Why Pig Fat is not mentioned but code(s) are printed??

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In nearly all the western countries including Europe, the PRIMARY choice for meat is PIG. There are a lot of farms in these countries to A breed this animal. In France alone, Pig Farms account for more than 42,000.PIGS have the highest quantity of FAT in their body than any other animal. But Europeans and Americans try to avoid fats. Thus, where does the FAT from these PIGS go? All pigs are cut in slaughter houses under the control of the department of food and it was the headache of the department of food to! dispose of the fat removed from these pigs. Formally, it was burnt (about 60 years ago). Then they thought of utilizing it. First, they experimented it in the making of SOAPS and it worked. Then, a full network was formed and this FAT was chemically Processed, Packed and marketed, while the other manufacturing companies bought it. In the meantime, all European States made it a rule that every Food, Medical and Personal Hygiene product should have the ingredients listed on its cover. so, this ingredient was listed as PIG FAT. Those who are living in Europe for the past 40 years know about this. But, these products came under a ban by the ISLAMIC COUNTRIES at that time, which resulted in a trade deficit. Going back in time, if you are somehow related to South East Asia, you might know about the provoking factors of the 1857 CIVIL WAR. At that time, Rifle Bullets were made in Europe and transported to the sub-continent through the Sea .It took months to reach there and the gun powder in it was ruined due to the exposure to sea. Then, they got the idea of coating the Bullets with fat, which was PIG FAT. The fat layer had to be scratched by teeth before using them. When the word spread, the soldiers, mostly Muslim and some Vegetarians, refused to fight. Which eventually lead to the Civil War. The Europeans recognized these facts, and instead of writing PIG FAT, they started writing ANIMAL FAT.All those living in Europe since1970's know this fact. When the companies were asked by authorities from the MUSLIM COUNTRIES, what animal fat is it, they were told it was COW and SHEEP Fat. Here again a question raised, if it was COW or SHEEP Fat, still it is HARAAM to MUSLIMS, as these animal were not SLAUGHTERED as per the ISLAMIC LAW. Thus, they were again banned. Now, these multinational companies were again facing a severe dr! ought of money as 75% of their income comes from selling their goods to Muslim Countries, and these earn BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of Profit from their exports to the MUSLIM WORLD. Finally they decided to start a coding language, so that only their Departments of Food Administration should know what they are using, and the common man is left lurking in the dark. Thus, they started E-CODES. These E- INGREDIENTS are present in a majority of products of multinational firms including, but not limited to - TOOTH PASTE, SHAVING CREAM, CHEWING GUM, CHOCOLATE, SWEETS, BISCUITS, CORN FLAKES, TOFFEES, CANNED FOODS, FRUIT TINS,

Some medication Multi-vitamins Since these goods are being used in all MUSLIM Countries indiscrimately, our society is facing problems like shamelessness, rudeness and sexual promiscuity. So, I request all MUSLIMS or non pork eaters to check the ingredients of the ITEMS of daily use and match it with the following list of E-CODES. If any of the ingredients listed below is found, try to avoid it, as it has got PIG FAT; E100, E110, E120, E 140, E141, E153, E210, E213, E214, E216, E234, E252,E270, E280, E325, E326, E327, E334, E335, E336, E337, E422, E430, E431, E432, E433, E434, E435, E436, E440, E470, E471, E472, E473, E474, E475,E476, E477, E478, E481, E482, E483, E491, E492, E493, E494, E495, E542,E570, E572, E631, E635, E904.

Dutch Foe of Islam Ignores US Allies' Far Right Ties

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The fiercely anti-Islam Dutch MP Geert Wilders has been traveling through the U.S. this week on a highly-publicised trip to meet with politicians, promote his controversial film ‘Fitna’, and raise money for his legal defence back home.

Although Wilders’s stated goal has been to campaign for free speech, his trip has been sponsored and promoted by an unlikely coalition of groups united primarily by their hostility towards Islam. His backers include neoconservative and right-wing Jewish groups on the one hand and figures with ties to the European far right on the other.

Since he was charged with incitement to hate and discrimination in the Netherlands in January and denied entry to Britain earlier this month on public safety grounds, Wilders has become something of a cause celebre for the U.S. right.

