chapter 33 - justanswer€¦ · 09/12/2011 · its upscale customers received valet parking,...

Davidson−Gienapp−Heyrman−Lytle−Stoff: Nation of Nations: A Concise Narrative of the American Republic, Fourth Edition

VI. Global Essay: The United States in a Nuclear Age

33. Nation Of Nations In A Global Community (1980˘2004)

© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2005

uan Chanax had never been far from San Cristobal, a small village in theGuatemalan highlands. In that region, some two thousand years earlier,

his Mayan ancestors had created one of the world’s great civilizations. During thetwentieth century, San Cristobal had escaped the political upheavals that disrupted

much of Guatemala. Still, by the1970s Chanax, a weaver, struggledto support his young family. Workat a nearby American textile factorybrought steady wages, but scarcelyenough to survive on. The comingof the factory alerted him to a largerworld outside his mountain village.In 1978 he decided that the onlyway he could help his sick son andimprove himself—to “superarme,” ashe put it—was to go north.

Chanax made his way toHouston, Texas, with little morethan a letter introducing himto several Guatemalans. Throughthem he learned of a maintenancejob at a Randall’s supermarket.

In the late 1970s, high oilprices had brought a boom toHouston. And as the city grew,Randall’s expanded with it. That

expansion meant plenty of low-wage jobs for people like Chanax, even thoughhe had almost no education and had entered the United States illegally. Randall’sdid not want just any low-wage workers. The chain specialized in high-pricedgoods in fancy suburban stores. Its upscale customers received valet parking,hassle-free shopping, and service from uniformed employees. Shortly beforeChanax began working at Randall’s, one of its managers had a falling out withseveral African American employees. When the manager criticized their work,they argued heatedly, until one employee finally threw a mop at the managerand quit.

CHAPTER 33

Nation of Nationsin a GlobalCommunity1980–2004

Preview A renewed wave of immigration in the lastdecades of the century was only one way in which global tiesincreased both diversity in the United States and the nation’sinterdependence with the rest of the world. The rise of theInternet signaled a revolution in global communications andcommerce during the decade’s economic expansion. But in2001 many global connections were challenged and shatteredby a terrorist movement that was itself global.

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That incident proved to be Chanax’s opportunity. Unlike the worker whostormed out, Chanax was willing to do any job without complaint. The minimumwage was more than twice what he earned in Guatemala. Within several weekshe began to wire money home to his family. And when the manager said Randall’swould soon need more workers, Chanax arranged for his brother-in-law and anuncle to come north. Over time Randall’s began to hire Guatemalans exclusively.

Within five years, over a thousand Mayans from San Cristobal were workingat Randall’s. A single person had created what scholars call a migration chain.Through Chanax, Randall’s had found access to a minimum-wageworkforce who would perform willingly—in the company’s words—as“cheerful servants.” The Mayans, in turn, found opportunities unavailable inGuatemala. In the process Chanax and other early immigrants had becomedepartment managers and supervising assistants. Many of their wives worked asmaids and servants in the homes of Houston’s upper-income communities.

In suburban Houston, Juan Chanax and his fellow Guatemalans formed theirown community in an area that came to be known as Las Americas. There, vari-ous Central American immigrant groups established churches and social clubsamid some 90 apartment complexes that a decade or two earlier had housedmostly young, single office workers. On weekends and evenings rival soccer teamsplayed in the nearby park. (Juan, also the soccer league’s president, helped newteams fill out the forms required by the parks department to use its fields.) Thegrowth of Las Americas in the late twentieth century echoed the pattern of immi-grants who had come to the United States at the century’s opening.

Yet those patterns had changed in important ways, too. Although citiesremained the mecca of most immigrants, Juan and many newcomers of the 1980sand 1990s settled in suburban areas, particularly in the West andSouthwest. Industrial factories provided the lion’s share of work in the1890s, but a century later the service industries—grocery stores, fast-food chains, janitorial positions—absorbed many more of the newarrivals. Even the faces had changed, as European immigrants found themselvesoutnumbered by Latinos from Mexico and Central America as well as by Asiansfrom the Philippines, China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent,not to mention increasing numbers of Arabs from the Middle East, Africans, andEastern Europeans. This broad geographic range reflected perhaps the mostimportant shift in immigration: its truly global character. Transportation andcommunications networks tied immigrants to their home countries more stronglythan in the past, allowing immigrants like Juan to keep regularly in touch withtheir former neighbors and relatives by phone as well as mail. Immigrants con-tinued to participate in home-country politics more easily; they could wire moneyinstantly to relatives and even build homes thousands of miles away where oneday they planned to retire.

The global nature of immigration was only one aspect of an American societymore tightly linked to the world community. For half a century the cold war had

NATION OF NATIONS IN A GLOBAL COMMUNITY � 967

Migration chain

Changes in thepatterns of globalimmigration





shaped American responses to the wider world. With the fall of the Soviet Union,attention shifted toward the need to manage regional conflicts. Internationaleconomic ties linked the United States with the rest of the world in equally importantways, because the effects of a recession or financial collapse in Russia or Thailandcould spread to other countries in a matter of weeks or months. Finally, the dawnof the twenty-first century witnessed a communications revolution as the Inter-net tied together correspondents, consumers, manufacturers, and information sys-tems. The movement of people, financial capital, and data around the globe forceda nation of nations to adapt itself to an increasingly global community—one inwhich terror too played a defining role.

THE NEW IMMIGRATION

The Immigration Act of 1965 (page 876) altered the face of American life—perhaps more than any other legislation among Lyndon Johnson’s Great Societyprograms. The lawmakers who passed the act did not expect such far-reachingchanges, for they assumed that Europeans would continue to predominate amongnewcomers. Yet reform of the old quota system opened the way for a wave ofimmigrants unequaled since the beginning of the century.

Turmoil abroad pushed many immigrants toward the United States, begin-ning in the 1960s with Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba and unrest in the

CHAPTER 33 � NATION OF NATIONS IN A GLOBAL COMMUNITY � 968

White

Asian

Black

Hispanic

White

AsianBlack

Hispanic0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

19952030

2050

1980

PROJECTED POPULATION SHIFTS, 1980–2050 The 6.5million immigrants who arrived between 1990 and 1998

accounted for 32 percent of the increase in the total U.S.population. Census figures have projected an increasing

racial and ethnic diversity.





Dominican Republic. The war in Vietnam and its aftermath produced morethan 500,000 refugees in the 15 years after 1975. Revolutionary conflicts inCentral America during the 1980s launched new streams. Yet eco-nomic factors played as great a role as the terrors of war. Althoughsome Filipinos fled the repressive regime of Ferdinand Marcos,many more came to the United States in a search for economicprosperity. When Mexico suffered an economic downturn in the 1980s, emi-gration there rose sharply.

In all, about 7 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, arrived between1975 and 1995. The nation’s foreign-born population rose to 9 percent, the high-est proportion since World War II. The tide rose even more sharply in the 1990s,with the Latino population increasing by over 35 percent to about 30.3 millionby 1999. The Asian American population grew at an even faster rate, to about10.8 million. Through the decade a steadily expanding economy made immigrantsa welcome source of new labor. Prosperity, in turn, reduced—though it did noteliminate—conflict among long-standing residents, new immigrants, and peopleon the margin of the labor market.

The New Look of America—Asian Americans

In 1970, 96 percent of Asian Americans were Japanese, Chinese, or Filipino. Bythe year 2000, those same three groups made up about half of all Asian Americans.As the diversity of Asian immigration increased, Asian Indians, Koreans, andVietnamese came to outnumber Japanese Americans. The newcomers also varieddramatically in economic background, crowding both ends of the economicspectrum.

The higher end included many Chinese students who, beginning in the 1960s,sought out the United States for a college education, then found a job and stayed,eventually bringing in their families. “My brother-in-law left his wifein Taiwan and came here as a student to get his Ph.D. in engineer-ing,” explained Subi Lin Felipe. “After he received his degree, he got a job in SanJose. Then he brought in a sister and his wife, who brought over one of her broth-ers and me. And my brother’s wife then came.” Asian Indians were even moreacculturated upon arrival because about two-thirds entered the United States withcollege degrees already in hand. Indian engineers played a vital role in the com-puter and software industries. Similarly, Korean and Filipino professionals tookskilled jobs, particularly in medical fields.

Yet Asian immigrants also included those on the lower rungs of the economicladder. Among the new wave of Chinese immigrants, or San Yi Man, many blue-collar workers settled in the nation’s Chinatowns, where they workedin restaurants or sewed in sweatshops. Without education andlanguage skills, often in debt to labor contractors, most remained trapped inChinatown’s ethnic economy. Refugees from war and revolution in Southeast

THE NEW IMMIGRATION � 969

Economic andpolitical causesof immigration

Prosperous newcomers

Blue-collar Asians





E Y E W I T N E S S T O H I S T O R Y

A Korean Growing Up in America from the Age of Three

When I was fourteen [in 1982], my parents thought it would be easier to raise their kids wherethe crime rate was not so high, so my father sent us to Virginia while he stayed in L.A. He

was going through a lot of financial problems at the time. He was even contemplating suicide so thatwe could have his insurance money. . . .

Then my father got the calling. It was just like one of those things where you get blinded bya light. He changed from being an international commodities broker to being a minister. . . . Afterabout a year and a half, my father just packed us all up and said, “We’re going to New Orleans.”He gave us two days’ warning. He found a Southern Baptist seminary in New Orleans that heliked. Now he’s working on a Ph.D. in theology. He has a small church in New Orleans. He spe-cializes in crazy women, like women crazy from their marriages to American soldiers. They livein these small southern towns, where there aren’t many other Koreans to talk to. A lot of themhave psychological problems, especially the first wave of GI brides. . . . My mother and father goto these halfway houses and boarding homes to meet with them. My father will talk to them, prayfor them, and bring them food. Even kimch’i is a thrill for them, because they haven’t eaten it forso long. . . .

Our parents forced us to read the Korean bible every night. If we couldn’t finish reading it, wesometimes had to stay up until two in the morning on school nights. . . . My younger sister, who’sat Barnard College in New York, doesn’t go to church now; she despises the dogma and sees the ide-ology as male chauvinist. Lately, I’m a little in line with her. I went to a Korean church here in L.A.

Asia often made harrowing journeys. Vietnamese families crowded into barelyseaworthy boats, sometimes only to be terrorized by pirates, other times nearlydrowned in storms before reaching poorly equipped Thai refugee camps. By 1990almost a million refugees had arrived in the United States, three-quarters fromVietnam, most of the others from Laos or Cambodia.

