Pat Buchanan surely holds the record for the greatest impact on a presidential election with the fewest votes. With less than 0.43 percent of the tally nationally, he still managed to decide the 2000 election. But for the thousands of votes mistakenly cast for Buchanan in Palm Beach because of the infamously confusing "butterfly" ballot, Al Gore would be President today and George W. Bush would be the Republican Michael Dukakis.

Buchanan's pernicious influence, however, did not end with the 2000 election. He's now picking up where he left off with his infamous "cultural war" speech to the 1992 Republican convention, a speech, as Molly Ivins quipped, that "sounded better in the original German." Well, Buchanan's been translating from Deutsch again, this time with The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, his new book. The Death of the West harks back to the xenophobic jeremiads of the early twentieth century, such as Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color, Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.

Indeed, enterprising journalists and historians looking to expose the next Stephen Ambrose or Doris Kearns Goodwin should consider comparing Buchanan's book side by side with these others. In addition to revising Spengler's title, Buchanan shares Stoddard's love of watery metaphors--both books gush with rising tides, surging oceans and flooding rivers of nonwhites, all of which push inexorably against the ever more precarious dams and dikes around the white world. The two authors also share a predilection for quoting Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of the "white man's burden."

Each of these earlier books shares the same simple theme: It's Us against Them, and with fewer and fewer of Us and more and more of Them, things look grim for Us. Buchanan readily accepts the "demography is destiny" argument: "As a growing population has long been a mark of healthy nations and rising civilizations, falling populations have been a sign of nations and civilizations in decline." Buchanan's data clearly put the West into the latter category. "In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world's population; in 2000, they were one-sixth, in 2050, they will be one-tenth. These are the statistics of a vanishing race."

And who's responsible for this disappearance? For Buchanan, women bear most of the blame. Liberated by technological and cultural changes, he argues, Western women have abandoned their true calling as designated racial breeders. "Only the mass reconversion of Western women to an idea that they seem to have given up--that the good life lies in bearing and raising children and sending them out into the world to continue the family and nation--can prevent the Death of the West."

Faced with declining birthrates, the only alternative available to Western nations if they wish to maintain themselves is massive immigration from the burgeoning populations of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. But for Buchanan, this medicine is worse than the disease, since immigration on this scale entails the introduction of too many nonwhite non-Christians. Regarding Europe, he writes: "And as the millions pour into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East, they will bring their Arab and Islamic culture, traditions, loyalties, and faith, and create replicas of their homelands in the heartland of the West. Will they assimilate, or will they endure as indigestible parts of Africa and Arabia in the base camp of what was once Christendom?" Clearly he thinks the latter. The United States faces a similar danger, he warns: "Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common--not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons."

Buchanan must know that many have rung this tocsin before him, and each time it has been a false alarm. The West's population has probably declined relative to the rest of the world ever since the Western world defined itself as such. For example, when Stoddard wrote in 1922, he sounded the alarm because Western nations had declined to only one-third of the world's population. By 1960, as Buchanan points out, the Western share of the world's population had fallen to one-fourth. Despite this relative decline in population, he considers 1960 as the height of Western power and influence. Furthermore, most evidence suggests that Western nations are at least as powerful now as in 1960, even with the decline in population.

Buchanan's warnings about the United States ring just as hollow. Of the 30 million foreign-born residents, he claims, "Even the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920 was nothing like this." He's right--that wave surpassed the current one. Today, foreign-born residents make up about 11 percent of the US population, but from the 1870s to the 1920s, that number fluctuated between 13 percent and 15 percent.

Buchanan, however, also argues that today's immigrants are fundamentally different from earlier generations of newcomers; but again, there's no evidence for this. America was hardly more familiar to a Southern Italian peasant who came to New York City in 1900 than it is to an immigrant today from Nigeria or the Philippines. If anything, the spread of global markets and American popular culture has made recent immigrants more attuned to the ways of their new home than their predecessors of a century ago. Furthermore, the bulk of contemporary immigrants come from Latin America, and thus possess the Christian faith that Buchanan views as central to any definition of America. Indeed, the vast majority of Latin American immigrants share Buchanan's Catholicism. Nonetheless, these immigrants "not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race," making it difficult if not impossible for them to assimilate into US society. While Buchanan might consider Latinos as his brothers in Christ, he draws the line at having them as neighbors or fellow citizens.