This week, he gave a private viewing of his 17-minute anti-Islam film in the U.S. Senate, where he was hosted by Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican. He also appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s and Glenn Beck’s popular right-wing TV shows, met privately with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and hobnobbed with former U.N. ambassador John Bolton at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

On Friday, he capped his busy week with an appearance at the National Press Club. At the event, he reiterated his calls for a halt to immigration from Muslim countries and pronounced, to raucous applause from the audience, that "our Western culture based on Christianity, Judaism, and humanism is in every aspect better than Islamic culture".

Wilders is also known for campaigning to ban the Koran, Islamic attire, and Islamic schools from the Netherlands, and for proclaiming that "moderate Islam does not exist."

His chief sponsors during the trip have primarily been neoconservative organisations such as Frank Gaffney’s Centre for Security Policy, David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre, and Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum, which is also helping to raise money for Wilders’s legal defence.

An event he held at a Boston-area synagogue was sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition, an influential group whose board members include casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, and neoconservative writer David Frum, who attended Wilders’s Friday event in Washington.

His trip has also been heavily promoted by conservative blogger Pamela Geller, who sponsored a reception for him in Washington on Friday. Geller is perhaps best known for alleging during the 2008 presidential campaign that now-President Barack Obama is the illegitimate child of the late Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X; she also continues to argue that Obama is a secret Muslim.

A less well-known but key backer of Wilders’s trip has been the newly-formed International Free Press Society (IFPS), which is headed by Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard and upon whose advisory board Wilders sits. The IFPS has been instrumental in promoting Wilders’ case as a free-speech issue, joining him in calling for an "International First Amendment", and it was a co-sponsor of Friday’s event at the National Press Club.

Wilders might seem to be an unlikely free-speech martyr - he famously called for the Netherlands to ban the Koran in an August 2007 op-ed, on the grounds that it was hate speech no different from Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’ Wilders and his defenders now claim that he is actually in favour of the repeal of all hate speech laws, although he made no mention of this issue in the original op-ed.

While the IFPS has strong ties to neoconservatives - its staff includes members of Pipes’s and Gaffney’s organisations - it also has ties to the European far right, and specifically the Belgian rightist party Vlaams Belang (VB), or Flemish Interest.

The IFPS’s vice president Paul Belien is married to Vlaams Belang MP Alexandra Colen, and has been a fierce defender of the party against its critics.

And in 2007, Hedegaard and Belien - along with IFPS board members Bat Ye’or, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, and Sam Solomon - appeared with VB leader Filip Dewinter at the CounterJihad conference in Brussels. Although "the VB did not organise the conference, it provided an important part of the logistics and the security of those attending," according to Belien.

These VB ties among some of Wilders’s most important backers may raise difficulties for the politician, who has taken care to differentiate himself from far-right leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen of France and the late Joerg Haider of Austria. In particular, they may complicate his efforts to market himself to mainstream Jewish groups, which have traditionally been suspicious of the European far right due to its reputation for anti-Semitism and fascist tendencies.

"My allies are not Le Pen or Haider," Wilders told the Guardian in 2008. "I’m very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups". However, this past December he told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he would consider an alliance with the VB.

The VB is the successor to the Vlaams Blok, the Flemish secessionist party that was banned by Belgian authorities in 2004 for violating the country’s racism and xenophobia laws.

The party’s defenders reject the characterisation of the VB as far right or neo-fascist. "The implication that Vlaams Belang is somehow neo-Nazi or racist is salacious," Geller told IPS. "They are the only party in Belgium that is staunchly pro-Israel."

VB leaders have insisted that their party is philo-Semitic and free of neo-Nazi elements, but Belgian Jewish groups have criticised the party for failing to sufficiently dissociate itself from Nazi sympathisers and other extremists.

The party’s outreach to Jews has also been hindered by the December 2008 conviction of senior VB leader Roeland Raes on charges of Holocaust denial.

The party has drawn a great deal of criticism even from figures known for being outspoken critics of Islam. Former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, has called for the VB to be banned, saying that "it hardly differs from the Hofstad [terrorist] group" and that its "way of thinking will lead straight to genocide."

Charles Johnson of the widely-read conservative blog Little Green Footballs has been a particularly harsh critic of the VB, which he calls "neo-fascist." He has also warned of "the incredible amount of support for the Vlaams Belang among U.S. white power and neo-Nazi groups."

