbollah that Israel, the U.S. and other members of the world community, including Canada, are demanding as part of any ceasefire agreement will not be accomplished without grave risk of opening up all sorts of old wounds. There are already reports of long-dormant Christian militias setting up checkpoints in the mountains.

In the 17 months since the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, and the expulsion of the occupying Syrians in the so-called "Cedar Revolution" (many locals prefer the same term as the Palestinians -- "uprising" or intifada), Hezbollah has manoeuvred skilfully, weaving itself deeply into the country's political fabric. The party now has 14 members in parliament, including two government ministers, and disavows any notion of moving Lebanon towards an Iran-like theocracy. Nasrallah has distanced himself from Damascus, without completely severing ties, and formed a strong alliance with Maronite Christian leader Gen. Michel Aoun, supporting his ambition to be the next president. (Under a 63-year-old informal agreement, Lebanon's president is Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni, and the speaker of the parliament a Shia.) Hezbollah helped re-elect long-time Druze power broker Walid Jumblatt, and even secured the re-election of Nabih Berri's -- an archrival -- as speaker. Hezbollah's price has been help in delaying efforts to take away its weapons in accordance with UN Security Council resolution 1559, and shaping the debate about the future of a "national resistance" to Israel.

What started as an effort to retrieve two kidnapped soldiers has become a much higher-stakes battle for Israel. Hezbollah's seemingly bottomless arsenal of rockets has proven that the threat the group poses to the Jewish state has not been exaggerated. And it appears that the U.S. is prepared to give Israel at least another week to try and dig them out of the hills of south Lebanon, and establish a buffer zone. "Israel is determined to continue on in the fight against Hezbollah," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said after meeting with Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state. "We will stop them. We will not hesitate to take severe measures against those who are aiming thousands of rockets and missiles against innocent civilians for the one purpose of killing them." The Bush administration continues to stress the need for an "enduring peace," a solution that will change the balance of power in Lebanon, starting with the disarmament of Hezbollah. "It is time for a new Middle East," said Rice. "It is time to say to those that don't want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail. They will not."

A senior diplomat in Beirut, who asked not to be named, says that in its own quirky way the democratic process was working. The "national dialogue" which brought the 14 main factions, including Hezbollah, to the table was in itself significant progress. Other parties are angry at the wrench that Nasrallah has thrown into the works -- they had sought and received repeated assurances that there would be no escalation -- but it's also clear that Hezbollah miscalculated the Israeli response. Feelers about a prisoner exchange with Israeli via the Germans were being extended within hours of the kidnapping.

The diplomat fears that much of Lebanon's elite -- and most especially moderate Shias -- will now flee, taking their money and the national will to compromise with them. There is confusion in the diplomatic community about the underlying goal of the hardline demands being advanced by the Bush administration and its allies. "It's hard to believe that anyone who has any kind of knowledge of the history of this region actually thinks that Hezbollah can be eliminated," says the diplomat. "And if Lebanon is scorched, who wins? For Israel to win, they have to eliminate Hezbollah. For Hezbollah to win, all they have to do is survive." A victory that would only serve to advance the interests of the Shia militia's most ardent supporter, Iran. Tehran is determined to become a dominant power in the region, and is banking on Hezbollah's continued presence in Lebanon to provide them with added leverage at the nuclear bargaining table. Sunni Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia fear that the Iranian/Hezbollah model of "resistance" could give their own restive populations ideas, which is why they have remained so silent as the bombs fall.

The growing talk about a multinational force, perhaps under the auspices of NATO, to man a buffer zone along the border with Israel may provide a way out, but many in Lebanon are skeptical. Israel's heavy response neatly illustrates a point that Hezbollah and its supporters have long been trying to make -- the country needs to have more guns, not less. The American University's Makdisi says there is no strategic advantage for Hezbollah, or the Lebanese government, to agree to disarm the group now. "They need to be around to help strengthen the Lebanese position in the ultimate peace negotiations," he says. Why agree to neuter your most feared military force until all the issues -- the border, the fate of Lebanese detainees who have been held in Israeli jails for more than two decades, and the fate of the Palestinians -- are on the table?

