Was Mussolini Misunderstood?

Giorgio Napolitano

Giorgio Napolitano, Italy's grandfatherly President, was trying not to squirm in his seat. But sitting center stage at a ceremony to honor World War II resistance fighters, the 83-year-old head of state couldn't help but wince as Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa shifted gears mid speech. "I would betray my conscience," La Russa declared, "if I did not recall other men in uniform."

Those "other men" were the fascist Italian troops allied with the Nazi occupiers. "From their point of view," La Russa said of the Nembo division, which served alongside the Germans in Rome, they "fought in the belief they were defending their country." La Russa's Sept. 8 speech was the second time in two days that a top leader of Italy's "post-fascist" National Alliance party — a key ally in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition — had opened wounds that most Italians have considered closed for decades.

Napolitano, a member of a Naples youth resistance movement during World War II, left no room in his own remarks for any backsliding on what is accepted history in Italy. "All the social, political and intellectual components" of Italy's postwar democracy come from those who opposed the Nazis and their Italian fascist allies, Napolitano said.

La Russa's controversial speech came just a day after Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno refused to categorically condemn Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Interviewed by Milan daily Corriere Della Sera following a visit to Israel, Alemanno, who also belongs to National Alliance, said he did not consider fascism an "absolute evil." While racial laws passed by Mussolini in the last five years of his two-decade reign were abhorrent, Alemanno told the newspaper, "fascism was a more complex phenomenon. Many people signed up in good faith."

Alemanno's comments were denounced by Jewish groups, surviving resistance leaders and members of the center-left opposition. Walter Veltroni, former Rome mayor and current head of the major center-left Democratic party, said he would resign from a city committee spearheading the building of a Holocaust memorial museum in protest.

The National Alliance has spent the past few years distancing itself from its extremist past. Five years ago, Gianfranco Fini, the longtime National Alliance party chief, used the words "absolute evil" to describe Mussolini's regime. Coming at the conclusion of his first trip to Israel, the then deputy Prime Minister appeared to have definitively separated his party from its fascist origins. This week's comments have undone a lot of that work.

Before his flight from Rome in 1943, Mussolini reigned over an iron-fisted dictatorship. He instituted one-party rule, eliminated basic freedoms, and ordered the killing of political opponents. In 1938, Italy instituted racial laws which helped pave the way for the subsequent deportation of thousands of Italian Jews to Nazi death camps.

But fascist or "post-fascist" Italians still try to separate the excesses of the leaders from what they consider a worthy ideology and the good intentions of its followers. In some sense, the comments by La Russa and Alemanno express the two halves of the nostalgia in fascist circles. La Russa sought to defend the legacy of the soldiers who fought, and sometimes died, in pro-Mussolini forces. Alemanno hinted at the need in Italy for the kind of rigidly controlled, law-abiding society that was said to have existed under fascism.

But both miss a larger point that their leader Fini had finally seemed to grasp about the "absolute" lessons that must be drawn from history. As Venice mayor Massimo Cacciari said after La Russa's remarks: Nazi soldiers also believed that they were defending their nation, and no German politician would think to praise their efforts.

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Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S.

By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority -- military power -- will "be the least significant" asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because "nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force."

Fingar's remarks last week were based on a partially completed "Global Trends 2025" report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.

"The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished," Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding "at an accelerating pace" in "political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas."

The 2025 report will lay out what Fingar called the "dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers" that will shape the world for the next administration and beyond. In advance of its completion, intelligence officials have begun briefing the major presidential candidates on the security threats that they would be likely to face in office. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received an initial briefing Sept. 2, with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expected to receive one in the coming days, intelligence officials said.

As described by Fingar, the intelligence community's long-term outlook has darkened somewhat since the last report in 2004, which also focused on the impact of globalization but was more upbeat about its consequences for the United States. The new view is in line with that of prominent economists and other global thinkers who have argued that America's influence is shrinking as economic powerhouses such as China assert themselves on the global stage. The trend is described in the new book "The Post-American World," in which author Fareed Zakaria writes that the shift is not about the "decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."

In the new intelligence forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout. Fingar predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.

In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said. "There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system," he said.

The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change "could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," Fingar said, while the United States will face "Dust Bowl" conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world. But among industrialized states, declining birthrates will create new economic stresses as populations become grayer. In China, Japan and Europe, the ratio of working adults to seniors "begins to approach one to three," he said.

The United States will fare better than many other industrial powers, in part because it is relatively more open to immigration. Newcomers will inject into the U.S. economy a vitality that will be absent in much of Europe and Japan -- countries that are "on a good day, highly chauvinistic," he said.

"We are just about alone in terms of the highly developed countries that will continue to have demographic growth sufficient to ensure continued economic growth," Fingar said.