September 11, Buchanan argues, painfully exposed the threat from contemporary immigrants: "Suddenly, we awoke to the realization that among our millions of foreign-born, a third are here illegally, tens of thousands are loyal to regimes with which we could be at war, and some are trained terrorists sent here to murder Americans." But the past is full of similar warnings about the enemy within. During World War II, anti-Japanese prejudices combined with national security concerns to result in the internment of thousands of US citizens. During World War I, "unhyphenated" Americans saw German-Americans as the Kaiser's minions, engaging in sedition and sabotage to aid the cause of the Fatherland. Yet as these instances demonstrate, the real threat, then as now, existed largely in fevered nativist minds.

This selective and myopic view of American nativism runs throughout The Death of the West. On the one hand, Buchanan refers to nativist statements by such people as Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge to support his assertion that concerns over immigration are not un-American. On the other hand, while he is correct that nativism has always been one of America's multiple political traditions, Buchanan has nary a mention of how pervasive, inaccurate and pernicious such sentiments have been. Of the Know-Nothings, he knows nothing. He quotes Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for the presidency by a major party, but includes no mention that anti-Catholic prejudices made a major contribution to his landslide defeat in the 1928 election, as he was vigorously opposed by Protestant leaders and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. (After the election, the joke went, Smith sent a one-word telegram to the Pope: "Unpack.") To Buchanan, it seems, anti-Catholic sentiment is a recent development and limited to left-wing intellectuals. Overall, he chooses to ignore the fact that nearly every immigrant to this country confronted nativists who argued that their race, religion, ethnicity or culture made them unfit to become full American citizens. Furthermore, if these previous nativists had had their way, they would have excluded the ancestors of most current American citizens, including Buchanan's.

Buchanan recognizes that he's in a minefield with this subject, and he makes some efforts to tread lightly. To rebut accusations that he's an anti-Semite, he sheds crocodile tears over the danger to Israel from a growing Arab population and occasionally (but not consistently) refers to America's Judeo-Christian values. But like Dr. Strangelove's hand, Buchanan's anti-Semitism refuses to stay under control. As examples of conservative leaders who have failed to fight the culture wars with sufficient zeal, he singles out Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Norman Podhoretz. One might well ask why these three when one could level similar charges against Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, John McCain and even George W. Bush.

By the end of the book Buchanan has dropped all pretenses, declaring America to be a Christian nation. His racism is equally apparent. For example, in addition to warning that many current immigrants are of a different--that is, nonwhite--race, he includes a lengthy discussion of black crime rates. Given that most blacks can trace their American ancestry back further than most white Americans, it's clear that Buchanan defines America not by "history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors" but by race.

If Buchanan's diagnosis of the problem is objectionable, his solution is even worse. For him, democracy, a shared culture and even a common race offer no defense against the West's impending doom. Rather, he argues, "If the West expects a long life, it had best recapture the fighting faith of its youth." And what were these youthful characteristics? "Protestant monarchs and Catholic kings alike did not flinch at burning heretics or drawing and quartering them at the Tyburn tree. The Christianity that conquered the world was not a milquetoast faith, and the custodians of that faith did not believe all religions were equal. One was true; all the rest were false." To believe otherwise invites disaster, "For it is in the nature of things that nations and religions rule or are ruled."

Buchanan's right-wing nativism is nothing new, so it might be tempting to dismiss him and his book as inconsequential. After all, didn't the 2000 election prove that Buchanan had only marginal electoral support and that even the Republican Party considers his views too extreme? But votes don't always measure influence, and The Death of the West has clearly struck a responsive chord. Not only does it stand near the top of the New York Times bestseller list, but its author remains a prominent fixture on the TV talk-show circuit. Indeed, it's interesting to contrast the reception of The Death of the West with that of Buchanan's previous book, A Republic, Not an Empire. The latter set off a firestorm of criticism, especially among Republicans and conservatives, when Buchanan argued that Hitler had not threatened the United States. If anything, The Death of the West is even worse, since Buchanan moves beyond minimizing the danger of Hitler to the open espousal of many of his doctrines. Yet this time around, the conservative commentators have not been nearly as critical. Then, of course, Buchanan was in the middle of bolting the GOP, potentially splitting the conservative vote and throwing the election to the Democrats. None of this came to pass, with Buchanan even helping Bush to win Florida. But the lesson seems clear: Conservatives are more than willing to tolerate Buchanan's racism and xenophobia, so long as he doesn't pose a direct threat to their political interests.