While no one is accusing Wilders or his backers of anti-Semitism, the VB connection illustrates the difficulties involved in forging a transatlantic coalition against Islam. Many of the most influential critics of Islam in the U.S. are neoconservatives, such as Pipes and Gaffney, who are also strongly pro-Israel; by contrast, anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe is often manifested in far-right parties whose views are anathema to much of the U.S. population, particularly Jews.

Wilders’s success and influence will likely depend on how well he can straddle the two camps, retaining his popular base of support in Europe while cultivating right-wing elites in the U.S.

Thursday’s event at the Senate was an important step for Wilders, and may have helped legitimise him in the eyes of U.S. conservatives. Sen. Kyl, who hosted the event, shares with Wilders a hard-line stance on immigration issues; he is also an honorary co-chairman of the neoconservative organisation Committee on the Present Danger.

Aside from Kyl, the list of congressmen attending the Wilders event was not released, but sources present at the event told IPS that attendees included Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, and possibly Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican.

Representative Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota and the only Muslim member of Congress, criticised Kyl for bringing Wilders to the Senate.

"At a time when President Obama has said to the Muslim world, ‘We are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest,' the showing of a film that denigrates the faith of 1.4 billion of the world's citizens does not foster mutual respect or mutual interest," Ellison said in a statement.

*With additional reporting by Ali Gharib.

Women Migrant Workers With HIV Get Raw Deal

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BANGKOK, Mar 13 (MT) - Thousands of Asian women flock to the affluent sheikhdoms of the Middle East annually, seeking jobs as domestic workers. For many this quest for a livelihood comes to a humiliating end when they test positive for HIV.

‘’The women learn about their HIV status when they go and get tested before their job contract is renewed,’’ says Malu Marin, director of the Manila-based Action for Health Initiative, or ‘Achieve’, a member of a regional non-governmental organisation (NGO) network dealing with migration.

‘’This test is mandatory and done every two years, but without any counselling services available,'' she added.

‘’Once they are identified as having HIV, the employer is informed, and the women are placed in a holding centre in a hospital until their departure is processed,’’ Marin said during a telephone interview from the Philippines capital. ‘’These holding centres are to restrict the movement of these vulnerable women.’’

‘’They are not allowed to go out and they are deported with no chance of packing their belongings or even getting salaries due to them,’’ she revealed. ‘’They can never go back to work in those countries.’’

The scale of the problem faced by these women from countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines was singled out in a report released this week by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

‘’(The women) often leave for overseas work under unsafe conditions, live in very difficult circumstances, and are often targets of sexual exploitation and violence before they depart, during their transit and stay in host countries and on return to their countries of origin,’’ states the report, ‘HIV Vulnerabilities of Migrant Women: from Asia to the Arab States’.

‘’With little or no access to health services and social protections, these factors combine to make Asian women migrant workers highly vulnerable to HIV,’’ it adds.

‘’Migrant women often have limited or no access to justice and redress mechanisms, especially in Gulf countries,’’ the report reveals, referring to places like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that were among those surveyed for the report.

‘’If they are found HIV positive, they face deportation and back in their countries of origin they experience discrimination and social isolation in addition to the difficulty of finding alternative livelihoods,'' the report said.

‘’Cases of HIV among domestic workers have been recorded in a number of migrant-sending countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka,’’ the report adds. ‘’As it is often the case in countries with low HIV prevalence, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, migrant workers represent a large percentage of those identified as living with HIV.’’

In fact, the U.N. report was prompted by concerns expressed by Pakistan during the annual assembly of the World Health Organsation’s (WHO) member states in Geneva in 2007. The South Asian nation had been worried at the increasing number of its citizens labouring as migrant workers in the Arab region being forced back after having been infected by the virus.

‘’During that assembly, Pakistan convened a meeting with other Asian countries to discuss the issue of migrant workers being deported from the Arab region because of HIV,’’ Marta Vallejo, an editor of the UNDP-UNAIDS report, told IPS. ‘’It is a sensitive issue in the Arab states.’’

Concerns by the Asian countries that send the female migrant workers to the Middle East is understandable due to the substantial amounts of foreign exchange these women plough back to their home countries. ‘’Women migrants from the region generate substantial economic benefits to their countries of origin and their host countries,’’ states the report.

Filipinos working in Arab countries sent back 2.17 billion US dollars in 2007 according to the report. ‘’Current remittances by migrant workers from Sri Lanka amount to three billion US dollars,’’ it added.