Thus the profile of Asian immigration resembled an hourglass, with themost newcomers either relatively affluent or extremely poor. Even so, such sta-tistics could be misleading. Although more Asian Americans made over $50,000per year than any other racial or ethnic group, more than half lived in just fivemetropolitan areas—Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and NewYork—where the cost of living ranked among the nation’s highest. High pricesmeant real earnings were lower. On a per capita basis, only the Japanese andIndians among Asian Americans made above the national average in 1990. Fur-ther, within professions like dentistry, nursing, and health technology where

970





for a while, but some of the things they said really bothered me. In the pulpit, the minister wouldsay something about Hillary Clinton or make snide remarks about “feminazis.” . . .

I was so upset when we moved to New Orleans [in the mid-1980s]. That was in the middle ofmy senior year in high school. I pictured the people there as being hillbillies with no shoes, livingin swamps among the alligators—a nightmare. When I went there, I found that there were actuallycars and cities. But people were so racist. There’s a large Vietnamese community in New Orleans.In Virginia, the view was that Asians are high-class, smart, intellectual people. In New Orleans, theywere just refugees. . . . I had never seen a Vietnamese person in my life. I was still very racist, andit was really hard for me to adapt, but the more I got to know them, the better it was.

I think I stopped being a racist when I was in college. I was a microbiology major at LouisianaTech University. The first African American community I encountered was in New Orleans. It wasvery rough because they were so discriminated against. When the Vietnamese came, they saw anotherethnicity they could discriminate against, so they were very rough on the Vietnamese. I received someof that, and I couldn’t believe it. They were so cruel. Yet, I had some African American friends whoprotected me and helped me out. . . .

The Latino kids at Louisiana Tech were exchange students from wealthy families, and I got alongwith them well. But the Mexicans! In L.A., I had these images of them screaming on the streets orsomething. Then I saw this movie called EI Norte, and I was in tears by the time the first part endedbecause I realized that they were immigrants like my family. It wasn’t just the stereotype of living offwelfare in America, but struggling to survive as immigrants. That really opened my eyes. . . .

I still have Latino friends from school, but I rarely see them anymore. I moved back to L.A. aftercollege, and lately I realized that all of my friends here are Korean. There are very few Koreans whoare able to hang around with both Korean and non-Korean friends. You usually only hang aroundwith Korean people, or you are so Americanized that you buy into the mainstream lifestyle and tryto escape from the fact that you are Korean.

Source: Excerpt Copyright © 1996 East to America: Korean American Life Stories edited by Elaine H. Kim and Eui-YoungYu. Reprinted by permission of The New Press.

Asians found work, they often held the lower-paying positions. Those Asianswho worked in sales were more often retail clerks than insurance agents orstockbrokers.

Finally, Asian Americans experienced two forms of downward mobility. First,highly educated Asian immigrants often found it difficult or impossible to landjobs in their professions. To American observers, Korean shopkeepersseemed examples of success, when in fact such owners often enoughhad been professionals forced into the risky small-business world. OneFilipino surgeon, unable to open up his own medical practice, found himselfworking as a restaurant meat cutter, for employers who had no idea of his realoccupation. “They thought I was very good at separating meat from the bone,”he commented ironically. Second, schools reported significant numbers of AsianAmerican students who were failing. Members of this “lost generation” were mostoften the children of families who entered the United States with little education

Asian downwardmobility

971





and few job skills. Still others were middle-class children who found it difficultto adjust to a new culture.

The New Look of America—Latinos

Like Asian Americans, Latinos in the United States constituted a diverse mosaic,reflecting dozens of immigrant streams. Although the groups shared a language,they usually settled in distinct urban and suburban barrios across the UnitedStates. Such enclaves provided support to newcomers and an economic footholdfor newly established businesses. Money circulated within a community; the work-ers and owners of an ethnic grocery, for example, spent their wages at neighbor-ing stores, whose profits fueled other immigrant businesses in a chain reaction.

Washington Heights, at the northern tip of New York City, followed that pathas nearly a quarter of a million Dominicans settled there during the 1970s and

1980s. Shopkeepers’ stereos along the major thoroughfares boomedmusic of trumpets and congas, while peddlers pushed heavily loadedshopping carts through busy streets, crying “¡A peso! ¡A peso!” (“For a

dollar!”). In addition, Dominican social clubs planned dances or hosted politicaldiscussions. Similarly, in Miami and elsewhere in South Florida, Cuban Ameri-cans created their own self-sustaining enclaves. A large professional class andstrong community leadership brought them prosperity and political influence.

Along the West Coast, Los Angeles was the urban magnet for many Latino(and Asian) immigrants. Mexicans had long flocked to East Los Angeles, and in

the 1990s it remained convenient to the jobs in factories, warehouses,and railroad yards across the river. Many Mexican Americans now

owned their own businesses and homes. But beginning in the mid-1980s and1990s the neighborhood of MacArthur Park became the focal point for the newestimmigrants from Mexico and Central America. MacArthur Park was less devel-oped as a community, and many of its residents were transient, passing quickly toother neighborhoods or jobs.

As more factories and service industries became decentralized, locating them-selves beyond urban downtowns, the barrios followed as well. Las Americas nearHouston, where Juan Chanax lived, was one example; but suburban barrios couldbe found dotted all across the nation, from Rockville, Maryland, to Pacoima,California, near Burbank. Pacoima’s bungalows housed well-kept working-classMexican Americans who had lived in California for decades. But the garages wereoften converted to dormitories with a sink and toilet, where four or five newcomersfrom Central America could rent a spot to lay a bedroll on the cement floor.

Illegal Immigration

Because Mexico and the United States shared a long common border—and anequally long history of intermingling of peoples and cultures—many Mexicansentered the United States illegally. But illegal immigration increased during the


The Dominicans ofWashington Heights

East Los Angeles





1980s as Central Americans joined the northward flow. By 1985, the number ofillegal immigrants in the United States was estimated at anywhere from 2 to 12million.

Congress attempted to stem that tide by passing the Immigration and Con-trol Act of 1986. Tightened border security was coupled with a new requirementthat American employers certify their workers as legal residents of theUnited States. At the same time, illegal immigrants who had arrivedbefore 1986 were granted amnesty and allowed to become legal resi-dents. In the end, however, the terms of the law failed to create the clean slateCongress had hoped for. Worried about a labor shortage, California’s fruit andvegetable growers lobbied for exceptions to the rules. Furthermore, the manyimmigrants who suddenly became legal under the terms of the law quickly soughtto reunite their families, bringing in wives and children illegally. Reluctantly, thefederal government decided it could not break up these families, and it allowedthem to live illegally in the United States while they applied for visas.

Thus by 1996, the illegal population of Latinos in the United States stood atabout 5 million—about the same number as in 1986 when the immigration reformact was passed. Legal immigrants continued to be intertwined with illegals in ahost of different ways: as relatives helping loved ones make the transition to liv-ing in the United States, as landlords boarding newcomers until they could geton their feet, as links with communities in the home country—just as Juan Chanaxcontinued to be after he received amnesty from the act in 1986.

Links with the Home Country

In an increasingly dependent world, the new immigrants found it easier to main-tain links with their points of origin. Pacoima, the small suburban barrio outsideBurbank, California, boasted 13 different currency exchanges to handle the fundsthat immigrants wired home to relatives. By 1992, the amount of funds sentworldwide was so great that it was surpassed in volume only by the currency flowsof the global oil trade.

And not just money traveled these routes. An immigrant entering La Curacao,a furniture store in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, could sign up to buy a bed-room suite on the installment plan. When the payments were completed, the fur-niture was released—not in Los Angeles but at a branch warehouse in El Salvador,where relatives could pick up the purchase. Cultural ties remained strong as well.Young Mexican immigrants flocked on Saturday night to popular dance halls likethe Lido in Los Angeles to hear a variety of music known as banda.

Religious Diversity

The global nature of the new immigration also reshaped the religious faiths ofAmerica. During the 1950s, most Americans’ sense of religious diversity encom-passed the mainline Protestant churches, Roman Catholicism, and Judaism. But

THE NEW IMMIGRATION � 973

Immigration andControl Act of 1986





immigrants brought with them not only their own brands of Christianity andJudaism but also Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic beliefs. By 1999 there were 5 to6 million Muslims in the United States. Many had emigrated from Arab states,but adherents from South Asia made up an even greater number. Buddhists andHindus numbered about a million each.

Mainline Protestants and Catholics changed as well. The Presbyterian Church(U.S.A.) increased its Korean-speaking congregations from about 20 in 1970 toover 350. In New York City, Episcopalian services were held in 14 different lan-guages. And Catholic churches increasingly found themselves celebrating mass inboth English and Spanish. Such arrangements took place not only in urban con-gregations such as the Church of the Nativity in South Central Los Angeles(where Latinos alternated services with African Americans) but increasingly evenin rural areas.

The religious and cultural diversity of the new immigrant streams broadenedthe ties between the United States and the rest of the world. Despite the end ofthe cold war, the future of that world remained as uncertain as ever. Regionalconflict in Vietnam, Central America, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere haddriven many immigrants to America. Economic pressures around the world had


At Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Mission, a family in the growing Mexicanand Central American community of Muscatine, Iowa, held a quinceañera—acelebration of a girl’s 15th birthday. Even towns in rural southeastern Iowa

reflected the growing diversity of immigrant religious life.





encouraged many more to come. The nation’s newest immigrants often linked theUnited States to the conflicts that presented the greatest challenge to Americanleadership in the post–cold war world.

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY: MANAGING A NEW GLOBAL ORDER

With the presidential inauguration of 1992, William Jefferson Clinton became thefirst baby boomer to occupy the White House. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton,would be the most politically involved presidential wife since Eleanor Roosevelt.Like so many couples of their generation, the Clintons were a two-career family.Both trained as lawyers at Yale University during the tumultuous early 1970s. Billchose politics as his career, while Hillary mixed private practice with public service.Their marriage had not been easy. Revelations of Clinton’s sexual affairs as gov-ernor of Arkansas almost ruined his presidential campaign. The first couple seemed,however, more intent on making public policy than in defending their private lives.

Meeting John Kennedy had inspired a young Bill Clinton to enter politics.Like Kennedy, Clinton envisioned himself as an activist president, not a moredetached leader like Reagan. But Clinton’s desire for major legislative initiativesran up against the election results of 1992. He had received just 43 percent ofthe popular vote, while the Republicans had narrowed the Democratic majoritiesin Congress. Still, Clinton believed that an activist executive could achieve much,“even a president without a majority mandate coming in, if the president has adisciplined, aggressive agenda.”