Such large questions mean little to the people of southern Lebanon at the moment. They simply wonder why the world community seems so unwilling to even try to put a stop to such a lopsided fight. The wards of the shiny new Rafik Hariri University Hospital in Beirut are rapidly filling with civilian casualties. Achmed Ali Saad, a 32-year-old fireman from Haris, lies in a bed hooked up to a cocktail of painkillers. He has a broken arm, shrapnel wounds and severe burns. He was trying to rescue people from a collapsed home when the Israelis dropped another bomb on the building. "I could hear children crying inside," he says. "They want to hit Hezbollah, but they can't find them, so they punish civilians."

A few doors away, Mira Ali, a 16-year-old from Lida, near the border, is recovering from shrapnel wounds and a broken right leg. She's well enough to leave the hospital, but has nowhere to go. All of her family are in the same hospital. Her father, Achmed, who is in a room a floor below, was the worst hurt, losing both his legs. Mira, who wears a hijab and learned her excellent English in high school, doesn't want to talk about Hezbollah. "I hope that the war will end. That is my only wish," she says. "I don't care who is weak and who is strong. We are all people."

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Adnan R. Khan: The back door to Tehran

Ousting leaders and replacing them with ones more friendly to American interests has been part of U.S. foreign policy for decades. It is one of the Bush administration's overarching obsessions, first in Iraq, perhaps in Syria -- and in Iran, as that country continues its push for nuclear weapons. But while the latter is in Washington's crosshairs, even more so given its involvement with Hezbollah, regime change in Iraq has proven that sometimes dictatorial power can hold a country together, while suddenly removing it risks the onset of civil war. Iran is, at least in theory, not much different. In Washington's view, though, the fundamentalist regime in Tehran must go. As Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told the Senate foreign relations committee in March: "So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear weapons program, at least clandestinely."

With negotiations aimed at halting Iran's nuclear ambitions in limbo, pending Iran's response to a package of incentives offered by the U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany, some feel time is running out. Threats of economic sanctions if Iran fails to comply, which might destabilize the regime over the long term, fail to address the concerns of a growing cadre of U.S. officials. Despite expert opinions to the contrary, including a 2005 estimate by the U.S. intelligence community concluding Iran could be up to 10 years away from acquiring enough fissile material for a bomb, many U.S. hard-liners surrounding George W. Bush are convinced the Islamic nation is very close to producing a nuclear weapon.

The consensus among this influential group is regime change, now. But how to go about it in Iran? An all-out invasion is off the table -- at least for now -- because of the quagmire the U.S. finds itself in in Iraq. A tactical military strike aimed at Iran's nuclear and security infrastructure, coupled with an internal revolt headed by opposition groups, could be an option. And the wheels may already have been set in motion. According to Seymour Hersh in a controversial article published in the April 17, 2006, issue of The New Yorker, sources inside the U.S. military say combat troops are already clandestinely operating in Iran, tagging targets for future bombing missions and buying the co-operation of local tribes.

Bush has strongly denied Hersh's allegations. But Maclean's has learned that, for some time, U.S. officials have been courting anti-regime revolutionary groups, many if not all of them ethnically based, that are operating along Iran's porous border with Iraq, encouraging them to step up their agendas.

There is no paucity of Iranian ethnic groups -- fully half of the country's population is made up of minorities -- and no shortage of rebels to choose from. But their different agendas may not include a vision for a non-fundamentalist Iran that is unified and stable. And in a region already rife with sectarian violence, pursuing a policy that might result in further ethnic strife is a dangerous game.

Sulaymaniyah, 275 km north of Baghdad near the Iranian border, is the regional headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party of Iraq's current President Jalal Talabani. In the surrounding area, a variety of anti-regime groups have been given refuge for years: the Iranian Communist, Democrat and Labour parties all have camps in the region, complete with military training facilities. All say they have been approached by the Americans.

"We meet with the Americans regularly," says Muhammad Nazif Khadiri, spokesman for the Democrats, an Iranian-Kurd party working in exile from Coya, a village approximately 150 km northwest of Sulaymaniyah. "It's no secret. We even have a presence in Washington." The party's agenda, like that of the Americans, is regime change in Iran, by any means possible. It is vague about its vision for the future. But if the party's history is any indication, a unified Iran does not figure in it: in 1946, the group orchestrated a revolt in western Iran and briefly set up a Kurdish nation that was toppled 11 months later by, ironically, the American-backed regime of the Shah.