As for impoverished Bangladesh, remittances sent home by its workers resident in the UAE alone reached 804.8 million dollars in the last fiscal year which ended in July, according to the Bangladesh Bank. That figure represents 7.4 percent of all remittances sent to Bangladesh in the last fiscal, which totalled almost six billion dollars.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), there are an estimated 9.5 million foreign workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, of which 7.5 million are from Asia. The GCC includes Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

‘’The flow from Indonesia is largely female; they are concentrated in Saudi Arabia,’’ says Manolo Abella, chief technical adviser at the ILO’s Asia-Pacific office. ‘’Migrant workers from Sri Lanka are 75 percent women, and from the Philippines, 85 percent are women.’’

What has made these female migrant workers so vulnerable in the Middle East is that ‘’domestic work is not covered by labour laws,’’ Abella said in an interview. ‘’That means if you have complaints about non-payment of salaries or a violation of your labour rights you have no access to a formal procedure.’’

And even if there is some protection offered in the employment contract, female domestic workers have little access to mechanisms that protect their rights, since ‘’they are confined in a home,’’ adds Abella. ‘’The domestic workers are completely beholden to their employees.’’

‘’It is very very tough to actually to take the active role of a complainant,’’ says Abella. ‘’There is very little the domestic workers can do when abused.’’

More Troops, More Worries, Less Consensus on Afghanistan

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Even Washington's precise war aims in Afghanistan more than seven years after U.S.-backed forces chased the Taliban out of the country appear subject to continuing debate, as, in the face of what virtually all analysts and officials concede is a deteriorating situation, the Pentagon is actively downgrading the Bush administration's hopes of ushering in a thriving democracy to something far less ambitious.

That was made abundantly clear last week when Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned Congress "to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan. If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience, and money," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

And while Gates insisted that Washington faces a "long slog" to achieve even its minimal aims, fears that Afghanistan could become a "new Vietnam", a deadly quagmire in which already overstretched U.S. forces could become bogged down in an unwinnable war, have gained sudden new currency in the mass media.

Indeed, the cover story in the latest edition of 'Newsweek' magazine is headlined, "Obama's Vietnam: The analogy isn't exact. But the war in Afghanistan is starting to look disturbingly familiar."

Public statements about the current situation by senior Pentagon officials, including Gates, have been grim. A Pentagon report released Monday noted that last spring and summer saw the "highest levels of violence" since the U.S. intervention in 2001, and that 132 U.S. troops were killed last year, up from 82 in 2007.

"You all have been covering recent events in Afghanistan long enough to know that the situation there grows increasingly perilous every day," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, told foreign reporters at the top of a special briefing here last week.

"Suicide and IED (improvised explosive device) attacks are up, some say as much as 40 percent over the last year," he went on. "The Taliban grows bolder implanting fear and intimidating the Afghan people, and the flow of militants across the border with Pakistan continues."

The U.S. has about 33,000 U.S. troops currently deployed to Afghanistan. These are augmented by another 30,000 troops from other NATO countries, of which, however, only British, Canadian, and Dutch contingents are fully cleared for combat in largely Pashtun areas in the east and south where the Taliban and its allies are strongest.

Commanders in the field, led by U.S. Gen. David McKiernan, have requested an additional 30,000 U.S. troops over the next six to nine months, a figure that Mullen echoed during last week's press briefing.

Gates has taken a more cautious approach, telling senators last week that 10,000 to 12,000 troops - or the two to three brigades that Obama said were necessary during his presidential campaign - are likely to be deployed over the next six months. At the same time, he said he would be "deeply sceptical" of further increases, adding that Washington expected the Afghan military (currently about 100,000 troops) and police to take a stronger role.

The new administration is also hoping that other NATO members, which were repeatedly pressed by the Bush administration for more support, will provide more troops - for both combat and accelerated training of Afghan forces.

Obama is sending a high-powered delegation led by Vice President Joe Biden; Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James Jones; and his special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, former Amb Richard Holbrooke, to Munich next week in the first of a series of international meetings culminating in NATO's 60th anniversary summit in April in Strasbourg where he hopes to secure new commitments.

But, despite all the goodwill generated abroad by Obama's election, public opinion both in Canada and Europe is running strongly against new deployments, according to recent surveys there, and analysts here warn that Washington is likely to be disappointed by the response.