Clinton: Ambitions and Character

Certainly, the agenda was ambitious. The new president pledged to revive theeconomy and rein in the federal deficit, which had grown enormously during theReagan years. Beyond that, he called for systematic reform of the wel-fare and health care systems as well as measures to reduce the increas-ing violence that too often had turned urban neighborhoods into war zones.

What often seemed missing in the White House was the “disciplined, aggres-sive” approach needed to move legislation through Congress. One observer shrewdlynoted that there were two Bill Clintons—the idealistic young man from Hope,Arkansas (his hometown), and the boy from Hot Springs (his mother’s home). Thelatter was a resort town associated with the seamier side of Arkansas high life. Withincreasing frequency, the leadership mustered by the idealistic politician from Hopeseemed to be undermined by the character flaws of the boy from Hot Springs.

Although Clinton’s conservative opponents disliked his politics, it was thepresident’s moral lapses that they most deeply resented. Critics nicknamed him“Slick Willie” and sought continually to discover discreditable or illegal dealingsfrom his past. Accusations were published that, when Clinton was governor in the

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY: MANAGING A NEW GLOBAL ORDER � 975

Clinton agenda





early 1980s, both he and his wife had received special treatment from a failed realestate venture known as Whitewater. An air of mystery deepened when Vincent

Foster, a White House adviser and close friend of Hillary Clinton’sfrom Arkansas, committed suicide. (The Clintons’ most vocal critics

suggested that the verdict of suicide was merely a murder cover-up, although theevidence suggested depression as a cause.) Rumors also abounded about Clinton’swomanizing, fanned in 1994 when a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones,filed a sexual harassment suit against the president. Under pressure from con-gressional conservatives, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed former judgeKenneth Starr as a special prosecutor to investigate Whitewater. But duringClinton’s first term, investigations by Starr as well as two Senate committeesproduced no evidence that the Clintons had acted illegally.

The New World Disorder

Determined to focus on domestic issues, Clinton hoped to pay less attention toforeign affairs. He discovered that the “new world order,” hailed by both MikhailGorbachev and George Bush, seemed more like a world of regional disorders. InRussia, President Boris Yeltsin struggled to bring order out of chaos, yet marketreforms failed to revive a stagnant economy. Elsewhere in the world, ethnic andnationalist movements provoked a number of regional crises. By using Americanpower in a limited way, Clinton gained considerable public support.

In sub-Saharan Africa, corruption and one-party rule severely weakened mosteconomies, tribal violence mounted, and AIDS became epidemic. Brutal civil warsbroke out in both Somalia and Rwanda. As president-elect, Clinton had supportedPresident Bush’s decision in December 1992 to send troops to aid famine-reliefefforts in Somalia. But attempts to install a stable government proved difficult.Tragically, the United States as well as European nations failed to intervene inRwanda before over a million people were massacred in 1994.

Instability in Haiti pushed the president to take a bolder approach closer tohome. In 1991 Haitian military leaders had forced their country’s elected presi-

dent, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, into exile. The harsh rule that followedprompted over 35,000 refugees to flee toward the United States, often

in homemade boats and rafts. When a UN-sponsored economic embargo failedto oust the military regime, the Security Council in 1994 approved an invasionof Haiti by a multinational force. American troops proved crucial in convincingthe military to leave. A smaller UN force stayed on to maintain order as newelections returned Aristide to the presidency.

Yugoslavian Turmoil

Europe’s most intractable trouble spot proved to be Yugoslavia, a nation dividedby ethnic rivalries within a number of provinces, including Serbia, Croatia, and


Whitewater

Americans in Haiti





Bosnia. After Bosnia became independent in 1992 both groups, but especially theSerbs, resorted to what was euphemistically referred to as “ethnic cleansing”—the massacre of rival populations—to secure control. The UnitedStates at first viewed the civil war in Yugoslavia as Europe’s problem.But as the civilian death toll mounted to a quarter of a million, theconflict became difficult to ignore. Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust sur-vivor Elie Wiesel beseeched President Clinton to “stop the bloodshed. . . . Some-thing, anything, must be done.”

Still, the ghosts of Vietnam loomed. Many members of Congress feared theprospect of American troops bogged down in a distant civil war. By 1995 Clintonhad committed the United States to support NATO bombing of Serbforces, and when Bosnian and Croatian forces began to win back ter-ritory, the Serbs agreed to peace talks to be held in Dayton, Ohio. The DaytonAccords created separate Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian nations. Some 60,000NATO troops, including 20,000 Americans, moved into Bosnia to enforce thepeace. Clinton had intervened successfully without the loss of American lives.

Having lost Croatia and Bosnia, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was deter-mined not to lose Kosovo, a province in which the Serb minority ruled over amostly Albanian population. In 1998 attacks by Albanian rebels pro-vided Milosevic an excuse to send in troops. Along with Serbian policeand militia groups, they committed widespread atrocities against civil-ians. In the spring of 1999 Clinton committed U.S. forces to a NATO bombingcampaign that hit targets in both Serbia and Kosovo. They destroyed much ofSerbia’s industrial, military, and transportation infrastructure. Without admittingdefeat, Milosevic finally agreed to a NATO occupation of Kosovo. Once again,American troops entered as peacekeepers. In 2000, elections followed by protestsand massive demonstrations forced Milosevic from power.

Middle East Peace

Clinton also worked to calm the Middle East. Sporadic protests and riotingby Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bankgave way in the 1990s to negotiations. At a ceremony hosted by the president in1993, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Itzak Rabin signeda peace agreement permitting self-rule for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip andin Jericho on the West Bank. In 1995 Arafat became head of the West BankPalestinian National Authority.

Still, a full settlement remained elusive. The assassination of Prime MinisterRabin in 1995 by an angry Orthodox Jew began a period of increased suspicion onboth sides, as extremists sought to derail the peace process. Even then, Clinton’sefforts to broker a settlement continued until he left office in January2001. His diplomacy failed to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together.In the preceding October, the worst violence in years had broken out

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY: MANAGING A NEW GLOBAL ORDER � 977

Conflicts in Bosniaand Croatia

Dayton Accords

Intervention inKosovo

Middle East peacenegotiations





between the two sides, dashing hopes for a comprehensive settlement. Whether inthe Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, or the Caribbean, such regional crisesdemonstrated how difficult a new global “world order” would be to maintain.

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY ON TRIAL

Throughout Clinton’s presidency the nation experienced a powerful economicexpansion. Despite low unemployment, there was little inflation. Prosperityallowed the president to eliminate the budget deficits that had soared during the1980s. It also kept his popularity high despite new scandals and attacks by con-servatives. But soaring budget surpluses did not win congressional support forClinton’s reform agenda.

Recovery without Reform

In his first speech to Congress, Clinton proposed a program that would beginreducing the deficit but also provide investments to stimulate the economy and

repair the nation’s decaying public infrastructure. In contrast, PresidentsReagan and Bush had cut funds to rebuild schools, roads, dams, bridges,

and other public structures. In August 1993 a compromise budget bill passed byonly a single vote in the Senate, with Republicans blocking the stimulus portion ofClinton’s program. Still, deficit reduction was a significant achievement.

The victory in the budget battle provided Clinton with some momentum. Inthe fall he hammered together a bipartisan coalition to pass NAFTA, the North

American Free Trade Agreement. With the promise of greater tradeand more jobs, the pact linked the United States economy more

closely with those of Canada and Mexico. The president also helped supportersof gun control overcome the opposition of the National Rifle Association to passthe Brady Bill, which required a five-day waiting period on gun purchases.

Health care reform topped Clinton’s legislative agenda. A task force led byHillary Rodham Clinton developed a plan to provide health coverage for all

Americans, including the 37 million who in 1994 remained uninsured.The plan proposed more far-reaching changes than did a Republican

plan merely to reform insurance laws in order to make private medical coveragemore readily available. But a host of interest groups rallied to defeat the proposal,especially small businesses that worried that they would bear the brunt of the sys-tem’s financing.

If the Clintons’ plan had passed, the president and the Democratic majority inCongress might have staked their claim to a government that was actively respond-ing to some of the long-term problems facing American society. But the failure ofhealth care reform heightened the perception of an ill-organized administration andan entrenched Democratic Congress content with the status quo. For the first time


Clinton program

NAFTA

Health care reform





since the Eisenhower years, Republicans captured majorities in both the House andthe Senate during the 1994 midterm elections.

The Conservative Revolution Reborn

When the new Congress assembled, the combative new Speaker of the House,Newt Gingrich of Georgia, proclaimed himself a “genuine revolutionary” andused the first hundred days of the new Congress to bring to a voteten proposals from his campaign document “The Contract withAmerica.” The contract proposed a balanced-budget amendment, taxcuts, and term limits for all members of Congress. To promote family values, itsanticrime package included a broader death penalty and welfare restrictions aimedat reducing teen pregnancy. Although the term limits proposal did not survive,the other nine proposals were passed by the House.

The whirlwind performance was impressive. “When you look back five yearsfrom now,” enthused Republican governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin,

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY ON TRIAL � 979

President Clinton’s most ambitious attempt at reform was to overhaul the nation’shealth care system to provide all Americans with basic health care (along with

a card to guarantee it). But medical interest groups defeated the proposal, arguingit would create yet another huge and inefficient bureaucracy. In 1996 Congress

passed a more modest medical reform bill that made it easier for workers to retainhealth insurance if they lost or changed jobs.

The Contract withAmerica





“you’re going to say ‘they came, they saw, they conquered.’ ” But the Senate wasless eager to enact the House proposals. And as Republicans assembled a morecomprehensive budget, it became clear that the public was increasingly worriedabout the Gingrich revolution. To balance the federal budget by 2002 whilestill cutting taxes by $245 billion, Republicans proposed scaling back Medicareexpenditures while allowing premiums to double. They also sought to roll backenvironmental legislation by reducing protection for endangered species, relaxingpollution controls set up by the Clean Water Act, and allowing miners, ranchers,and loggers greater freedom to develop public lands.

When President Clinton threatened to veto the Republican budget, first-yearRepublicans (among Gingrich’s most committed troops) pushed the Speaker

toward confrontation. Twice Republicans forced the federal govern-ment to shut down. The result was a disaster for the self-proclaimed

revolutionaries. Most of the public viewed their stance as intransigent, and theCongress was forced to retreat.

At the same time, the president moved to preempt the Republican agenda.By 1995, he had proposed his own route toward a balanced budget by 2002.