Closer to Sulaymaniyah are the headquarters of the Iranian Labour party, also Kurdish and envisioning a loose federalist system based on ethnic lines in a future Iran. Members say they have been carrying out military operations in Iran, although they will not elaborate. And the party is blunt about its relationship with the U.S. administration. "We attended the conference in Washington at the end of May," says spokesperson Reza Kaabi, referring to a meeting of Iranian opposition groups held in the U.S. capital earlier this year. "Since that meeting, we've been considering increasing our clandestine military activities inside Iran."

Of the opposition groups that agreed to speak to Maclean's, only the Communist party said it has rejected Washington's request for assistance. "We told them we are only a political party," says secretary-general Ebrahim Alizeh. "We do keep a military wing, but its function is to keep the threat of force alive. Any military intervention in Iran, and we emphasized this to the Americans, would only benefit the current regime."

The Communists were not invited to the May conference. Other ethnic opposition groups were: the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, the Azeri-led Diplomatic Commission of Southern Azerbaijan, the Balochistan People's Party, representing the Baloch people who live mostly at the southeast border with Pakistan, and the Ahwaz Human Rights Organization, from the Arab minority in the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan. That conference promoted a united front to topple the regime, although the participants are all tight-lipped on details of what was discussed in Washington.

Now, the increased instability as a result of the nuclear standoff has provided fertile ground for agitation. Azeris, the largest of Iran's minorities, represent up to a third of the population. They hold some senior posts in the regime -- Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is Azeri. But proportionally, Azeris are still politically and economically marginalized, and the Azeri opposition has become much more vocal, with demands for autonomy and even outright secession. "The rhetoric of the Azeri minority in Iran has never been more militant than it is today," says political scientist Abbas Vali, director of the University of Kurdistan Hawler in Irbil, capital of Iraq's Kurdish region.

Azeris have even taken to the streets in violence, after a recent incident in which an Iranian newspaper cartoonist depicted them as cockroaches. Still, according to Vali, "The Azeris have too much to lose right now to be a serious threat to the Persian-led regime." But he cautions that they could become more militant. "If Iran's ethnic rivalries escalate in the future, and if the regime falls," Vali says, "they will pose a real danger to stability."

For the moment, it's the Kurdish groups, with their camps lined up along the Iranian border in Iraq, that pose the greatest threat to Iran. That's a fact the U.S. hasn't missed. The militant Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting a bloody insurgency against Turkey since the mid-1980s in the hopes of establishing a Kurdish homeland, has been using the slopes of Qandil mountain, approximately 130 km north of Sulaymaniyah, as a home base from which to launch attacks against both Turkey and Iran. The PKK is a threat to the region's territorial integrity, as it hopes to carve a Kurdish homeland out of sections of Iran, Turkey and Iraq. And the PKK has apparently been recruited by the U.S.

Rustam Joudy, one of the group's senior leaders, initially denied that. "We have nothing to do with the Americans," he said. But locals living alongside the PKK contradicted him. "The Americans were coming here regularly six months ago," said one villager. "We don't know why. The PKK leadership never talked to us about it." When confronted with such allegations, the PKK leadership drastically modified its earlier comments, admitting that they not only met U.S. representatives in the past, but that these meetings continue. "They have stopped in Qandil," a spokesman told Maclean's, "but these meetings continue in other places. As for their purpose, that's strategic. I cannot tell you why."

After repeated requests for a comment, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad issued a terse denial: "The report that U.S. government officials are meeting with PKK representatives is false." But the mere fact that the PKK and others continue to operate in Iraq shows they are of use to the U.S., says a former PKK member who would identify himself only as Raoof. "The Kurdish revolutionaries are a threat to Iraqi Kurdistan's stability as well," he says. "And yet, they are still here. If the Americans didn't have a use for these groups, they would not let them remain in Iraq."

The Kurdistan regional government (KRG) is trying to keep itself above the fray. "It's wise for the KRG to keep its distance on this issue," says one member of its parliament and a senior member of Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, requesting anonymity. "Leave it to the U.S. and Iran. The Iranians came to us to discuss the issue. We told them that it's not our problem. It's your problem. But do you think we don't know what's going on there? Of course we know." Like Raoof, he also noted that the fact that the PKK and others are still operating in Qandil reinforces the conclusion the U.S. wants them there. "Obviously there is a strategic advantage," he says. As for U.S. involvement with a group that the State Department has placed on its list of terrorist organizations, the parliamentarian says that is acceptable. "We are in a devil's circle," he concludes.