Meanwhile, Holbrooke, working with the chief of the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), Gen. David Petraeus, as well as Washington's new ambassador-designate to Kabul, ret. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who has served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, will take part in a comprehensive review of U.S. strategy that is unlikely to be concluded before April.

The review is aimed at both defining U.S. short- and long-term goals in Afghanistan and elaborating a strategy to achieve them.

The one goal on which virtually all policy-makers and analysts are agreed is that expressed by Gates during last week's hearing: "To prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the United States and its allies."

But how to achieve even that minimal goal - given obvious constraints on resources and the secure bases that the Taliban continue to enjoy in Pakistan's frontier areas - remains the subject of considerable debate.

The dominant view for now is that increasing security for the civilian population, particularly in the Pashtun areas where the Taliban is strongest - much as the U.S. "surge" of 30,000 additional U.S. troops purportedly accomplished in Iraq - is essential. Success should deprive the Taliban of much of its popular support and persuade "reconcilable" leaders to negotiate with the government and reduce the level of violence.

In addition, pressure on President Hamid Karzai to address the corruption that has become endemic under his administration and renewed efforts to persuade - in part through significantly enhanced training - the Pakistani military to conduct an effective counter-insurgency campaign against its home-grown Taliban in the frontier areas, as well as the al Qaeda leadership that is based there, are also seen as indispensable.

But critics, of which there are a growing number, are sceptical. Among other things, they question comparisons between Iraq and Afghanistan, noting, among other things, that, even if 30,000 troops are added to the existing deployment in Afghanistan, the ratio of troops - both foreign and indigenous - to people will remain substantially below the ratio in Iraq, and far below the ratio recommended by conventional counter-insurgency doctrine.

There is also disagreement - even within the military itself - over how best to deploy those troops: whether close to the rugged Pakistan border to try to block supply and infiltration routes; or in cities, towns, and villages to provide "security" to the population, as the Surge purportedly did in Iraq.

In a new report released Tuesday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Gilles Dorronsoro, a French expert on South Asia, argued that adding troops would actually be counter-productive because the mere presence of foreign soldiers in Pashtun areas has fueled the Taliban's resurgence and that the best way to weaken it is to reduce military confrontations. In that respect, "the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops."

Indeed, Dorronsoro argues, as do other critics, that most effective way to ensure that Afghan territory is not used as a base to attack the U.S. is to "de-link" the Taliban from al Qaeda, "which is based mostly in Pakistan."

"We will be in a much better position to fight al Qaeda if we don't have to fight the Afghans," he said. "We have to stop fighting the Taliban because it is the wrong enemy."

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Was Bush Doctrine Just a Little Bit of History Repeating?

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Or did the Bush years merely demonstrate, in exaggerated form, impulses that were already present in the U.S.'s dominant foreign policy traditions? Particularly, was the Iraq war an expression or a betrayal of the liberal internationalist tradition of President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)?

These questions have taken on special relevance given the high hopes attached to the inauguration of Barack Obama. If his administration will mark a return to the U.S.'s liberal internationalist heritage, as Obama seemed to suggest in his inaugural address, will this be sufficient to avoid future debacles of the sort that marked the Bush years?

In the new anthology "The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton, 2009), four prominent U.S. political scientists - G. John Ikenberry, Thomas Knock, Tony Smith, and Anne-Marie Slaughter - debate these questions. Knock and Slaughter aim to defend the liberal internationalist tradition and differentiate it from Bush's foreign policy, while Smith argues that liberal internationalism actually set the stage for Bush and the neoconservatives.

What this thought-provoking but ultimately frustrating volume demonstrates, however, is how little consensus there is about what Bush really represented - or, for that matter, what Wilson really represented. With so little agreement about the basic terms of debate, there are few satisfying conclusions to be drawn about how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past eight years.

The primary point of debate between Knock and Slaughter on the one hand and Smith on the other is whether a reliance on multilateral institutions or democracy promotion is more fundamental to Wilson's internationalist vision.

If Wilsonianism is fundamentally about multilateralism, then the (relatively) unilateral Iraq war would fail to qualify as Wilsonian. But if Wilsonianism is fundamentally about democracy promotion, this might seem to open the door to democratisation by force of arms, as in Iraq.

But this question raises others that are equally difficult to resolve. For one, how relevant is Wilson's original vision to liberal internationalism as it developed over the course of the twentieth century?