Similarly, in 1996 the president signed into law a sweeping reform ofwelfare. The law owed as much to Republican ideas as it did to the

president’s. For the first time in 60 years, the social welfare policies of the liberaldemocratic state were being substantially reversed. The bill ended guarantees offederal aid to poor children, turning over such programs to the states. Food stampspending was cut, and the law placed a five-year limit on payments to any fam-ily. Most adults receiving payments were required to find work within two years.

Thus as the election of 1996 approached, the Republican revolution had beeneither dampened or co-opted by the president. The Republicans nominated for-mer senator Bob Dole, a party loyalist, to run for president. Dole sought to stirup excitement with promises of a 15 percent tax cut. But the economy was robust,and skeptical voters doubted he could balance the budget and still deliver histax cut. In November Bill Clinton became the first Democrat since FranklinRoosevelt to win a second term in the White House.

Women’s Issues in the Nineties

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton used her influence to promote opportunityfor women and to draw attention to feminist issues. Bill Clinton shared many ofhis wife’s concerns. During the election he told voters that he had “learned thatbuilding up women does not diminish men.” In that spirit he appointed RuthBader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court and three women to his cabinet, includ-ing Janet Reno as attorney general. In 1997 he named Madeleine Albright as thefirst female secretary of state.

Both Clintons had supported a woman’s right to control her decisions onreproduction, an issue that remained hotly contested during the 1990s. Because


Government shutdown

Welfare reform





antiabortion conservatives had been unable to secure the repeal of Roe v. Wade,they sought to limit its application as much as possible by proposing to makeillegal a procedure they referred to as “partial-birth” late-term abortion. Doctorsseldom performed the procedure and did so only to save a mother’s life. TwicePresident Clinton vetoed bills that would criminalize the procedure.

More problematic for feminists was the Supreme Court decision in the 1991case of UAW v. Johnson Controls. Since Muller v. Oregon in 1908 (page 619), theCourt had accepted as constitutional those laws that gave women spe-cial protection based on their biological differences from men. Usingthis standard, Johnson Controls had established a policy of not hiringwomen workers to manufacture batteries, because the lead fumes in the work-place might damage a pregnant woman’s unborn fetus. The workers’ union chal-lenged the policy, noting that fertile men who faced reproductive risks in theworkplace were not restricted. The Court agreed with the union, ruling that theemphasis on biological differences denied women an “equal employment oppor-tunity.” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that a woman’s decision as to whether her“reproductive role is more important to herself and her family than her economicrole” was one for her to make on her own.

Many feminists hailed the decision as a step toward workplace equality. Fem-inist scholar Cynthia Daniels saw it as more ambiguous. Should laws recognizebiological difference, or should they uphold equality? As Danielsargued, “To ignore difference is to risk placing women in a workplacedesigned by and for men, with all of its hazards and lack of concernfor the preservation of life and health.” Yet rules that recognized difference hadin the past reinforced “those assumptions and economic structures which formthe foundation of women’s inequality.”

Scandal

Almost every two-term president has faced some crisis in his second term.Watergate brought down Richard Nixon, and the Iran-Contra controversy tar-nished Reagan. Bill Clinton’s scandal was in some ways more puzzling. At oncesmaller and more personal, it nonetheless threatened his presidency with theAmerican political system’s ultimate sanction: impeachment, conviction, andremoval from office.

By four years into the Whitewater investigation, Special Prosecutor KennethStarr had spent $30 million and produced only the convictions of several of thepresident’s former business partners. (The Watergate investigation, incontrast, lasted just over two years.) Starr dismissed the grand jury inArkansas without filing charges against either of the Clintons on Whitewater.Then in January 1998, Starr hit what looked like the jackpot. Linda Tripp, adisgruntled federal employee with links to the Bush administration and to a con-servative literary agent, produced audiotapes of phone conversations in which a


UAW v. JohnsonControls

Contrasting viewsof feminism

The Lewinsky affair





21-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, talked of an intimate rela-tionship with the president.

Starr succeeded in preventing Clinton from learning of the tapes before thepresident and Lewinsky testified in depositions that they had not had “sexualrelations.” When word of the tapes leaked out several days later, many punditspredicted that the president must resign or face impeachment—if not for his per-sonal conduct, at least for lying under oath. Starr subpoenaed the president toappear before a Washington grand jury, taking four hours of testimony and thenrecommending that the president be impeached on the grounds of perjury,obstruction of justice, and witness tampering.

To the astonishment of the news media, polling indicated that the public didnot support impeachment. Although Clinton had clearly engaged in behavior

most Americans found inappropriate or even repugnant, they seemedto draw a line between public and private actions. Furthermore, Starr’s

report went into such lurid detail that many Americans questioned the specialprosecutor’s motives. Nonetheless, the Republicans pressed their attack. Alongstrict party lines, a majority in the House voted three articles of impeachmentfor lying to the grand jury, suborning perjury, and orchestrating a cover-up. InJanuary 1999 the matter went to the Senate for trial, with Chief Justice of theUnited States William Rehnquist presiding.

But unlike with the Watergate scandals, in which Richard Nixon resignedbecause a bipartisan consensus had determined that impeachment was necessary,

the accusers and defenders of Bill Clinton divided along partisan lines.The Senate voted to acquit, with five Republicans joining all 45 Senate

Democrats in the decision.

The Politics of Surplus

The impeachment controversy left the president weakened, but hardly powerless.Throughout the political tempest the nation’s economy had continued to growstrongly. By 1999 the rate of unemployment had dropped to 4.1 percent, the low-est in nearly 30 years, while the stock market reached new highs. Furthermore,as the economy expanded, federal tax receipts grew with it. By 1998 Bill Clintonfaced a situation that would have seemed improbable a few years previous—abudget surplus. By balancing the budget the president had appropriated a keyRepublican issue. Political debate shifted to what to do with the surplus.

Clinton sought to revive much of his initial agenda: education, paying downthe national debt, and protecting Social Security and Medicare funds from pre-

dicted future deficits. The deficits seemed sure to arise because anentire generation of graying baby boomers was heading toward retire-

ment beginning around the year 2010. During the 1990s six workers paid taxesfor each retiree collecting benefits. By around 2030, only three workers would be


Impeachment

Acquittal

Social Security crisis





paying taxes for each retiree. That ratio threatened fiscal disaster. Clinton thusargued that the budget surplus could best be used to ensure the solvency of SocialSecurity and Medicare.

Hanging by a Chad: The Election of 2000

Tax cuts and Social Security reform should have loomed large in the 2000 elec-tion campaign. Instead, Al Gore, who had loyally served as Bill Clinton’s vicepresident, and George W. Bush, the son of former president George H. W. Bush,ran centrist campaigns that did little to excite voters. Before the younger Bushbecame a popular governor in Texas, few people believed he was serious aboutpolitics. In contrast to the affable Texan, Gore had written a book on the globalenvironmental crisis, promoted federal support for the Internet, and given newstature to the office of vice president. Where Bush knew little about world affairs(he had traveled outside the United States only twice), Gore seemed better pre-pared to conduct the nation’s foreign policy.

Trailing Gore in early polls, Bush made the campaign less about issues andmore about character—not his or Gore’s, but Bill Clinton’s. That tactic deprivedGore of a major asset, the president’s continued popularity. By election nightmany pollsters predicted a race “too close to call,” but they were not preparedfor the debacle that resulted. The outcome came down to Florida, where, twodays after the election, Bush led by just 300 votes. Nationwide, Gore held a500,000-vote lead, but without Florida’s 25 electoral votes neither candidate hada majority in the Electoral College. The 9000 votes that went to Green partycandidate Ralph Nader most likely cost Gore a clear victory in the state.

Evidence immediately surfaced of widespread voting irregularities. SomeFlorida counties had used ballots so complicated that voters with poor eyesightmight choose the wrong candidate. Other counties used punch-card machines soantiquated that they failed to fully perforate many ballots. They left what wouldbecome widely known as “hanging chads.” More serious charges alleged that thestate had actively suppressed voting in heavily black counties. Those accusationswere particularly sensational since George Bush’s brother was Florida’s governor.

After weeks of legal challenges, the question of how to recount Florida’sballots landed in the U.S. Supreme Court. Normally, the Supreme Court avoidsreviewing election matters already decided by state courts. This time,however, the Court agreed to hear Bush v. Gore. On December 12the Court’s conservative majority, all Republican appointees, ruled 5–4 that therecount must end. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause,the majority argued that because the recount procedure was limited to onlythree counties, it valued some votes more than others. Thus, in Bush v. Gore, theSupreme Court, not the American electorate, cast the deciding votes to makeGeorge W. Bush the president of the United States.


Bush v. Gore





THE UNITED STATES IN A NETWORKED WORLD

In 1988 economist Lawrence Summers was working on the presidential campaignof Michael Dukakis. At a meeting in Chicago, the staff assigned him a car witha telephone. Summers was so impressed, he recalled, that “I used it to call mywife to tell her I was in a car with a phone.” A decade later as deputy treasurysecretary in the Clinton administration, he visited the Ivory Coast in Africa. Onevillage on his itinerary could be reached only by dugout canoe. As Summersstepped into the canoe for his return trip, an aide handed him a cell phone:“Washington has a question for you.” The man who once marveled at a phonein his car in Chicago 10 years later expected one in his dugout canoe in the inte-rior of Africa.

The Internet Revolution

Like Summers, Americans at the end of the twentieth century were linked to aglobal communications network almost anywhere they went. Computers andother electronic devices provided almost instant contact with the wider world.This interconnectivity had been driven by a revolution in microchip technologies.

The roots of the Internet revolution could be traced to the early 1960s. In1962 J. C. R. Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote a series


Election officials in Broward County, Florida, examine a ballot for chads, punchedpaper from holes, in the hotly contested presidential election of 2000.





of memos laying out the concept of what he grandly termed a “Galactic Net-work”: computers all across the world connected in order to share data and pro-grams. But the technology for sending data back and forth efficientlyalong phone lines was still primitive. Computer technicians cobbledtogether a network between four host computers in 1969. Known asthe ARPANET, it allowed university and Department of Defense researchers toshare computer capacity more efficiently as well as to create a communicationssystem that could survive a nuclear attack. Managers discovered that many of theresearchers with access to the network used it to send personal messages. E-mailhad been born.

A second phase of the revolution began in the 1970s when a Harvard dropoutnamed Bill Gates helped write software to operate personal computers. Mostcomputing was then done on what were called mainframes—massive and hugelyexpensive machines found only in large businesses, universities, and governmentagencies. Gates was among a growing group of visionaries who saw that the tech-nologies of miniaturization would make personal computers useful in everyday life.