Even more disturbing than Buchanan's kid-gloves treatment by the media and the right is that the book's popularity stems from and seems likely to reinforce the upsurge in nativist sentiments after September 11. For many Americans, those tragic events gave even more reason to see the world in manichean terms and to divide Americans along lines of race, religion and ethnicity. Consequently, relatively open immigration policies came under attack. In Congress, a House caucus devoted to immigration restriction doubled in membership after September 11. Representative James Traficant, Democrat of Ohio, spoke for many of those members when he asked, "How do you defend your home if your front and back doors are unlocked? What do we stand for if we can't secure our borders? How many more Americans will die?... If 300,000 illegal immigrants can gain access to America every year, trying to find a better life, do not doubt for one moment that a larger contingent of people with evil intentions could gain entry into America and continue to kill American citizens."

Thankfully, such sentiments have not gained much headway in the ensuing months. Although the Bush Administration has backed off its proposal for granting amnesty to illegal immigrants from Mexico, it has shown few signs of embracing significant immigration restrictions in response to September 11 and has even agreed to restore food-stamp eligibility to legal immigrants. In Congress, immigration opponents have failed even to gain a formal hearing for their proposals. Yet the popularity of The Death of the West shows that nativist attitudes have not disappeared, and Buchanan's diatribe will undoubtedly help reinforce such views. Furthermore, both opponents and supporters of open immigration recognize that another incident of terrorism is perhaps all that is needed to turn The Death of the West from polemic to policy.

Barbara Coe is not your typical sixty-something silver-haired-senior-in-polyester.

It's one thing to have Somali groups protesting Black Hawk Down for what they say is an inaccurate and racist portrayal of Somalis.

Bush will have trouble in the long run selling the "axis of evil" and other myths.

One of the old school of the British colonial service, a man with the irresistible name of Sir Penderel Moon, wrote a book about the end of empire and titled it Divide and Quit. At whose expense was this extremely dry joke? Look around the global scene today, and you will find the landscape pitted with the shards of that very policy.

On terrorism and the new democratic realism.

At the outset of the war on terrorism, President Bush announced a doctrine: Regimes that harbor terrorists will be dealt with as severely as the terrorists themselves. Three months later, the Taliban regime that then ruled Afghanistan is gone, and Washington is scanning the horizon for other regimes to attack. The government of Iraq is the one most frequently mentioned.

During the week of December 17, US freighters are expected to dock in Cuban ports and begin offloading a historic shipment of foodstuffs. In a deal worth up to $30 million, the Castro government has purchased wheat, corn, soybeans, rice and flour and is currently negotiating with Perdue and Tyson to buy chicken in order to replenish supplies destroyed by Hurricane Michelle. Paid for with cash, the sale marks the first major commercial transaction between the United States and Cuba since the Kennedy Administration imposed the US trade embargo forty years ago.

Few people know that President Kennedy exempted food from the original US trade blockade. The Johnson Administration added foodstuffs to the embargo in February 1964 after the conservative senator from New York, Kenneth Keating, complained that Cuban efforts to purchase $2 million worth of lard--yes, lard--would have "a significant impact upon the foreign policy and international interests of the United States." According to declassified White House documents, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy's office asked the Department of Agriculture to provide an analysis of the "uses of lard" in hopes that some ominous strategic purpose could explain US actions. "Cuba could be expected to use 100 percent of any lard it gets for edible purposes," an aide reported back. "It would probably not be credible to take the line that we have decided to stop shipments of lard because it is not solely a food."

