Transcendent Justice:  Implementing a New Paradigm of Civilizations in the Fourth World War

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

Part One

The Role of Justice


I.  Origins of the Fourth World War

      The Third World War, known as the Cold War, ended in 1990 with the implosion of Stalinist Communism, which for almost a century represented the global threat of secular totalitarianism.  The Fourth World War started that same year in the mountains of Afghanistan when religious warriors turned from their victorious war against totalitarian Communism to fight a global war against oligarchical capitalism.  The maxim was, “one down, one more to go, until the end of history”.

  Unfortunately, the forces behind this new war against what were considered to be the generic forces of global hegemony were rooted in religious totalitarianism no different from the forces that had been defeated in the Third World War.  The new totalitarian forces were determined to impose a new religious hegemony that posed potentially a greater threat to global civilization in the twenty-first century than were the secular ideologies of Nazism and Communism in the century just past. 

  World history is full of tyrannies led by despots who seek only to preserve and enhance their own power.  Tyranny is reactive and local.  It seeks stability and can be manipulated.  Totalitarianism, by definition, seeks total control of the human mind and annihilation of all opposition, wherever it may be.  Totalitarianism, whether it is secular or religious, is proactive and global.  It seeks dominance through chaos and destruction.  It is, in fact, suicidal and cannot be manipulated.  Like evil, it cannot be destroyed, but it can be marginalized and emasculated by eliminating its recruiting power. 

  The new religious threat, which has arisen as a reaction to Western secularism, is not between or among civilizations but has become endemic in all of them.  This new threat can be countered only when every civilization revives its classical teachings in a universal drive for justice as a paradigm for both domestic and foreign policy.  Without such a moral framework, which is at the heart of all world religions, freedom and democracy mean little to most of the people in the world.  Freedom and democracy are the offspring of a morally sound society, not its parents.

II.  The Natural Law of Faith-Based Justice

  The three major purposes that transcend the pursuit of power, privilege, prestige, and wanton pleasure in any civilization are justice, known in Qur’anic Arabic as ‘adl, balanced order, known as mizan, and freedom of religion, known by some as haqq al din.

  Islam is known as a religion of peace, salam.  In classical Islamic thought, as developed from the third through sixth Islamic centuries, peace as the essence of Islam results from justice, and justice is merely the expression of truth.  The most profound verse in the Qur’an as a source of faith-based justice is Surah al An’am 6:115, “The Message of your Lord is completed and perfected in truth and in justice.”  This teaches that justice is an expression of truth and that truth originates in the transcendent order of reality, indeed from the Being of God, not in man-made law.

  Perhaps the second most profound verse is Surah al Shura 42:17, which emphasizes the concept of balance, known as mizan.  This is central to all classical Islamic thought in every aspect of both personal and social life.  “It is God Who has bestowed revelation from on high, setting forth the truth, and [thus given man] a balance [wherewith to weigh right and wrong].”  This verse of the Qur’an teaches that divine revelation through the various prophets in human history is considered to be a balance, an instrument placed by God in our hands by which we can weigh all issues of conscience.

  A third profound teaching of the Qur’an is the importance and power of choice, of which the most important instance is freedom of religion and the freedom to interpret divine guidance in the practice of justice.  The concept of choice is central, because, without freedom to choose, neither balance nor justice would have any meaning.  The power to choose between good and bad is the greatest gift from the Creator to the created, but it is also a profound test for every person, every community, and nation, every civilization, and humanity itself. 

  The Qur’an emphasizes the importance of the basic power to choose between purposes or higher paradigms of thought, because the choice shapes the governing agendas of both persons and communities and thereby controls action.  According to the Qur’an, the choice that has determined the rise and fall of entire civilizations throughout human history is between the pursuit of transcendent justice and the pursuit of material power as an ultimate goal in life.  The weightiness of this choice is indicated in the following Qur’anic verse from Surah al Hadid – Iron – 57:25:

We bestowed revelation from on high, and [thus gave you] a balance [wherewith to weigh right and wrong]; and We bestowed [upon you] from on high [the ability to make use of] iron, in which there is awesome power as well as [a source of] benefits for man; and [all this was given to you] so that God might mark out those who would stand up for Him and His Apostles, even though He [Himself] is beyond the reach of human perception.

  Man has the power through his own ingenuity and free choice to convert to his own use the natural resources of the world in order to fashion tools and ultimately to develop technology and the machine and even nuclear fuel for either good or evil.  He can develop modern conveniences to live more easily on his native planet or he can treat the entire planet as a tool and thereby lose his inner connection with nature.  This, in turn, can lead to the gradual dissolution of all moral and spiritual perceptions and to denial of divine guidance as a fact of reality.