Professor Vali, for one, says that the current nuclear standoff, coupled with the U.S. strategy toward Iranian rebel groups, could be "regionally disastrous." Iran, through experience, believes that a belligerent attitude reaps more rewards. During Mohammed Khatami's moderate presidency from 1997 to 2005, the path of reform and reconciliation that Iran took, albeit slow and laboured, received little in return from the world community. Hard-line regime loyalists have learned from that. Under international pressure, they will, as they are doing now, "push the situation to the brink," Vali says. Should the antagonism between Washington and Tehran reach a tipping point, followed possibly by the collapse of the regime and the sectarian strife that is sure to follow, Vali fears a new regional conflagration. Turkey is his main concern; with a de facto Kurdish nation already established to its south in Iraq, another autonomous Kurdish region to its east in Iran would almost certainly provoke it to act, with potentially dire consequences.

Divide and conquer may be the approach the Bush administration has chosen for Iran. The problem is, that policy could end up dividing much more than it conquers.

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Luiza Ch. Savage: World War III?

In the Clinton era, Newt Gingrich was the most powerful Republican in the United States, leading his party to a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. He's been out of office for the better part of a decade now, but he still packs a punch. The former House Speaker sits on the influential Defense Policy Board, which advises Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He's even flirting with a run for president. And so it was that Gingrich was chatting with Tim Russert on Meet the Press last weekend about the escalating conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. It's more than a squabble, he said. It's much more ominous. In fact, it's the next world war.

"We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the Third World War," Gingrich declared. "And frankly, our bureaucracies aren't responding fast enough, we don't have the right attitude about this." Missile launches by North Korea, bombs in Mumbai, a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq "funded largely by Saudi Arabia and supplied largely from Syria and Iran," terrorist plots in Britain, Miami, Toronto and New York -- are all connected, in Gingrich's view. "I believe if you take all the countries I just listed, that you've been covering, put them on a map, look at all the different connectivity, you'd have to say to yourself this is, in fact, World War III. You've got to understand these dictatorships all talk to each other," he continued. "There's public footage from North Korean television of the Iranians visiting with Kim Jong Il the dictator, and a North Korean missile manufacturing facility. The Iranians have now unveiled a statue of Simón Bolívar in Tehran to prove their solidarity with Venezuela. I mean, these folks think on a global basis."

For adherents of this view, calling it a world war is not just a matter of taxonomy. It implies a course of action for the United States, if not all the West. If, for example, the current fighting between Hezbollah and Israel leads to an attack on Israel by Syria or Iran, Gingrich asserted, it should be considered an attack on the United States. "I'm saying the first step has to be to understand, this is an alliance -- Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas -- and you can't deal with it in isolation."

Perhaps testing to see whether this was merely one controversialist's off-the-cuff remark, CNN's Larry King tried the quote out on another Republican presidential contender, Arizona Senator John McCain, who serves on the armed services committee and spent years as a POW in Vietnam. McCain said he agreed with Gingrich "to some extent. I think it's important to recognize that we have terrorist organizations who are dangerous by themselves, and are now being supported by radical Islamic governments."

Gingrich and McCain were only the highest profile voices in a flurry of discussion about whether a third world war is indeed underway. "This is like Hitler taking over Czechoslovakia. That's the stage we're at right now," former CIA officer Robert Baer told CNN Headline News last week. (Baer was the inspiration for George Clooney's character in the Oscar-winning film Syriana.) American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Ledeen told Fox News on July 10 that we are in World War IV (the third having been the Cold War) and that it began with the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. The world war talk proliferated to the point that the liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, began keeping a tally on their website.

But the discussion has not been confined to talk-show sabre-rattling. Serious players in the unfolding crisis have been talking this way since long before this latest round of violence in the Middle East. Speaking to The Economist magazine in 2004, the former head of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, Efraim Halevy, said of former CIA director George Tenet: "Mr. Tenet was in office for seven years and his many successes cannot be publicly revealed. But there is one achievement of which one can speak: the rare knack he had of pulling together a genuine international effort in this third world war against Islamic terror and the proliferation of WMD."