As Ikenberry and Knock point out, the peaceful global community that Wilson envisioned never came to pass due to the imperatives of Cold War geopolitics. Instead of a single law-governed international community, the Cold War years saw the development of two separate international systems: a cooperative set of "inside" relationships between Western democracies under U.S. dominance, and a competitive "outside" system governed by force and realpolitik, in which the West battled communism and postcolonial nationalism.

Knock argues convincingly that this Cold War order was a betrayal of Wilson's vision. A U.S.-dominated military alliance like NATO was a far cry from the sort of multilateral institution Wilson had in mind.

But liberal internationalism in practice has always had an ambivalent relationship with its idealistic origins. While paying homage to the goal of an egalitarian and cooperative global community, liberal internationalists have nevertheless tended to fall back pragmatically on those multilateral institutions that have been more pliable as instruments of U.S. power. Liberal internationalists therefore often talk as if the answer to Bush's unilateralism is simply to update the Cold War status quo and win back European allies in support of U.S. power.

But is this Wilsonian? More importantly, does it resolve any of the problems with Bush's foreign policy, or simply provide it with a sheen of legitimacy? It is quite possible that, with a bit more humility and diplomatic finesse, Bush could have won over France and Germany and perhaps gotten an additional Security Council resolution in support of the Iraq war. But would this have made the war just, or wise? If not, it suggests then multilateralism as such cannot provide the answers to these problems.

Slaughter's essay illustrates some of the difficulties involved in separating liberal internationalism from Bush-era foreign policy. Slaughter's views are of particular interest since she has just been appointed head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, making her Hillary Clinton's house intellectual at State.

Although she initially supported the Iraq war, Slaughter is now adamant that it could not be in any way justified under a liberal internationalist framework. Wilsonianism is built upon the self-determination of peoples, not their democratisation by force; U.S. leadership, not U.S. hegemony; legitimate multilateral institutions, not coalitions of the willing.

But these apparently sharp distinctions come to seem fuzzier in practice. The line between U.S. "leadership" and "hegemony" is often ambiguous, and since World War II the former has often been a euphemism for the latter.

Furthermore, Slaughter argues for U.N. reform to provide the world with a single arbiter of legitimacy, but concedes that in the absence of a more pliant U.N. the U.S. must settle for "broadly representative regional institutions" such as NATO instead of ad hoc alliances. But if the U.S. accepts the authority of whatever reasonably legitimate international body is willing to sanction its plans, is this so different from an ad hoc coalition of the willing?

Although Slaughter is adamant that democracy cannot be imposed by force, she does maintain that the international community - or its more conscientious members - have a "responsibility to protect" populations by force from atrocities committed by their rulers.

And if the "cornerstone of Wilsonianism" is, as Ikenberry sympathetically claims, the conviction that autocracies make war and democracies make peace, this would seem to give the U.S. not merely a moral imperative but a compelling national security interest in spreading democracy however it can. This goes beyond "making the world safe for democracy" to imply that democracy can only be safe when it is universal.

Smith's essay effectively critiques Wilsonianism along all these lines, showing how these arguments easily slide into those used to justify Iraq. But his attack on liberal internationalism, like Slaughter's defence of it, suffers from a simplistic view of what the Iraq war was about.

Whereas for Slaughter, the essence of the Bush years was unilateralism, for Smith, it was democracy promotion, plain and simple. This naturally suggests - although Smith never quite states it - that what the U.S. needs is a return to realism, a focus on the national interest rather than utopian dreams of democratisation abroad.

It is far from obvious, however, that democracy promotion was the essential motivation for the Iraq war rather than an ex post facto justification. The war was initially argued for in terms of threats rather than ideals, WMDs rather than human rights, and most of the war's architects appear to have been motivated less by democratic idealism than by a grandiose and aggressive conception of the national interest.

This is why a simple end to democracy promotion and return to realism may not be a cure-all. It is likely that the next push for war, wherever it is, will be justified as a hard-headed response to external threats rather than an act of humanitarianism. What is needed is therefore not simply a renunciation of liberal internationalism but a more realistic assessment of the U.S. national interest and the threats to it.

As the Obama years begin, we are faced with a widespread consensus that the Iraq war was wrong, but little agreement on how or why it was. As the essays in this volume indicate, neither Wilsonians nor anti-Wilsonians seem to have any clear solutions for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past eight years.