  The balance to be maintained in every civilization as embodied in every world religion is among order, justice, and freedom.  This paradigm of balance teaches that order, justice, and freedom are interdependent.  When freedom is construed to be independent of justice, there can be no justice and the result will be anarchy.  When order is thought to be possible without justice, there will be no order, because injustice is the principal cause of disorder.  When justice is thought to be possible without order and freedom, then the pursuit or order, justice, and freedom are snares of the ignorant.

  Without consensus on the proper nature of order, and of justice and freedom as essential parts of a single whole, rather than as independent pursuits, no civilization can continue to exist.  The twin roles of religion in all of its traditionalist manifestations, including the monotheistic and “revealed religions”, and especially Islam, are the spiritual well-being or happiness of every person and the maintenance of consensus on the responsibilities and rights necessary to live in an ordered society.

III.  Transcendent Justice as a New School of Law

  Students of comparative legal systems differ on whether there is an essence to any particular religion and to any given legal system, or whether each religion is an accumulation of human practices and every legal system is a composite of accidentals developed in response to changing exigencies.

  Islam is by far the best example of a religion that has very self-consciously developed a sense of its own essence and sharply distinguished this from any perverted interpretation and practice by self-professed Muslims.  Whereas in Christianity the essence is considered to be love at the level of metaphysical philosophy, in Islam the essence is considered to be law at the level of moral philosophy.  As Michiel Bijkirk put it in an email on May 18, 2008, “Law in Islam has a soul or spiritual side.  Without that spiritual side, there is only the law, not justice.”

  In Western positivist law, which by definition is entirely manmade, law exists only to the extent that it is enforced.  In Islam, if the law has to be enforced it has failed, because the purpose of Islamic law is primarily educational as a set of guidelines for action.

  What are these guidelines?  Some of the best minds in human history developed this set of guidelines over a period of many centuries.  These guidelines are known as the maqasid al shari’ah or purposes of the shari’ah, or as the kulliyat or universal principles, or as the dururiyat or essentials. 

  Very briefly, these may be categorized as the following seven:  haqq al din (freedom of religion), haqq al nafs or haqq al haya (respect for the human person and human life), haqq al nasl (respect for marriage and human community), haqq al mal (respect for the universal right to ownership of productive property), haqq al hurriya (respect for the universal right of self-determination or political freedom), haqq al karama (respect for human dignity, especially gender equity), and haqq al ‘ilm (respect for the rights to free speech, publication, and association).

  These norms or guidelines constitute a set of human responsibilities and rights and form the essence of Islamic jurisprudence.  They provide a sophisticated methodology for understanding the Qur’an and evaluating the ahadith, so that the rules and regulations or ahkam can be applied justly.

  There are, in fact, two essences of Islam as a religion and as Islamic jurisprudence as its most comprehensive manifestation.  One is formative and the other derivative, and they must be maintained in a dialectical balance.  Human rights as the intellectual essence, but this is an essential derivative of a prior essence, which is love, ‘ishq, which comes from beyond the human intellect.  In systems terminology, there is an input/output balance.  The input is transcendent, known as the batin, and the output is immanent, known as the zahr. 

  This is similar to the dialectic between the theory and practice of law.  In the intellectual processing, the theory should influence the practice, but the practice should also influence the theory.  In Islamic jurisprudence and in Islamic thought generally, the theory itself comes from the transcendent source of divine guidance, as best human beings can understand it in the open-ended search for truth.  But this understanding must also reflect the experience of practice in a changing space-time universe.  The essence is indeed unchanging, but its application is or should be in constant flux, because that is the nature of reality.

  The controversial question then arises, is there a need for a separate madhab or school of law that reflects this transcendent dimension more clearly than have the existing six madhdhabib.  Or should one consider this focus on the transcendent merely a school of thought rather than a school of law?  In Islam is there really a difference between thought and law, since law is the basic framework of reference in Islamic thought, whereas in the Western positivist paradigm human thought is the framework for law?

  One might look at this new perspective on the shari’ah by using the analogy of the hourglass.  The shari’ah is like an hourglass which transmutes the transcendent into the immanent by means of the art of intellectual processing.  This processing from input to output is what Allah in the Qur’an refers to as the jihad al kabir or “great jihad,” which is the only jihad mentioned in the Qur’an, the other two, the jihad al akbar and the jihad al saghrir, being mentioned only in the ahadith, wa jihidhum bihi jihadan kabiran, “struggle with it [divine revelation] in a great jihad.”