Energy security will also become a major issue as India, China and other countries join the United States in seeking oil, gas and other sources for electricity. The Chinese get a good portion of their oil from Iran, as do many U.S. allies in Europe, limiting U.S. options on Iran. "So the turn-the-spigot-off kind of thing -- even if we could do it -- would be counterproductive."

Nearly absent from Fingar's survey was the topic of terrorism. Since the last such report, the intelligence community has projected a declining role for al-Qaeda, which was deemed likely to become "increasingly decentralized, evolving into an eclectic array of groups, cells, and individuals." Inspired by al-Qaeda, "regionally based groups, and individuals labeled simply as jihadists -- united by a common hatred of moderate regimes and the West -- are likely to conduct terrorist attacks," the 2004 document said.

The new assessment saw a continued threat from Iran, however. Fingar predicted steady progress in the Islamic republic's attempts to create enriched uranium, the essential fuel used in nuclear weapons and commercial power reactors. For now, however, there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on building a weapon, Fingar said, echoing last year's landmark National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that warhead-design work had halted in 2003.

He said Iran's ultimate decision on whether to build nuclear weapons depended on how its leaders viewed their "security requirement" -- whether they thought their government sufficiently safe in a region surrounded by traditional enemies.

Iranians are "more scared of their neighbors than many think they ought to be," Fingar said. But he noted that the United States had eliminated two of Iran's biggest enemies: Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

"The United States took care of Iran's principal security threats," he said, "except for us, which the Iranians consider a mortal threat."

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Palin promotes general after he changes his stance on her experience

John Byrne and Mike Sheehan

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has promoted an adjutant-general in the Alaska National Guard to Lieutenant General after he reversed course on remarks that seemed to criticize the now-Republican candidate for Vice President.

Last Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Craig Campbell suggested to the Boston Globe that Gov. Sarah Palin's role as commander of the state's National Guard was largely ceremonial, thus blunting attempts by the McCain campaign to assert she had foreign policy experience.

"Our National Guard is basically just like any National Guard," Campbell told the paper. "You could call [Adjutant General] Joe Carter in Massachusetts and he would say he is organized the same way."

"She is very much engaged in what we are doing and she asks a lot of questions," Campbell added. "Maybe not the most engaged, but definitely engaged.

He noted that 75 percent of the Guard's budget is controlled by the National Guard Bureau in Washington, and that Alaska's anti-nuclear missile site is not under his or Palin's purview.

Later in the week, however, Campbell appeared on Fox News to tout Palin's candidacy.

"I'll tell you, in the last few days, I've been watching the press, and I've not been very pleased with what I've been seeing about the chastising of the National Guard by having it diminished by the insinuation that a commander-in-chief of the National Guard doesn't really control the military," he remarked. "The National Guard has 500,000 people in it around this great country, serving in states and overseas. National Guards are state military forces run by governors, and Sarah Palin does it great."

On Monday, he was quietly promoted. A statement -- issued by Palin's office -- asserted that the promotion signified "Governor Sarah Palin's support of the Guard and her commitment to reinforcing the cooperation between federal and state military assets."

"Palin took the opportunity to promote Campbell ahead of any pending emergency that may occur with the upcoming fall storm season," it added. "This allows Alaska to have more of a say in times of state disasters."

"This is about Alaskans serving Alaskans," Palin said in the release. "The promotion is a statement that the Alaska National Guard is the state military force responsible for responding to state issues, at the direction of the Governor. The decision to promote the Adjutant General to Lieutenant General is based on a fundamental states'-rights stance, for which Alaska has a strong historical position."

The promotion was first noted by VoteVets' Brandon Friedman.

At least one Alaskan National Guardsman has expressed outrage at the promotion. In a posting on the blog of an Alaska radio host, a man who claims to be a member of the Alaska National Guard expressed his ire.

"The Guardsmen found out about this travesty when a call went out for volunteers to fill the room for his ceremony," the Guardsman wrote. "The response was almost non-existent."

Campbell's promotion is largely ceremonial, the poster noted. Only the federal level of the national guard is able to promote individuals to the Major General rank.

"General Campbell's promotion will be a 'state' promotion," he said. "He will be a three-star general only while on State business. In a very rank-conscious environment, this distinction will not be lost on the other Flag Officers. He will look the part of a three-star general but will not be regarded as one by the very people he needs to work with and influence."

"No one can be promoted to the top ranks because of perceived leadership deficiencies but even with his obvious leadership flaws, he has no reluctance whatsoever to accept a cosmetic promotion," he added. "I believe the Governor's office will receive substantial correspondence urging her to reconsider this insult to the men and women of the Alaska National Guard."

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