By the mid-1980s small businesses, homes, and schools were using personalcomputers for word processing, graphic design, and spreadsheets that tracked per-sonal and financial data. Other manufacturers used microprocessors onsilicon chips to operate complex mechanical systems ranging fromwatches to jet aircraft. By the 1990s desktop computers could boast more powerthan the mainframes of just 40 years earlier.

The Internet (successor to the ARPANET) was growing too. By 1985 itlinked about a thousand host computers. Taking the next step in the evolutionaryprocess, British-born physicist Tim Berners-Lee wrote software thatcreated the World Wide Web as a facet of the Internet. Berners-Leesaw the possibility for a universal system with access to anything that was infor-mation. He applied the hypertext link (http://) that allowed users to move freelyamong sites of related interest, each with its own Web address, or URL (Uni-form Resource Locator).

Most Internet pioneers shared a democratic vision: they saw the Web as openand free to all. Users could communicate without restriction and find access to anyform of information. Such openness was the bane of authoritarian governments,which found it difficult to control public opinion in a world in which informationflowed freely. The unregulated format of the Web raised substantial legal, moral,and political questions in the United States as well. By 1999 five million sites werein operation—among them were sites promoting pornography, hate speech, andeven instructions on how to build atomic bombs. A number of politicians and civicgroups called for the censorship of the more extreme Web content. But thesystem’s openness, coupled with the opposition of a majority of Web users, madecensorship extremely difficult.

Interactivity also gave the Web enormous commercial potential. With Webbrowsers, developed in the mid-1990s, seekers and finders increasingly became

THE UNITED STATES IN A NETWORKED WORLD � 985

The World Wide Web

The personal computer

The Galactic Networkand ARPANET





buyers and sellers. Early sites such as CD-Now and The Onion tended to offergoods—music CDs, financial information, news, and games—favored by young,

technically sophisticated Web surfers. After 1995 business on the Web,or e-commerce, grew rapidly as more and more people went “online.”

The revolution in microchip technologies contributed substantially to theeconomic expansion of the 1990s. In 1998 e-commerce alone generated some482,000 jobs. Whereas in 1965 businesses committed just 3 percent of theirspending to high technology, they committed 45 percent in 1996. That increasecontributed to a significant rise in labor productivity. Improved productivity inturn proved to be a critical factor behind economic growth.

American Workers in a Two-Tiered Economy

The benefits of prosperity have not been evenly distributed, however. Economistsdescribed the United States in the 1990s as a two-tiered labor market in whichmost increases in earning went to people with the highest wages. Thus despitethe decade’s prosperity, the median income of American families was barely higherin 1996 than in 1973. Indeed, the earnings of the average white male worker actu-ally fell. Only because so many women entered the job market did the familystandard of living remain the same. In the early 1970s some 37 percent of womenworked outside the home; in 1999 about 57 percent did.


Use of the Internet broadened sharply after 1995. As of 2000, the number of piecesof mail handled daily by the U.S. Postal Service was 668 million. The averagenumber of e-mails sent daily was 10 billion. This graphic by Stephen G. Eick

of Bell Laboratories plotted worldwide Internet traffic.

E-commerce





Education was a critical factor in determining winners in the high-tech, globaleconomy. Families with college-educated parents were three times more likely tohave home access to the Web than were those families in which parents’ educa-tion ended with high school. Because average education levels were relativelylower among African Americans and Latinos (and relatively higher among AsianAmericans), the computer divide took on a racial cast as well. But the implica-tions went beyond mere access to the Web and its wealth of information and com-merce. More important, the high-wage sector of the computer economy requirededucated workers, and the demand for them drove up those workers’ salaries.

Most semiskilled and unskilled workers saw little growth in earnings despitefull employment. Unlike computer programmers or corporate executives whowere in high demand, low-skill workers were not able to increase theirearnings simply by switching jobs. Some economists concluded that“the most important economic division is not between races, or genders, or eco-nomic sectors, but between the college-educated and the noncollege-educated.”

The booming economy in the last three years of the twentieth centurybrought a small decrease in that inequality. Wages rose slightly, boostingthe median American income to $38,885 in 1998. The number of Americansliving in poverty dropped by a million in 1998, to a decade low.Once again, earnings differences between white, black, and Latinomales began to narrow. Governments showed new willingness to spend moneyon education and transportation, services most vital to the poor. Even so, theboom’s statistics were not encouraging over the longer term. Despite thedecline in the poverty rate, it remained above the rate for any year in the1970s. If the strongest economy in 30 years left the poverty rate higher thanthe inflation-plagued years of the 1970s, what would happen if the economyfaltered?

MULTICULTURALISM AND CONTESTED AMERICAN IDENTITY

No state more fully represented the multicultural and global complexion of late-twentieth-century America than California. More of the nation’s recently arrivedimmigrants from Asia, Central America, and Mexico settled there than in anyother state. By 1990, fully 33 percent of the residents of Los Angeles county wereforeign-born, a figure rivaling the high-water mark of 40 percent set by New YorkCity in 1910. Predictably, then, it was California that so often led the nationaldebate over multiculturalism. Californians put forth election propositions chal-lenging the policies of affirmative action, proposed to make English an officiallanguage, and sought to restrict welfare, education, and other social benefits forimmigrants and aliens. A recession there sharpened the debate in the early 1990s,as did several explosive legal cases raising the issue of racism. The battles overrace, immigration, and multiculturalism suggest that in an era of internationally

MULTICULTURALISM AND CONTESTED AMERICAN IDENTITY � 987

Wage stagnation

Effects of prosperity





linked economies and global migrations, the United States remains a nation ofnations seeking to accommodate distinctive identities along lines of race, ethnic-ity, and national origins.

African Americans and the Persistence of the Racial Divide

In the 1990s the highest-paid celebrity in the world was an African American—Michael Jordan. Oprah Winfrey, also an African American, was the highest-paidwoman in America. Both political parties eyed former general Colin Powell as apossible presidential candidate. Millions of white as well as black Americansexpressed outrage when an all-white jury acquitted four Los Angeles police offi-cers charged with beating Rodney King, a black American man. Yet when a largelyblack jury acquitted football star O. J. Simpson of murder in a 1994 trial, pollsindicated that whites and blacks sharply disagreed over Simpson’s guilt or inno-cence. Although the situation of African Americans had improved vastly comparedwith their position in the 1950s, race still mattered.

In 1991 Los Angeles police arrested a black motorist, Rodney King, for speed-ing and drunken driving. The police were all white; King was African American.

As King lay on the ground, four officers proceeded to beat him withnightsticks more than 50 times. Often, when blacks complained aboutsuch brutality at the hands of largely white police, public officials dis-

missed their complaints. This case was different. A man in a nearby apartmentvideotaped the beating, which the news media repeatedly broadcast to the entirenation. But the following year, an all-white suburban jury acquitted the officers,concluding that King had been threatening and that the officers had acted withintheir authority.

The verdict enraged the African American community in Los Angeles, wherewidespread riots erupted for three days, making the violence the worst civil dis-turbance in Los Angeles history. By the time police and the National Guardrestored order, nearly 2000 people had been injured, 40 people had died, over4500 fires burned, and $500 million of property had been looted, damaged, ordestroyed.

At first glance the riot appeared to be much like the one that had decimatedWatts, a poor area of Los Angeles, in 1965. Poor African Americans had lashed

out in frustration at white racism. In fact, the 1992 riots were mul-tiracial in character, exposing divisions in Los Angeles’s multicultural

communities. Rioters, both black and Latino, damaged over 2000 small groceries,liquor stores, and other businesses run by Korean American immigrants. AfricanAmericans also attacked Latinos; and after the first day, Latinos also joined in thedisturbances. But there was a revealing pattern. In the more established Latinocommunities of East Los Angeles, where families had more to lose, residentsremained quiet or worked actively to maintain the peace. In contrast, fires andlooting destroyed many businesses in the MacArthur Park area, where the newest


Rodney King and theLos Angeles riots

Complexity of the riots





Latino immigrants lived. “Everybody said, ‘How can they destroy their neigh-borhoods, their jobs . . . ?’ ” commented a Latino demographer from UCLA.“Well, my answer is that they did not consider it to be their own.” Thus the 1992riots exposed tension and competition among ethnic groups.

In quite another way the case of O. J. Simpson revealed the persistence of aracial divide. Born into a ghetto family, Simpson had become first a football leg-end, then a movie star and television personality. He seemed to defyall notions that racial prejudice restricted African Americans. But in1994 police charged Simpson with the brutal murders of his white ex-wife, Nicole,and her friend Ron Goldman. Millions of television viewers watched with raptattention as Simpson’s attorneys transformed what seemed to be a strong murdercase into a trial of the Los Angeles police. Their client had been framed, his attor-neys suggested, by racist police officers. Defense lawyers revealed that the leadofficer in the case had lied on the stand about his own prejudice, which includedhis use of racial slurs.

After a trial lasting almost a year, a jury of nine African Americans, two whites,and one Mexican American took just four hours to acquit Simpson. Regardless ofhis guilt or innocence, the verdict revealed a racial fault line dividing Americans.The vast majority of whites believed the evidence against Simpson allowed justone verdict—guilty. Most African Americans were equally persuaded that Simpsonhad been framed. Why? Both groups had watched the same trial, yet each broughtto it significantly different personal experiences of the American system of justice.Black Americans who had all too often found themselves stopped arbitrarily bypolice or pulled over while driving in white neighborhoods disagreed fundamen-tally over whether that system applied equally to all people regardless of race.

African Americans in a Full-Employment Economy

In 1966 the African American community of North Lawndale, on Chicago’s WestSide, was one of the worst slums in America. Over the next 20 years half the pop-ulation moved away from the endemic crime, drug addiction, and vio-lent gangs. In the late 1990s North Lawndale underwent a rebirth asAfrican American professionals returned to the neighborhood. Homes that oncestood deserted now sold for over $250,000.

What happened in North Lawndale reflected new circumstances for manyAfrican Americans across the country during a decade of economic expansion.Home ownership reached 46 percent and employment increased from around 87percent in 1980 to nearly 92 percent in 1998. African Americans in increasingnumbers rose up the ladder in corporate America. Many started their ownbusinesses.

Economic success brought new hope to the nation’s inner cities. Crime andpoverty decreased, especially rates of murder and violence. Births to unwed moth-ers reached a postwar low. Fewer blacks lived below the poverty level and fewer


The O. J. Simpson case

Inner-city renewal





were on welfare. The most hard-core block of the unemployed—males between16 and 24—found many more jobs. The gap between wages for whites and blacksnarrowed as well.