  Following the insights of Rumi, the shari’ah would have two essences, the input of love and the output of human rights.  Without eternal input there will never be any lasting output, since, as Rumi puts it, love is the reason for the creation of the universe.  Quite simply, who would care about justice unless one were motivated by love?  This, of course, would explain why in recent times justice has gone out of style.

  In pursuit of justice as a product of higher understanding we should remember the wisdom of “the throne verse,” the ayah al kursi, Surah Baqara 2:255, Ya’alamu ma bayna ‘aydihim wa ma khalfahum; wa la yuhituna bi shayin min ‘ilmihi illa bi ma sha’a, “He know all that lies open before men and all that is hidden from them, whereas they cannot attain to any of His knowledge except what he wills [them to attain].

IV. The Primacy of Economic Justice in Iraq

  Justice must be implemented in practical ways through models for application everywhere.  Justice for most of the people in the world requires a revolution of ideas, especially economic ideas that can unite highly diverse people and provide them the freedom to make their own life-enhancing economic choices.  People in developing countries are increasingly rejecting capitalist and socialist models of development as power-concentrating and exploitative, outmoded and inefficient, or exclusionary and elitist.

  Classical Islamic thought, well developed in the writings of Ibn Khaldun more than half a millennium ago on personal, communal, and civilizational identity, calls for an inclusionary nation-building and federation-building model based on universal access to private property.  The key to an economic grand strategy for waging the Fourth World War against religious totalitarianism was perhaps first advanced in the wise words of the first century B.C. Greek historian Diodorus Siculaus:  “Never entrust the defense of a country to people who own no part of it.”

  This wisdom could be applied in many places, but especially in Iraq, starting with Iraq’s oil reserves.  While Alan Greenspan agrees with those who claim that the war in Iraq is “all about oil”, de-monopolizing state ownership of Iraqi oil in equal shares of inalienable and voting shares of stock to every resident of an Iraqi federation would eliminate the bogeyman of oligarchical foreign control and provide a cost-free first step toward a global solution to defeat religious totalitarianism and global terrorism.

  Such a model of expanding capital ownership in a country where there is no private ownership of natural resources would lift the artificial barriers that deprive the vast majority of citizens of an equal opportunity to acquire and possess productive capital assets and to share profits and economic power.  This model provides a stable foundation for an effective and religiously pluralistic democracy.  It offers a viable and politically unifying framework for all Iraqi citizens to work and prosper together, regardless of their religious, ethnic, cultural, political, and other differences.  It would help Iraq become economically self-sufficient as soon as possible, providing the basis for a stable, independent, and democratic government that would serve as a model for other nations in the Middle East and around the world.

  The challenge in Iraq to freedom, democracy, and even survival is obvious.  There seem to be no clear answers.  The opportunity now presents itself for America to become the champion of global economic justice by working with the prime movers in Iraq to implement a global “beachhead” project that would:

(1) Transfer Free Oil Shares to Every Citizen of Iraq

Denationalize the oil fields of Iraq, as a catalyst for building a new “Just Third Way” economy.  All Iraqis would automatically receive free, as a right of citizenship from birth to death, one equal non-transferable share in the new professionally managed corporation.

(2) Establish in Iraq’s Constitution the Right of Universal Citizen Access to Property.

The constitution of Iraqis should be written to reflect all the rights contained in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, particularly Article 17, which acknowledges every person’s right to own property individually or in association with others.

(3) Enact Central Bank Credit Policy for Growing the Economy

The discount power of the central bank in Iraq should be restructured to encourage non-inflationary private-sector productive growth through the creation of interest-free money for local banks to promote more universal citizen access to capital credit for financing new investments.

(4) Gain U.N. Support for Iraq as a Global Free Trade Zone

The United States and other countries should introduce a resolution into the U.N. General Assembly to treat Iraq as a “global free trade zone” whose imports and exports would be exempt from all trade barriers and tariffs of other countries.  In this way the international community could provide a major catalyst for “Peace Through Justice” in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

V.  Facing up to the Challenge

  The late futurist R. Buckminster Fuller shed light on the mission of grand strategy in the era of the current Fourth World War:  “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. . . . [Our challenge is] to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time with spontaneous cooperation and without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

  Civilizations rise under three conditions: first, if they are challenged; second, if they recognize the challenge; and, third, if they therefore know how to respond. 