More recently, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, told the Security Council on May 30: "Today we must sadly and emphatically state that terrorism is indeed the third world war. This is World War Three. As this is a world war, the allies should fight this axis of terror, just as 60 years ago the Allies fought the Axis." He singled out Iran, Syria and "the terror organizations they finance, harbour, nurture and support," accusing them of targeting "innocents wherever they are." The Syrian diplomat, Ahmed Alhariri, countered that if it was a world war, Israel was to blame. "The constitution of UNESCO tells us that 'wars begin in the minds of men,' and it appears that this is what is in the mind of Israel," he said.

Even U.S. President George W. Bush, who has emphasized diplomacy over confrontation in dealing with the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, has himself used the phrase. In May, referring to the passenger revolt on hijacked Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III." (The President was commenting on a Wall Street Journal essay by David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, and who called the act "our first successful counterattack in our homeland in this new global war -- World War III.")

While the WWIII discussion seems to have sprung up suddenly in the post-9/11 world of conflict and threat, the notion has a longer pedigree. During the Cold War, there was much worry that any number of proxy wars could escalate into a mutually destructive Armageddon between the superpowers. Some historians, in fact, consider the Cold War to have been the third world war. One of these was the senior French intelligence officer and author Count Alexandre de Marenches, who is also believed to have been first to suggest that international terrorism and rogue states were about to unleash the next world war. In 1992, he published The Fourth World War: Diplomacy and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism with the journalist David Andelman. It called for a "Decent People's Club" of nations to adopt a doctrine of certain destruction of extremists and dictators. The authoritative magazine Foreign Affairs felt his "extreme views" cast doubt on his judgment while running French intelligence.

It wasn't until after the attacks of Sept. 11, however, that the idea of a new world war began to receive serious consideration. Eliot Cohen, the director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, declared in the Wall Street Journal, a little more than a month after the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon, that the struggle against terrorism was more than a law-enforcement operation, and would require military conflict beyond the invasion of Afghanistan. Cohen, like Marenches, considered World War III to be history. "A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV," he wrote. "The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multi-million-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map."

Cohen was no mere ivory tower spectator. Like Gingrich, he was a member of the Defense Policy Board, and also a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group that successfully pushed for the toppling of Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq War. (Cohen, who has a son serving in Iraq, has since criticized the way the war has been carried out.)

The coming war resembles the Cold War, Cohen wrote, in that "It is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots." The invasion of Afghanistan, he said, would be "just one front in World War IV." The U.S. would have to continue to "target regimes that sponsor terrorism," beginning with the invasion of Iraq.

Cohen's use of the World War IV label was soon endorsed by James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Clinton administration, who had urged the ouster of Saddam. He compared the war on terror to the struggle against Nazism, and warned that it would be longer than either world war that came before it. "I rather imagine it's going to be measured, I'm afraid, in decades," he said in a 2002 speech. He added: "I don't believe this terror war is ever really going to go away until we change the face of the Middle East."

Even the French leftist philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, adopted the expression to describe the war on terror, although he used it his own unique way: "There is no longer a front, no demarcation line, the enemy sits in the heart of the culture that fights it," he told the German magazine Der Spiegel. "That is, if you like, the fourth world war: no longer between peoples, states, systems and ideologies, but, rather, of the human species against itself."

Perhaps the most comprehensive take on the world war thesis has come from Norman Podhoretz, an influential author on the American right and former editor of Commentary magazine, on whom Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour the U.S. government can bestow on a civilian. In "World War IV: How It Started, What it Means, and Why We Have to Win," Podhoretz traces the global conflict back to the 1970s and the beginnings of Islamic fundamentalist terror. A succession of American presidents avoided military retaliation, he argues, only emboldening their enemies. The clash between militant Islamists and the West, which had been underway for years, only became clear with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in which Americans were attacked on their own soil -- "a feat neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia ever managed to pull off."

"The great struggle into which the United States was plunged by 9/11 can only be understood if we think of it as World War IV," Podhoretz wrote in the September 2004 edition of Commentary. "We are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play."