Yet many African Americans reacted with reserve to such statistics. “To theextent that you proclaim your success,” one community leader remarked, “peo-ple forget about you.” Furthermore, an economic downturn might reverse thosegains, especially if employers resorted to the traditional practice of “last hired,first fired.”

Civil rights leaders were most concerned about the continued opposition toaffirmative action. In 1996 California voters passed a ballot initiative, Proposition

209, that eliminated racial and gender preferences in hiring and col-lege admissions. The leading advocate for Proposition 209 was aconservative black businessman, Ward Connerly. Connerly arguedthat racial preferences demeaned black and other minority students by

setting up a double standard that patronizingly assumed minorities could notcompete on an equal basis. In any case, Proposition 209 had a striking effect.Enrollments of Latinos and blacks at the elite California university campuses andprofessional schools dropped sharply: down 57 percent for black students atBerkeley and 34 percent for Latinos. What remained was a student body that wasonly 3 percent black and 9 percent Latino in a state in which African Americansconstituted 7 percent and Latinos 29 percent of the population. Similar lawsbanning racial preference in admissions produced similar declines at leading stateuniversities in Texas, Washington, and Michigan.

Also in 1996, a federal circuit court further restricted affirmative action. InHopwood v. State of Texas et al. the court ruled that race could not be a factor incollege admissions. The Supreme Court did not fully address that issue until 2003,when the administration of George W. Bush pressed the Court to strike down racialpreference in the admissions program at the University of Michigan. Leading uni-versities, retired military officers, and some corporate leaders supported Michigan.They argued that by encouraging diversity, a policy of affirmative action benefitedthe education provided by their institutions. The Court ruled, in Gratz v. Bollinger,that Michigan’s point system, which gave minorities preference in undergraduateadmissions, was unconstitutional. At the same time, the Court approved a separateprogram used by the university’s law school, which allowed race to be consideredin the admissions process. In so doing the justices allowed the nation’s publicuniversities as well as other institutions to take race into account in less overt ways.Affirmative action had been reduced in scope, but not abolished.

Global Pressures in a Multicultural America

Clearly the enormous changes wrought by the new global economy affected notjust the immigrant enclaves but American culture as a whole. Salsa rhythmsbecame part of the pop culture mainstream, and Latino foods competed with


Proposition 209against affirmative

action





Indian curries, Japanese sushi, and Thai takeout for the loyalties of two-careerfamilies whose parents lacked the time to cook.

But the mix of cultures was not always benign. Throughout the course ofAmerican history, when immigration flows increased, members of the dominantculture often reacted defensively. Nativists of the early twentieth century suc-ceeded in sharply restricting immigration. During the 1990s the debate contin-ued over how diverse the United States could become without losing its nationalcharacter.

Restriction again became a goal of those citizens worried about Americanidentity. In 1990 Lawrence Auster published The Path to National Suicide, in whichhe complained of the “browning of America.” In California, opponentsof immigration supported Proposition 187, a ballot initiative thatdenied health, education, and welfare benefits to illegal aliens. Despitethe opposition of most major religious, ethnic, and educational organizations, themeasure passed with a lopsided 59 percent of the vote. In the end, the proposi-tion was not put into effect because a federal judge ruled unconstitutional theprovision denying education to children of illegal aliens.

A movement to make English the official language of the United Statesreceived broader support. Speaking a native tongue in the privacy of the homewas acceptable, one English-only supporter granted, but “English isthe ‘glue’ that helps keep American culture vibrant and dynamic.” In1986 73 percent of Californians voted for a measure to make EnglishCalifornia’s official language. Similarly, as a new wave of Cuban immigrantsflooded southern Florida during the 1980s, voters of Dade County adopted aninitiative making English the county’s official language. Cuban Americansresented the initiative and in 1993 pressured county officials into repealing it. Thesame year, however, Florida voters approved an English-only referendum for thestate. By 1996 23 states had adopted either resolutions or laws declaring Englishtheir official language.

Traditionally, nativist conflicts pit the dominant majority culture against theminority cultures of more recent arrivals. But in a multicultural society, suchpolar opposites often break down. In 1998 yet another ballot initiative passed inCalifornia (Proposition 227), mandating that schools phase out all their bilingualeducation programs. Students would be granted only one year of English-languageimmersion courses before receiving all instruction in English. In this instance bothwhite and Latino voters approved the proposition by nearly the same margin,within one or two points of 62 percent. And the measure itself had been proposedafter a group of Spanish-speaking parents boycotted their elementary school untilit agreed to teach their children to read and write in English.

The pressures of global migration also increased tensions between minorities,as the Los Angeles riots of 1992 demonstrated. As recently as 1980 blacks andLatinos seldom competed directly in California’s economy. African Americans hadmade gains in older industries and in the public sector. Latinos were more likely


Proposition 187 andillegal aliens

English as an officiallanguage





to work in agriculture or the low-wage service sector. Butthose economic boundaries were always changing. In the1980s, for example, a great many of the janitors working inthe downtown office buildings of Los Angeles were AfricanAmerican. As union members, their wages and benefits came

to more than $12.00 an hour. By 1990 most had been replacedby nonunion Latino immigrants, usually illegals, working foronly about $5.00 an hour with no contract, no benefits orhealth insurance, and no vacation time. That same dynamic hadcaused Juan Chanax and his fellow villagers from Guatemalato replace African Americans at Randall’s supermarkets in

Houston.

TERRORISM IN A GLOBAL AGE

Along the northeast coast of the United StatesSeptember 11, 2001, dawned bright and clear. In the

World Trade Center, Francis Ledesma was sittingin his office on the sixty-fourth floor of the SouthTower when a friend suggested they go for coffee.Francis seldom took breaks that early, but he decided

to make an exception. In the cafeteria he heard andfelt a muffled explosion: a boiler exploding, he

thought. But then he saw bricks and glass falling bythe window. When he started to head back to hisoffice for a nine o’clock meeting, his friend insistedthey leave immediately. Out on the street Francis sawthe smoke and gaping hole where American AirlinesFlight 11 had hit the North Tower. At that momenta huge fireball erupted as United Airlines Flight 175

hit their own South Tower. “We kept looking back,”Francis recalled as they escaped the area, “and thenall of a sudden our building, Tower 2, collapsed.I really thought that it was a mirage.”

That was only the beginning of the horror. Shortly after takeoff from DullesAirport American Airlines Flight 77 veered from its path and crashed into thePentagon. Several passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to SanFrancisco heard the news over their cell phones before hijackers seized that plane.Rather than allow another attack, passengers stormed the cockpit. Moments laterthe plane crashed into a wooded area of western Pennsylvania.

From a secure area at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, PresidentGeorge W. Bush addressed a shaken nation. He called the crashes a “national


Libertad by Ester Hernandez





tragedy” and condemned those responsible. “Freedom itself was attacked thismorning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended,” he assured theAmerican people.

In an age of instant global communications, the entire world watched as thetragedy unfolded. Three minutes after the first plane hit the World TradeCenter, ABC News announced that an explosion had rocked the tow-ers. British television was already covering the fire when the secondplane reached its target at 9:03 A.M. Japanese networks were on theair with coverage of the Pentagon crash about an hour later, around midnighttheir time. TV Azteca in Mexico carried President Bush’s statement from Barks-dale Air Force Base, and China Central Television was not far behind. This was,indeed, an international tragedy. The aptly named World Trade Center was ahub for global trade and finance. Citizens of more than 50 nations had died inthe attack.

As for the United States, not since Pearl Harbor had the nation experiencedsuch a devastating attack on its homeland. Most directly the tragedy claimedapproximately 3000 lives. More than 20,000 residents living in lowerManhattan had to evacuate their homes. The attack had broader eco-nomic consequences as well. Before September 11 the booming economy of the1990s was already showing serious signs of strain, as many overextended Internetcompanies retrenched or went out of business. The World Trade Center attackpushed the nation into a recession. Added to those economic worries were newfears for security. The attacks were not the work of enemy nations but of an Arabterrorist group known as al Qaeda, led by a shadowy figure, Saudi national Osamabin Laden. How many of al Qaeda’s terrorist cells were still undetected withinthe United States? After the World Trade Center attack, nations were no longerthe only threat to national security. Smaller groups—subnational or international—possessed the capability of using weapons of mass destruction to make war againstthe most powerful nation in the world.

A Conservative Agenda at Home

The crisis of September 11, 2001, energized George W. Bush. Before the attacks,his administration seemed to lack direction. Bush’s claim to leadership was shakypartly because when he took office in January 2001, a majority of the electoratehad voted for his opponent, Al Gore. Among his critics the president had a rep-utation as a person who took little interest in complex domestic issues and almostnone in foreign policy. Yet his easy self-assurance contrasted sharply with BillClinton’s more frenetic style.

Although the new president’s inaugural address promised a moderate course,the actions of the new administration showed that it was taking a more con-servative path. When Vice President Cheney brought energy indus-try leaders together in the summer of 2001 to discuss policy, he

TERRORISM IN A GLOBAL AGE � 993

Global dimensions ofthe attack

Economic downturn

Energy policy





included no one from the environmental community. The group recommendeda course of action that stressed energy production rather than conservation. Theproposal to drill for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge particularlyangered environmentalists.

To improve education, the administration pressed to make schools moreaccountable through the use of standardized tests. Liberals like Senator TedKennedy joined the president in January 2002 when he signed intolaw the “No Child Left Behind” initiative. Yet while the bill allowedfor $18 billion in funding, the administration asked for only $12 billion, leavingmuch of the burden of implementing the ambitious new program to financiallystrapped state and local governments. Evangelical Christians were pleased withthe president’s proposal for “faith-based initiatives” that would provide publicfunds to churches involved in education and social work. Critics complained thatsuch aid blurred the line separating church and state.

Tax cuts formed the cornerstone of the Bush agenda. Many conservativeswanted lower taxes in order to limit the government’s ability to initiate newpolicies—a strategy referred to as “starving the beast.” With the threatof recession looming, Bush defended his proposals as a means to boostthe economy and create more jobs. Congress supported the proposed cuts, pass-ing first the Economic Growth and Tax Reform Reconciliation Act of 2001(EGTRRA) and then the Job Creation and Workers Assistance Act of 2002(JCWA). Size alone did not make these tax bills controversial. Critics objectedthat the cuts did little for job creation and that those in high income bracketsreceived most of the benefits. Citizens for Tax Justice claimed that by 2010, when(and if ) the Bush tax reductions were fully in place, 52 percent of the total taxrelief would be going to the richest 1 percent of Americans. Further, tax cutsturned the federal budget surpluses of the late 1990s into massive deficits.