  In the twenty-first century, world civilization is challenged by an ideology of hatred and destruction more evil and potentially more destructive even than the ideologies of Communism and Nazism in the century just past.  America, with its unrivaled economic, military and diplomatic powers, is waging a paradigmatic war on all fronts.  This war is totally focused against religious totalitarians who have stolen the name of Islam in their murderous pursuit to enslave the human mind by destroying all independent and creative thought..  Our enemies have turned oppressed and frustrated humans into suicide bombers willing to kill indiscriminately thousands of fellow Muslims and innocents of other faiths.  The modern paradigm of hate has become a cancerous growth within one of the great world religions.  If America and global society do not eradicate this cancer with a paradigm of justice, the very survival of human civilization and all earthly life is threatened.  Americans enjoy the security of a virtual oligopoly of weapons of mass destruction, but this cannot last much longer, as access to these weapons become available to terrorists in the global marketplace.

  Interfaith understanding and avoidance of reciprocal demonization are necessary, but without action they are sterile, fraudulent, and self-defeating.  We need intellectual H-bombs of paradigmatic revolution to expose, marginalize, and destroy the common threat that looms in the extremists’ attempting hijacking of all the world religions for their hate-inspired agenda designed to create global chaos and impose their own alternative universe of religious totalitarianism.

  This war is being fought not between civilizations but within every human society.  Such a war requires grand strategy.  Grand strategy by classical definition transcends tactical battles and focuses all efforts on strategies to win the larger war. 

VI.  Recognizing the Nature of the Challenge

  The most difficult task of grand strategy often is to identify the nature of the enemy and to adopt terminology adequate to communicate the full dimension of the threat.

  Assessments of the threat have varied from year to year and from one think-tank to another.  Some policymakers suggest that Islam is anachronistic in the modernizing world and will soon die out along with the threat.  Other defenders of the Iraq war define all politically active Muslims as “Islamists” and declare that they all are a threat, despite the fact that the radicals among the Islamists broke off years ago to form their own splinter groups in opposition to the moderates who abjure violence.  This clash within the ranks of politically active Muslims compares with the break-off of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin from the Mensheviks in the early days of Communism.

  These radicals are religious totalitarians and do indeed pose a monumental threat at least in potential to mount what could amount to their World War against civilization.  Some who advocate preemptive use of American military force define the threat in terms of five capabilities that make the religious totalitarians unique in human history.  These five are: 1) A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate human life; 2) A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of Fascism or Communism; 3) An impressively conceptualized, funded, and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility and goodwill; 4) An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from the oppressed to the privileged, from illiterates to PhD’s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians; and 5) A growing number of committed cadres. 

VII.  Recognizing the Identity of the Challengers

  Generalizations generally mislead.  The challengers to America are evil, but evil does not describe the specific identities of those who would impose a paradigm of confrontation, hatred, and destruction.  The term “Islamists” is too general, because most self-described Islamists genuinely want freedom and democracy as both the means and substance of justice. They renounce violence as a road to power because violence will then be the only means to keep it.  But peace-loving Islamists cannot disengage themselves from the global struggle against the religious totalitarians who co-opt Islam and use words like “justice,” “freedom,” and “democracy” to mean their opposite, as did the Communists in their peace fronts and in their calls for peaceful existence, which were designed merely to buy time until they were ready to launch the final holocaust.  In the war of ideas, words count.

  Exaggerating the numbers of religious extremists who either do or might resort to violence is just as misleading as underestimating them.  The best way to counter the threat of religious extremists among Muslims as the major totalitarian threat in the 21st century is first to identify those who misrepresent the religion of Islam as understood by its classical scholars over the centuries and who attempt to hijack their professed religion for their own political agendas.  This is essential in order to disassociate the name of the religion, Islam, from the totalitarian threat posed by hate-mongers who invoke Islam as alleged justification for their war on civilization.

  Popular terms of either misinformation or disinformation designed to demonize the religion merely direct attention away from the religious totalitarians and provide them with ammunition to demonize America.  The first such term was coined by Newt Gingrich in 1994 in his call for a war against “Islamic totalitarianism.” He got the threat right, but missed the source of it in a movement that was the very opposite of everything that is classically Islamic.  More recently, on September 1, 2007, presidential candidate Senator John McCain in an internal memo to his staff declared that, “The transcendent issue of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism.” He correctly identified radical extremism as the first step toward a totalitarian war of extermination, but again targeted the wrong source.  A more politically popular term for the up-coming presidential elections in America is David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism,” which is an oxymoron and counter-productive.  Even President Bush used for a short time before recognizing that it is not official governmental policy to mix religion and politics.

  There are better terms than these, however, by which to launch a grand strategy against the real global threat in a Fourth World War.  There are plenty of Muslim totalitarians who can well be described as fascist, but they should be referred to as Al Qa’ida fascists or Muslim fascists, not oxymoronically as Islamic fascists, or simply as religious fascists, who exist in every religion. 