Podhoretz was reprising Cohen's theme at a time when the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq had surpassed 1,000, and public opinion polls showed that more than half of Americans considered the war to have been "not worth it." In the face of these doldrums, Podhoretz invoked the patience and fortitude that were necessary to win past global conflicts. "In World War II and then in World War III, we persisted in spite of impatience, discouragement, and opposition for as long as it took to win," he wrote. "And this is exactly what we have been called upon to do today in World War IV."

He reminded Americans that the Cold War also had its moments where it looked like the other side was winning, and there were "plenty of missteps -- most notably involving Vietnam -- along the way to victory."

Podhoretz also used the world war characterization to defend various tactics being used by the Bush administration. He argued that each war brought with it institutional changes on the world scene: World War II led to the creation of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Court of Justice. The Cold War spawned NATO. Likewise, he wrote, World War IV necessitated the controversial Bush doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, among others.

The believers in the world war view have argued that it demands everything from much greater military spending and readiness, to a commitment to "regime change" in Iran and a more confrontational stance on North Korea. In Gingrich's view, in the nearer term, it means supporting Israel's attacks on Lebanon until every last Hezbollalh rocket has been removed from the country.

It's a move of some consequence to recast a fight against terrorists and rogue dictators into a global conflict. The very term "world war" conjures up a conflict that required enormous sacrifice of blood and treasure by many nations over long periods of time. It entails sweeping changes in both domestic and international priorities. It suggests that the time for extraordinary measures has arrived.

As a result of these arguments moving out of scholarly journals and think tanks and onto cable news, critics have begun to question the wisdom and motives of the world war theorists. "It's too simplistic. I think it's done primarily for political reasons and has no real strategic validity," said P.J. Crowley, who served on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. It's also dangerous, he said. "Conceptualizing the war on terror as World War III potentially feeds the false perception that the West is at war with Islam, which is the way it is being perceived even though it is not the case," said Crowley, the director of national defence and homeland security at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington.

At a time when America is already struggling with a two-front war, "President Bush is right to advance that we must resolve challenges like Iran and North Korea diplomatically. Number one, they do not lend themselves to military solutions, and number two, even the U.S. does not have the military capability to make this a four-front war around the world," he said.

Critics also reject the parallels between the Cold War and the struggle against international terrorists. "There is strong U.S. support for having fought and won the Cold War. It was a long struggle, it was difficult and it was costly, but in the end the U.S. prevailed, hurray! There is a comfortable and popular narrative to tell," said Christopher Preble, the director of foreign policy studies, at the libertarian Cato Institute. "The problem is that the frame is almost entirely wrong because the kind of threat we're dealing with in terms of terrorism is much, much smaller than the dangers of many thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at the U.S., the Soviet Union and everywhere else. It is an order of magnitude at least different," he said.

Moreover, state sponsorship is not necessary for major terrorist attacks like those of Sept. 11, which cost only a few hundred thousand dollars, he said. "We know from the London, Madrid and Mumbai attacks that groups that have no affiliations to al-Qaeda or to a state sponsor are capable of killing a large number of civilians. But that doesn't fit in the frame," he said. The struggle against international terrorism is better thought of as an intelligence and law enforcement operation "that occasionally but rarely requires the traditional kind of war where you do knock off a state and engage in regime change. The case of Afghanistan is rare," he said.

And while the conversation about World War III or IV has been going on for half a decade, critics see the latest flare-up as having to do less with recent events around the globe, and more with the impending congressional elections in November, in which Republicans will face an electorate skeptical about the war in Iraq. "I think Mr. Gingrich is perhaps recasting this so that if it's perceived as something larger than Iraq, then the specific failures in Iraq become a detail," said Crowley.

Indeed, the Seattle Times reported that Gingrich told the newspaper in an interview that he is "very worried" about Republicans facing fall elections and says the party must have the "nerve" to nationalize the elections and make the 2006 campaigns about a liberal Democratic agenda rather than about President Bush's record. The Times quotes him as saying that while Americans may be critical of the Iraq war, public opinion can change "the minute you use the language" of World War III. The message should be, "Okay, if we're in the Third World War, which side do you think should win?" Gingrich said.

Gingrich denies that he is playing politics. "I think we need a national dialogue as Americans, not as Republicans or Democrats," he told Fox News. "But precisely in the experience of a world war, to say, what do we do as a people to defeat the terrorist alliance worldwide?"

Read Luiza Ch. Savage's weblog, Savage Washington

July 25, 2006

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