Unilateralism in Foreign Affairs

Even before the events of September 11, the president rejected the multilateral-ism in foreign affairs that since World War II had guided American presidents,including his father. President Bush was determined that the United States wouldplay a global role, but largely on its own terms.


Education

Tax cuts

The cold war of the 1950s had imagined a Manhattan like this: debris everywhere,buildings in ruin, the city shrouded in smoke and fumes. On September 11,2001, however, disaster on such a large scale came not from confrontation

with another superpower but through the actions of international terrorists. The attack made clear that in a post–cold war world, global threats could come

from small groups as well as powerful nations.





The administration’s unilateral approach was made clear when it rejected the1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming to which 178 other nations had sub-

scribed. “We have no interest in implementing that treaty,” announcedChristie Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency,arguing that compliance would add an unfair burden on American

energy producers. Environmentalists around the globe protested the decision.With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States produced about25 percent of the Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions.

After seven months in office George Bush’s conservative agenda at home andhis unilateralism abroad had not stirred widespread popular enthusiasm. Nor hadhe persuaded his domestic critics that he was the leader of “all of the people.”Abroad, one normally friendly British newspaper worried that the United Statessought to “force everybody else to make concessions, while itself remainingimpervious to change.” Angry members of the United Nations removed theUnited States from the Commission on Human Rights.

September 11 changed perspectives around the world. “This is not only anattack on the United States but an attack on the civilized world,” insisted Germanchancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Even normally hostile nations like Cuba and Libya conveyed shock and regrets. At home the president was careful to distin-guish between the majority of “peace-loving” Muslims and “evil-doers” likeOsama bin Laden. But he made it clear that “our enemy is a radical network ofterrorists” and that governments around the world had a simple choice: “Eitheryou are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

In a war with so many shadowy opponents, it was not easy to agree on whichradical groups most threatened American security. The “radical network of ter-rorists” worked underground, spread across dozens of nations. Even the statesmost hospitable to al Qaeda proved hard to single out. Afghanistan was an obvi-ous target. It was the seat of the Taliban, the extreme Islamic fundamentalists whoruled the country, and the haven of bin Laden. Yet 15 of the 19 hijackers in theWorld Trade Center attacks hailed from Saudi Arabia, long an ally of the UnitedStates.

The Roots of Terror

Before September 11 few Americans had paid much attention to terrorist move-ments. Indeed, few American radicals had resorted to terrorist tactics. During theRed scare following World War I anarchists had exploded bombs, including onedetonated on Wall Street in New York City (see page 675). During the 1960sradical groups such as the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army hadplanted bombs and robbed banks. In 1995 Timothy McVeigh, a right-wingterrorist, exploded a bomb that killed 161 people in the federal building inOklahoma City. Yet those events were shocking precisely because, in the UnitedStates, they were relatively rare.


Kyoto Protocolrejected





Most terrorists resort to violence not because they are strong, but becausethey are weak. By creating widespread fear they hope to undermine the legiti-macy of governments or force their enemies to recognize their grievances. In bothNorthern Ireland and Israel, two centers of recent terrorist activities, the rulinggovernments possessed far more power than the insurgents.

In the Middle East, conditions that fostered terrorist movements increasedduring the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Saudi Arabia. By 2000 that nation’s pop-ulation had nearly tripled, to 19 million, since 1980. Per capita incomefell from around $19,000 to $7300. Much of the Saudi population wasyoung and educated and possessed little hope for the future. These dis-contented young Saudis received their education in schools run by Wahabbi cler-ics, a sect of radical Islamic fundamentalists. The Wahabbis viewed the UnitedStates and its secular Western values as the greatest threat to Islam.

The mass unemployment in Saudi Arabia afflicted other Islamic nations aswell. But while social conditions in the Middle East fostered terrorist movements,ironically it was the cold war—and, indirectly, the United States—that providedterrorists with training and weapons. During the early 1980s the Soviet Unionwas bogged down in its war in Afghanistan (see page 938). The CIA, with helpfrom Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom, encouraged Muslims fromall over the world to join the Afghan rebels. Between 1982 and 1992, approxi-mately 35,000 Muslim radicals traveled to Afghanistan from over 40 Islamicnations in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and the Far East. U.S. policymakers were delighted with the alliance they had helped forge. “What was moreimportant in the world view of history?” asked Zbigniew Brzezinski, nationalsecurity adviser during the Carter administration. “A few stirred-up Muslims orthe liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

One of the militants who had journeyed to Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden,a lanky six-foot, five-inch Saudi who towered over most of his fellow rebels. Dur-ing the 1980s bin Laden founded al Qaeda to forge a broad-basedalliance of Arab rebels. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, bin Ladencalled upon Saudi Arabia to help repel the invasion. To his dismay, the Saudisallowed the United States to use its lands to invade Iraq—not at all the kind of holywar bin Laden imagined. From his network of hidden camps in Afghanistan he begandirecting a worldwide terror network, including operatives in the United States.

Bin Laden’s organization differed from previous movements. As historianWalter LaFeber has noted, earlier attacks came from nation-based groups, withnationalist objectives. The Irish Republican Army wanted a unifiedIreland. Palestinians wanted an independent state of their own. AlQaeda, in contrast, had no national home. It was born out of theglobal alliance of radical Muslims who gathered in Afghanistan in the 1980s, itsprimary motivation was religious rather than nationalist.

Al Qaeda’s anti-America campaign began with a bombing at the World TradeCenter in 1993. That attack killed six people but did only minimal damage to the


Pressures in SaudiArabia

Osama bin Laden

A global terroriststrategy





building. Further attacks occurred in places far from the United States. Twice theClinton administration retaliated against al Qaeda with missile attacks; once itnarrowly missed killing bin Laden himself in one of his Afghan camps.

The War on Terror: First Phase

The military offensive against terrorism began in early October 2001. Despiteintense American pressure to deliver bin Laden “dead or alive,” the Taliban rulers

of Afghanistan refused to expel him or al Qaeda. The United Statesthen launched air attacks followed by an invasion, which quickly

brought down the Taliban. The United States established a coalition governmentin Kabul to help in the slow and uncertain process of rebuilding Afghanistan.

Although it became clear months later that bin Laden had managed to escapethe bombing campaign, this first stage of the war on terrorism went well.President Bush’s approval ratings remained high at home, and many Afghanscelebrated the end of Taliban rule, particularly women, whose rights had beenseverely restricted by the regime.

Domestically the war on terrorism faced a daunting task. The United Stateswas an open society, where citizens expected to travel freely and valued their

privacy. How aggressively should the government act to preventterrorist incidents? A month after the World Trade Center attacks the

vulnerability of American society was further exposed by the deaths of five peoplefrom letters tainted with anthrax virus sent through the postal system. Evidence

eventually pointed to a domestic rather than foreign source of the virus,but widespread fears led the administration to propose the USA Patriot

Act. Congress passed it so quickly, some members did not even read the bill beforevoting for it. The act broadly expanded government powers to use electronicsurveillance, monitor bank transactions (to fight money laundering), and investi-gate suspected terrorists.

With these expanded powers the Justice Department detained hundreds ofaliens—mostly Muslims and Arabs. By May 2003 some five thousand aliens werebeing held. Of those, only four had been charged with any terrorist activity, twoof whom were acquitted. Critics argued that these detentions, as well as the broadpowers of the Patriot Act, threatened the constitutional rights of Americans aswell as the natural rights of aliens. In July 2004 a near-unanimous SupremeCourt rejected the Bush administration’s claim that in fighting terrorismthe president could jail indefinitely American citizens deemed to be “enemycombatants.”

Beyond locating and arresting terrorists, an effort was set in motion to securevital systems of transportation, communication, and energy production. To coor-dinate new measures, Bush created the cabinet-level Department of HomelandSecurity, placing former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge in charge. Eventu-ally, a commission appointed to investigate September 11 declared these steps


Afghanistan

Anthrax virus

USA Patriot Act





inadequate. Effective security, it concluded, required a reorganization of thenation’s intelligence agencies.

The War on Iraq

With the war in Afghanistan ended, the president’s focus shifted from Osama binLaden to Iraq’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein. Indeed, a decision to overthrowHussein had been made in the first weekend after the September 11 attacks. Theonly question, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged, “waswhether [invading Iraq] should be in the immediate response or whether [thepresident] should concentrate simply on Afghanistan first.”

In September 2002 the president appeared before the UN General Assembly,challenging it to enforce its inspection program in Iraq for weapons of massdestruction (WMD). Beginning in 1998 Iraq had refused to allow UN inspectorsto verify the destruction of its WMDs. “All the world now faces a test,” con-cluded the president, “and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment.Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside with-out consequence?”

The speech proved effective. Under renewed pressure from the UnitedNations, Hussein allowed inspections to resume, but Bush grew impatient. “If we


PAKISTAN

INDIA

TAJIKISTAN

TURKMENISTAN

UZBEKISTAN

IRAN

CH

INA

Pashtun

Tajik

Hazara

Uzbek

Other ethnic groups

Repeatedair strikes

Cities captured byNorthern Alliance(allied with Americanand British forces)

Kurds

Sunni

Shia

Groundforcesmovement

Massgraves

Islamabad

Kabul Jalalabad

Tora Bora Caves

Mazar-e-Sharif

Herat

Tikrit

Fallujah

Mosul

Baghdad

BasraKandahar

Kunduz KirkukIRAN

KUWAIT

SYRIA

JORDAN

TURKEY

SAUDI ARABIA

IRAQ

AFGHANISTAN

.R

setarhpuE

.R

sirgiT

PersianGulf

0

0 100 200 Kilometers

100 200 Miles

0

0 100 200 Kilometers

100 200 Miles

THE WAR ON TERROR: AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ In Afghanistan al Qaeda forces were concentrated inthe mountainous region along the border with Pakistan. Ethnic and religious divisions influencedallegiances in both wars. In Iraq the most severe resistance to American occupation occurred from

around Baghdad to Fallujah in the west and Tikrit to the north. In this “Sunni triangle,” SunniMuslims had prospered more under Saddam Hussein than had Shia Muslims to the south.





know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weaponstoday—and we do—,” he proclaimed, “does it makeany sense for the world to wait . . . for the final proof,the smoking gun that could come in the form of amushroom cloud?” The president had already laid thegroundwork for a policy of not waiting, by asserting

that the United States would be “ready for preemptive action when necessary todefend our liberty and to defend our lives.”