  Better yet would be to condemn the Al Qa’ida movement and associated perversions of Islam by the terms that Muslims themselves now are using to condemn them.  Increasingly, especially since the savagery in Iraq has focused their attention, Muslims are becoming aware that they will be the major victims of the Al Qa’ida heresy unless it can be marginalized and destroyed.  In a movement led by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, those Muslims who are waging a war against Muslim extremism are denouncing the heretical movement of Osama bin Laden and his minions by using the words these murderous fanatics understand. 

  The fascist extremists among Muslims call themselves mujahidun or warriors waging Holy War, which they presumptuously call jihad, so that they will go to jannah or heaven.  In fact, according to Qur’anic teachings they are mufsidun headed for jahannam or evildoers headed for hell.  They claim that they are fighting for ihtiram or human respect, whereas in fact they are committing istilal, which is the cardinal sin of playing God.  Their murderous assault on every human right should be exposed for what it is, namely, a monumental act of rida al shaytanniya or diabolical apostasy.

  Applying classical Islamic thought in the war from within, which can be done only by recognized Islamic scholars, makes it clear that suicide bombing requires blind fanaticism, not courage.  True submission to God requires the dedication of one’s life to a much more difficult and daunting task.  This is to transform one’s own life, which was given as a gift in the image of God, in order better to transform the world in which one lives out of love, rather than to destroy it out of hatred.

VIII.  Responding to the Threat through Paradigmatic Revolution

  The first two steps in a grand strategy against the enemies of America and of all human kind are to face up to the existence of the threat and to recognize its nature and specific source.  The third step is to mount an adequate response.

  The response must be a revolutionary paradigm shift from survival as the ultimate goal to justice as a transcendent purpose.  The history of civilizations shows that whoever seeks only to survive, will die.  Whoever pursues the transcendent purpose of peace through justice will not only survive but prosper.

  This was well understood by America’s Founders, who in the Preamble to the American Constitution listed justice as the first of their five purposes, and freedom only last as its product.  They envisioned freedom, not as the demolition of all authority as did the leaders of the French Revolution, but as the essence of justice based on a religious and spiritual understanding of the transcendent source of all authority, including that of every nation-state.  Since then, we have gone far off course, estranged ourselves from the rest of the world, and, especially with the disastrous war in Iraq, have forfeited much of our destined moral leadership to those who claim to be leaders but have no morality.

  One of American policy makers’ greatest weaknesses is the use of terminology that appeals to many Americans but totally turns off the rest of the world.  The best example is “democratic capitalism.”  Most policymakers repeat this mantra as America’s vaunted gift to humankind, not realizing that it has failed as a vision for winning the hearts and minds of most people in the world and neutralizing the breeding grounds for global terrorists.  We are losing the mimetic warfare against religious fanatics by using Islamic terms like jihad that serve only to glorify them and justify their cause.  Similarly, we are losing the war of ideas in today’s Fourth World War by failing to use the most powerful word in the world, which is “justice.” Worse yet, American propagandists have substituted an oxymoronic term suggesting that political democracy and plutocratic or exclusionary “capitalism” (a term invented by enemies of private property rights and a just free market economy) can be harmonized.  Even Osama bin Laden in his last videotape has attacked “capitalism” to mask his own brand of totalitarianism. 

  America’s founders understood that a democratic society rests on widespread access to “the means of acquiring and possessing property,” which is the key to personal independence and to an economically just and free enterprise system.  Neither our founders nor moral philosophers like Adam Smith and John Locke ever used the term “capitalism,” a word invented by Marxists to suggest concentrated ownership, exclusionary barriers to ownership, monopolies of economic power, institutionalized greed, and exploitation of working people.  Such an inherently materialistic term obscures the universal principles of economic justice imbedded in the original American Dream, whereby artificial legal, tax, and financial barriers can be lifted so that every citizen has a truly equal opportunity to become a capital owner.  American leaders need to reprogram the war rhetoric we use in marketing globally the many positive values and traditions that once made America “the last best hope of mankind.”

  Every war needs a war leader, one who has provided a model of success in former wars.  Our model today should be President Ronald Reagan who combined the strategy of escalation dominance in military power with the strategy of what Zbigniew Brzenzinski called “peaceful engagement.”  Zbig was calling for maximum communication and even economic cooperation with the peoples caught in the web of the evil empire so that they could break out of it without the need for the U.S. military to turn the Third World War from cold to hot.