This doctrine of preemption—announcing that the United States might attackbefore it was itself attacked—was a major departure from the cold war policy of

containment. “A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility,” Pres-ident Eisenhower declared in 1954. But Bush argued that, in an erain which terrorist enemies struck without warning, containment would

no longer work. With midterm elections looming in October 2002 the presidentpersuaded Congress to pass a joint resolution giving him full authority to takemilitary action against Iraq if he deemed it necessary.

UN weapons inspectors, however, reported that they could find no evidence ofWMDs or programs to build them. The Security Council refused to support anAmerican resolution giving the United States the authority to lead a UN-sponsoredinvasion. Only the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy, among the major powers,were willing to join the United States. France and Germany balked, as did Russia.

On March 19, 2003, without a UN mandate, a “coalition of the willing” (30nations, though the actual troops were virtually all American and British) attackedIraq. The invasion was accomplished with amazing speed and precision. Withindays U.S. forces were halfway to Baghdad. On May 1 Bush announced an end tomajor combat operations. Coalition casualties (135 dead and 1511 wounded) wereremarkably low.

A Messy Aftermath

Although a large majority of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, a vocalminority had opposed the war. Some believed that a doctrine of preemption wasnot only morally wrong, but also dangerous. If the United States felt free toinvade a country, what was to stop other nations from launching their own wars,justified by similar doctrines of preemption? Opponents also argued that no solidevidence linked the secular Saddam Hussein with the religious al Qaeda.


Preemption versuscontainment

Among the leaders of the major powers, only PrimeMinister Tony Blair (left) of the United Kingdom unre-servedly supported President Bush’s war in Iraq. The twoleaders met in the Azores several days before the invasionof Iraq, with the prime ministers of Spain and Portugal.





The administration dismissed those concerns but found it harder to ignorethe practical problems arising out of swift victory. Ethnic and religious factionsdivided Iraq—Shiite Muslims in the southeast, Sunni Muslims aroundBaghdad, and Kurds in the north. Without Saddam’s tyranny to holdthe country together, the burden of peacekeeping fell to the American military.The United States sought both aid and troops from allies, but most larger nationswere reluctant to participate, angered by the American go-it-alone attitude. Overthe next year, the number of violent acts against the American occupation steadilyincreased. By the fall of 2004 over 1000 Americans and coalition allies had diedpreserving the peace—more than five times the 172 killed in winning the war. Inaddition, the United States had spent over half a billion dollars in an unsuccess-ful search for the weapons of mass destruction.

In June 2004 the United States turned over formal control of Iraq to a provi-sional government operating under an interim constitution. But the handover didnot stop the violence from spreading, making it difficult to hold free elections inJanuary 2005. Meanwhile, the American cost of the war had risen to over $120billion, at a time when the federal deficit at home was exceeding $550 billion.American troop strength had been stretched to its limits. In both Afghanistan andIraq rebuilding war-torn economies promised to be slow and expensive—“a long,hard slog,” as Secretary Rumsfeld admitted in a confidential memo.

The intangible costs of the war were also high. In the spring of 2004,Americans were stunned to learn that Iraqi prisoners of war being held in theAbu Ghraib prison near Baghdad had been abused and tortured byAmerican soldiers guarding them. The Bush administration blameda handful of “bad apples” in the military. Several investigations bythe army, however, indicated that the abuse had been fostered by a militaryintelligence shake-up in September 2003. At that time counterterrorism expertsrecommended that army guards at Abu Ghraib “be actively engaged in setting theconditions for successful exploitation of the internees.” The Justice Department’sOffice of Legal Counsel had also prepared a memo on torture that argued thatcruel, inhuman, or degrading acts might not be classified as torture. ManyIraqis who once welcomed liberation from Saddam’s brutal regime came to seeAmerican soldiers as an occupying army.

The Election of 2004

President Bush planned to make the war on terror the center of his reelection cam-paign. A sluggish recovery and weak employment numbers made him vulnerable oneconomic issues. But with the war in Iraq dragging on and the Department ofHomeland Security warning of new domestic threats from al Qaeda, Bush’s Demo-cratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, made the war on terror amajor campaign issue, although he had trouble making a clear case on how he wouldresolve the chaos in Iraq differently. Since World War II voters generally have shown


Postwar Iraq

Abu Ghraib prisonscandal





more confidence in Republicans to protect the nation’s security. That attitude favoredGeorge W. Bush in the 2004 election. As in 2000, the outcome rested on just onestate—this time Ohio. Had 60,000 people out of some 5.6 million Ohio votersswitched to Kerry, he would have won the election, but not the popular vote. ButOhio went to Bush with 51 percent of the almost 120 million votes cast.

In his second inaugural address, George W. Bush laid out a visionary missionfor his administration. The United States would support “democratic movementsand institutions in every nation and every culture,” he declared, “with the ultimategoal of ending tyranny in the world.” Yet 40 years earlier President John Kennedyhad warned against overreaching the nation’s power. With only 6 percent of theworld’s people, the United States could not readily impose its will on the other94 percent, he observed. Nor could it “right every wrong or reverse every adver-sity.” In a world drawn closer by the Internet, global flows of immigration, andinternational terror, only time will tell whether a nation of nations can succeedas a policeman in an uncertain world.


c h a p t e r s u m m a r y

During the 1990s the United States becameincreasingly tied to a worldwide network ofeconomic, financial, and demographic relation-ships that increased both the nation’s diversityand its interdependence.● The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the

United States to a new wave of immigrationin the 1980s and 1990s, different from theinflux earlier in the century because of itstruly global diversity.● Immigrants from Asia—hailing from South

and Southeast Asia as much as from China,Japan, and the Philippines—crowded bothends of the economic spectrum in an hour-glass profile.

● Both legal and illegal immigrants fromMexico, Cuba, and Central America con-tributed to the growing Latino population,settling in both urban and suburban barrios.

● Many immigrants retained closer financial,political, and emotional ties with theirhome countries.

● Immigration changed the shape of religionin America, adding an increased presenceof Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths.

● During the Clinton presidency, regional con-flicts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe,Africa, and the Caribbean replaced cold warrivalries as the central challenge of foreignpolicy.

● President Clinton’s ambitious political agendaincluded rebuilding the nation’s infrastruc-ture, improving education, and reforming thehealth care system.● A divided and (after the elections of 1994)

increasingly hostile Congress limited thepresident’s legislative program.





INTERACTIVE LEARNING � 1003

● The campaign of Republican conservativesto impeach President Clinton ended whenthe Senate failed to convict the presidentof three articles of impeachment.

● The growth of the Internet, the World WideWeb, and e-commerce was part of a revolu-tion in communications and informationmanagement made possible by advances inmicrochip and computer technology. Butthose advances also threatened to create apermanent two-tiered economy divided bylevels of education and literacy.

● The political battles of the 1990s over race,immigration, and multiculturalism suggestthat the United States will remain a nation inwhich distinctive identities along lines ofrace, ethnicity, social class, and religion con-tinue to be a source both of strength and ofpolitical conflict.

● President George W. Bush advanced a con-servative agenda in domestic affairs, revolv-ing around lower taxes, education reform,and faith-based initiatives in social policy. In

foreign policy he pursued a unilateralist ap-proach that led him to reject the Kyoto Pro-tocol on global warming.

● The attacks of September 11 gave newstature to the president, as he declared waron Osama bin Laden and global terrorism.● Unemployed and discontented young peo-

ple in the Islamic nations such as SaudiArabia became a fertile source of recruitsfor bin Laden and global terrorism.

● The Bush administration launched a suc-cessful attack on Afghanistan’s Talibanregime in 2001, putting a new governmentin place. But Osama bin Laden eluded cap-ture. The decision to invade Iraq, in a pre-emptive war that lacked UN approval,proved controversial, though the initial in-vasion in 2003 went well. Hussein waseventually captured, but resistance amonginsurgents kept the nation in turmoil.

● George W. Bush won reelection despite JohnKerry’s charges that he had mismanaged theeconomy and bungled the war in Iraq.

i n t e r a c t i v e l e a r n i n g

The Primary Source Investigator CD-ROMoffers the following materials related to thischapter:● Interactive maps: Election of 1996 (M7),

The Cold War (M60), and InternationalOrganizations (M61)

● A collection of primary sources capturing thefall of communism, the end of the cold war,

and the era of President Clinton, includinga photo of President Clinton’s first inau-guration. Other sources include CaliforniaProposition 187 to prevent illegal aliens fromreceiving public benefits and services.

For quizzes and a variety of interactive resources, visit the book’s OnlineLearning Center at www.mhhe.com/davidsonconcise4.






s i g n i f i c a n t e v e n t s

1965 Immigration Reform Act

1969 ARPANET created

1986 Immigration and Control Act; Proposition 63

2003 Department of Homeland Security created;United States and the “Coalition of the Willing”invade Iraq, replace Saddam Hussein with Coalition Provisional Authority

1992 Rodney King verdict; Los Angeles riots; Bill Clinton elected

1994 U.S. troops sent to Haiti; health care reformfails; Kenneth Starr appointed special prosecutor; Rwanda massacres; Republicans win control of Congress; California’s Proposition 187 denies benefits to illegal aliens

1995 O. J. Simpson acquitted; Dayton Accords; GOP government shutdowns; U.S. troops in Bosnia; e-commerce boom begins

1996Welfare reform adopted; Clinton defeats Dole;

California passes Proposition 209 againstaffirmative action

1993NAFTA passed; peace agreement between Israel

and Palestinians; Clinton’s deficit reductionbudget adopted

1998Lewinsky scandal; Starr issues report recom-

mending impeachment; federal budget surplus

George W. Bush elected 2000

2002No Child Left Behind Act signed; Job Creationand Workers Assistance Act (JCWA) enacted;

President Bush asserts doctrine of preemptive war

2004Hussein captured; Abu Ghraib prisoner torture

scandals revealed; Iraq interim governmentreplaces Coalition Provisional Authority;

Bush reelected

1999 Senate acquits Clinton of impeachmentcharges; NATO planes bomb Serbia; Americantroops enter Kosovo as NATO peacekeepers;Senate rejects nuclear test ban treaty

2001 United States withdraws from the KyotoProtocol on global warming; Economic Growthand Tax Reform Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA) enacted; terrorists destroy the World Trade Center; anthrax virus sent through U.S. mailkills five people; Patriot Act passed; UnitedStates attacks Afghanistan’s Taliban regime

1965

1970

1985

1990

2000

1995

2005

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