  Ronald Reagan was one of the twentieth century’s preeminent grand strategists.  He laid out his grand strategy in his first major foreign-policy pronouncement on February 22nd, 1983, celebrating George Washington’s birthday.  He emphasized “our responsibility to work for constructive change, not simply to preserve the status quo.” “History,” he declared, “is not a darkening path twisting inevitably toward tyranny. … It is the growing determination of men and women of all races and conditions to gain control of their own destinies.”

  President Reagan, who started his career as a labor leader combating the threat of Communist infiltration into the movie industry, called on all American policy-makers, both Republican and Democrat, to recognize, as he put it, “the central focus of politics – the minds, hearts, sympathies, fears, hopes, and aspirations not of governments, but of people – the global electorate.”  He concluded, “The American dream lives – not only in the hearts and minds of our own countrymen, but in the hearts and minds of millions of the world’s peoples in both free and oppressed societies who look to us for leadership.  As long as that dream lives, as long as we continue to defend it, America has a future – and all mankind has reason to hope.”

  President Reagan was the last president to recognize justice, especially economic justice, as the key to America’s mission in the world, just as George Washington was the first.  He recognized the economic justice of broadening ownership of all forms of productive capital, just as Abraham Lincoln recognized through the Homestead Act the importance of broadening ownership of land, which in 1862 was the major source of wealth.  Above all, Ronald Reagan recognized economic justice as a universal human right, essential to political freedom. 

  In 1985, Senators Richard Lugar, Chris Dodd, Russell Long, Paul Laxalt and Steve Symms and Representatives Phil Crane and Michael Barnes co-sponsored the formation of a bipartisan Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice to advance “capital homesteading for every citizen” as a regional strategy for countering Marxist advances in Central America and the Caribbean.  On August 3, 1987, President Reagan welcomed the task force’s final report, High Road to Economic Justice, by declaring that, “Economic and political freedom are inseparably linked. … What better weapon against Communism than millions of working men and women owning the enterprises in which they work and reaping the rewards of technological advancement.”

  The threat today is not Communism imposed from the top, but something even worse.  This is the chaos deliberately engendered by religious fanatics who believe that no force on earth can stop them, least of all the American military.  They are right in assessing the limits of the military, but they are 100% wrong in assuming that they are the only source of power on earth and heaven.  They are wrong because chaos can trigger paradigmatic revolution, the revolution envisaged by Ronald Reagan and encapsulated in the slogan, “Close the Wealth Gap: Own, or Be Owned.”  This revolution is known as the Just Third Way.

Part Two

Launching the Paradigmatic Revolution in Iraq

I.  Strategic Elements of the Just Third Way Model

  Iraq is not merely a zone of war.  It is also a zone of revolution.  Whoever can win this revolution will shape the future not only of Iraq and the Middle East, including the Holy Land, but of the entire world for decades and centuries to come.

  The transfer of “sovereignty” to the Iraqi people on June 30, 2004, has not yet brought about a government that can secure the “life, liberty, and property” of its citizens.  There is still no clear exit strategy for U.S. troops that would avoid leaving Iraq in chaos and civil war.  No official plan for economic reconstruction has been offered by the United States, its allies, or the United Nations that could unify the various factions in Iraq and provide for a broad sharing of ownership and economic power among all Iraqi citizens.

  People in developing countries are increasingly rejecting capitalist and socialist models of development as power-concentrating and exploitative, or outmoded and inefficient.  The Just Third Way, in contrast, is a model designed to build nations and federations of nations based on the equal opportunity of every citizen to acquire and possess productive capital assets within an economy that decentralizes economic power.  The new model provides a stable foundation for an effective and religiously pluralistic democracy.  It offers a viable and politically unifying framework for all Iraqi citizens to work and prosper together, regardless of their religious, ethnic, cultural, political, and other differences.

  The Just Third Way model addresses a “fatal omission” in conventional approaches to nation-building whose exclusionary policies engender a growing gap between the rich and poor, concentration of power and ownership by a small elite, corruption and abuses of power at all levels, and instability within society. 

  This new model is best developed in the following five books.  Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen, by Norman G. Kurland, Dawn K. Brohawn, and Michael D. Greaney, Center for Economic and Social Justice, 2004, http://www.capitalhomestead.com, provides a comprehensive blueprint for closing the ownership gap that could be adopted by any nation.  This represents more than sixty years of constant refinement in the evolution of the seminal ideas begun in 1946 by the Chief Mufti of Tunisia, Muhammad al Tahir ibn Ashur, in his path-breaking book, Maqasid al Shari’ah, which was first published in English in 2006 by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and reviewed by Dr. Robert D. Crane in his article, “Islamic Economics: The Total Revolution,” http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, August 23, 2007.  This pioneering work was improved upon independently in two books by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer Adler (America’s greatest modern philosopher), namely, The Capitalist Manifesto, Random House, 1958, which spelled out the basic concept, and The New Capitalists, 1961, which explored the role of pure credit based on future earnings and on capital insurance.  The fifth of the classic books on this new model is Binary Economics: The New Paradigm, by Robert Ashford and Rodney Shakespeare, University Press of America, 1999, which can serve as a university textbook. 

  The leading edge of the new strategic framework is economic, attacking directly the economic injustice root causes of terrorism and the basis of its support among the populace.  It answers the demands of all Iraqi citizens for social and economic justice and an end to systemic poverty and oppression.  It creates systematically a true nation of owners.

  This strategy promotes the growing economic sovereignty and empowerment of each citizen — as a worker, as a consumer, and as a capital owner.  Economic governance and accountability are structurally diffused from the bottom-up by protecting existing private property rights and by spreading throughout society equal opportunity to acquire new and transferred productive capital assets.  Universal access to capital ownership would enhance the economic well-being and self-determination of the people, and reduce the tendency toward corruption and abuses of power associated with any form of monopoly power.

  It sets up the legal and constitutional infrastructure for moving quickly to a high-growth, free market system.  It is based on the four pillars of a just market economy: (1) expanded capital ownership; (2) limited economic power of the state; (3) restoration of free trade and open markets for determining just prices, just wages, and just profits; and (4) restoration of private property in all means of production.

  Because of its emphasis on infrastructural re-engineering (particularly with respect to central banking, capital credit, taxation, and land and natural resources development), this framework would radically reduce the cost of reconstruction in Iraq, allowing for low-cost internal means of financing the reconstruction by Iraqis, for Iraqis, in a post-occupation environment.  This would permit the U.S. and Coalition forces to extricate themselves honorably from the war, and would reduce the cost to the U.S. taxpayers, the United Nations, and those countries supporting the effort in Iraq.

Finally, it would help Iraq become economically self-sufficient as soon as possible, providing the basis for a stable, independent, and democratic government that could serve as a model for other nations in the Middle East and around the world.

II.  Phases of Implementation

PHASE 1: Transfer Free Oil Shares to Every Citizen of Iraq

  Denationalize the oil fields of Iraq, as a catalyst for building a new “Just Third Way” economy.  Transfer the ownership and control of all oil reserves and natural resources within the borders of Iraq from the Iraqi National Oil Company to a newly formed, professionally managed, limited liability joint stock corporation.  All Iraqis would automatically receive free, as a right of citizenship from birth to death, one equal non-transferable share in the new corporation.  All citizens would be guaranteed first-class shareholder rights to the profits and voting control over the board of directors and management of the new company.  All profits except for operating reserves would be paid out fully and periodically as after-taxes dividends to each shareholder.

  To meet all costs and services of government at the national, provincial, and local levels, taxes on such dividend incomes would be withheld by the corporation before distributing the balance of dividends to each citizen.  The shares of those who die would be cancelled or redistributed to newborns, returning Iraqi exiles, and newly naturalized citizens, who would receive an equal number of shares as existing shareholders.

  The new corporation would encourage market forces in setting prices throughout the economy by offering, through a competitive bidding process, concessions and leases for exploration, drilling, infrastructural engineering and construction, processing and marketing oil, and other natural resource activities. Preferential treatment would be given to competitive operating companies that are broadly owned by Iraqi citizens.

  To lay the foundations for Iraq’s future economy, new industrial, agricultural, and commercial demonstration projects (for example, using advanced alternative energy technologies that produce power and water from sea water and waste), could be launched and financed in ways that encourage wider share ownership among Iraqi workers and other stakeholders.

  Future government revenues would then flow from the bottom-up from increasing citizen incomes.  This would make government more dependent economically on its citizens, rather than perpetuating the previous top-down dependency of the people on the political elite.  A single rate of taxation on all incomes above poverty levels would balance government budgets, achieve greater accountability, transparency, and democratic participation in governance at all levels, and radically reduce future risks of public sector corruption or future coups.

  Personal share accounts (like Individual Retirement Accounts in the United States) would be set up within local banks for each worker and every citizen of Iraq to accumulate income-producing capital assets, sheltered from any taxes until assets or income are distributed for personal consumption. The equity accumulation accounts would also be given the power to borrow interest-free, non-recourse productive credit on behalf of the citizen.

  This “capital credit” would be used exclusively by citizens to purchase new shares issued by new or growing Iraqi enterprises to finance the expansion and modernization needs of a growing Iraqi economy. The debt for purchasing the newly issued growth shares would be secured and repaid by the projected dividends on those shares (as with leveraged employee stock ownership plans in the United States).

PHASE 2: Establish in Iraq’s Constitution the Right of Universal Citizen Access to Property

  The Iraqi constitution should be amended to reflect all the rights contained in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, particularly Article 17, which acknowledges every person’s right to own property individually or in association with others. The new Iraqi constitution should include the provision that as a fundamental right of citizenship every citizen is guaranteed access to the social means (i.e., money and interest-free productive credit) for acquiring and possessing income-producing property. All tax, credit, property, corporation, insurance, inheritance, and related laws should, if necessary, be reconstituted to conform to the constitution and to establish institutions supporting economic democracy and the universal right to private property and protection of the rights of property.

PHASE 3: Enact Central Bank Credit Policy for Growing the Economy

The discount power of the central bank in Iraq should be restructured to encourage non-inflationary private-sector productive growth through the creation of interest-free money for local banks to promote more universal citizen access to capital credit for financing new investments.

PHASE 4: Gain U.N. Support for Iraq as a Global Free Trade Zone

The United States and other countries should introduce a resolution into the U.N. General Assembly to treat Iraq as a “global free trade zone” whose imports and exports would be exempt from all trade barriers and tariffs of other countries.  In this way the international community could provide a major catalyst for “Peace Through Justice” in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

III.  Conclusion

  The new Administration in Washington will continue to push for political democracy in Iraq. There is, however, mounting skepticism among critics that political democracy can work in the Muslim world.  The ongoing war in Iraq has proven that any plan for political democracy is insufficient without a viable plan for building economic democracy.  Such a plan requires an Iraqi model of what President Bush called an “ownership society.”

  Tailoring it to the specific circumstances of Iraq, the Iraqi political and religious leadership should unleash a bold “Peace through Justice” offensive to reinforce the government’s counter-terrorism initiatives.  This position paper on implementing a new paradigm of civilizations through transcendent justice offers a specific “first step” proposal with a powerful message that, if properly communicated by respected Iraqi leaders, cannot fail to capture the attention and raise the hopes of every Shi’a, Sunni, Kurd, Turkmen, Christian, and Jew.  Centered on who should own and receive profits from the nation’s oil resources, this proposal deserves serious consideration by thoughtful leaders and citizens ready to explore a truly different paradigm that is consistent with Islam, one based on ownership and economic justice for every citizen.

Acknowledgements

  This position paper was prepared initially by Dr. Robert D. Crane and Dr. Norman Kurland as part of a Core Group Vision Statement for the ecumenical think-tank, The Abraham Federation: A Global Center for Peace through Compassionate Justice.  This is the first in a series on waging the Fourth World War against religious totalitarianism, which is the first of several projected series on winning the war for compassionate justice. 

  Dr. Crane started his career as an attorney in international investment law after receiving his J.D. in 1959 from Harvard Law School.  In September, 1962, he became one of the four co-founders of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  Since then he has specialized on long-range global forecasting both in and out of government.  President Ronald Reagan appointed him in September, 2001, to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, responsible additionally for two-track diplomacy with the Islamist movements in Africa and Southwest Asia.  Currently he is Scholar in Residence at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Virginia, and is the new Director for Global Strategy at the Abraham Federation.  In 2001, immediately after 9/11, he became the Founding Chairman of The Center for Understanding Islam, which is one of the Abraham Federation’s institutional meembers.  He is a founder and one of the four co-owners of the journal http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, in which over the years he has published hundreds of articles on global strategy.

  Dr. Norman Kurland studied law and economics at the University of Chicago where he received his J.D. degree in 1960.  After 5 years as a government civil rights and anti-poverty lawyer, he became the first executive director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Systems, which he co-founded with Louis O. Kelso whose revolutionary “Just Third Way” economic paradigm was appropriately described by Milton Friedman as “turning Karl Marx on his head.” Kurland is recognized globally as one of the pioneers of Kelso’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and the inventor of Justice-Based Management and the Community Investment Corporation.  He is the founding president of the investment consulting firm, Equity Expansion International, and headed the team that designed the first worker shareholders association in the Arab world at the Alexandria Tire Company in Egypt using a no-interest Islamic loan to turn 600 workers of a new $160 million company into its largest group of investors.  He has also been president of the Center for Economic and Social Justice since it was formed in 1984 as the lead agency in President Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice in Central America, which he served as the task force’s deputy chairman.