Since the end of the cold war, the embargo has proved a serious embarrassment for Washington. Instituted as part of a broad set of punitive measures designed to isolate the Castro regime, the trade sanctions have succeeded only in isolating the United States. Every year for the past decade the United Nations has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US blockade; the last vote, on November 27, was a 167-to-3 defeat for the United States, with only the Marshall Islands and Israel supporting Washington and all fifteen members of the European Union voting against the United States. Our Western allies have been antagonized by the Helms-Burton bill, which tightened the embargo by penalizing friendly nations that freely trade with Cuba. Indeed, as Cuba has opened its economy to foreign investment and international trade, US corporations and agricultural interests have watched from the sidelines as competitors from Canada, Europe and Asia have built profitable business and commercial partnerships on the island.

US corporate interests, led by giant food conglomerates and rice, soy and wheat growers, have emerged as the principal lobbyists for lifting, at least partially, trade restrictions against Cuba. Once an executive order, the embargo was codified into law by the Helms-Burton bill. But legislators from agricultural states like Missouri, Iowa and Louisiana have progressively plowed into the political turf of the hard-line anti-Castro representatives from Florida; majorities in the Senate and House are moving closer to dispensing with this ineffective, counterproductive anachronism of the cold war.

Last year, on an amendment sponsored by Republican Representative George Nethercutt of Washington, Congress took the first substantive step to rescind the embargo, voting to lift the ban on commercial transactions with Cuba involving food and medicine. But a last-minute provision, inserted by the Republican leadership at the behest of a handful of Miami legislators, prohibited private financing of Cuban purchases. Angry at the punitive credit restrictions, the Castro government stated that it would "not spend a nickel" in the United States until the law was changed.

Cuba's deft decision to alter its rhetorical position and ask the Bush Administration to expedite this $30 million cold cash transaction in the wake of Hurricane Michelle may well contribute to reconsideration of those financing restrictions and indeed the embargo itself. Already, the Senate Agriculture Committee, chaired by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, has voted to allow private bank and corporate financing. Analysts predict that US economic interests that want to continue such sales will eventually turn their attention to lifting restrictions on travel to the island, since American tourist dollars could provide Cuba with substantial currency to purchase US goods. "This creates momentum," according to Philip Peters, a Republican economic analyst at the Lexington Institute, who will lead a Congressional delegation to Cuba in January. "This re-energizes people who want to trade with Cuba."

"We have always been rather proud of the fact that 'we weren't trying to starve the Cuban people,'" an aide argued to McGeorge Bundy in an abortive effort to keep food from being added to the embargo. After thirty-seven years of trying, and failing, to do just that, restoring food sales has created the first major crack in the embargo. As the current of commerce begins to flow, that crack is likely to widen until the embargo collapses from its own outdated weight.

On November 27, Samira Dahduli waited in the Amman, Jordan, airport to pick up her husband, Ghassan, who was being deported after two months in a Denton, Texas, INS detention facility. Having lived in the States for twenty-three years, she had arrived in Jordan just weeks before with her five children, all US citizens, with the expectation that Ghassan would follow. But when the flight came, she saw no sign of her husband, a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport. She was about to leave when her 15-year-old son spotted his father surrounded by Jordanian security and American INS agents. Her son recognized one: Donna Chabot, an INS criminal investigator who had attended hearings in Dallas wearing a jacket with an antiterrorism task force insignia.

Samira Dahduli returned home and waited for her husband's call. After a week she still hadn't heard from him. "I would love to hear his voice," she said from a furnished apartment she has rented in Amman. Friends there tell her not to worry. "They need to make sure that he is not a danger to his community," she said. "Everyone says that this is normal procedure."

If the first chapter of the 9/11 detention story was the rounding up of 1,200 people, Dahduli's case ushers in the next phase, in which the government will decide their fate. Amnesty International believes that Dahduli is the first 9/11 deportee who could be facing ill treatment or torture in another country, says Angela Wright, Amnesty's chief US researcher. The arrest at the Amman gate and the accompaniment by a US task force member are troubling and unusual, according to immigration advocates and Dahduli's Dallas lawyer, Karen Pennington. "Nobody represents him now," said Pennington. "They took him away, and now he will be without the protections of American law, and they can torture him as much as they want."

Dahduli had a tense relationship with the US government well before September 11. He had been a leader of the Islamic Association for Palestine, an Illinois-based nonprofit with an office in Texas that has been the subject of federal scrutiny for allegedly having ties to Hamas. On September 25, 2000, federal agents confronted Dahduli in a Wal-Mart parking lot and then threatened to deport him, but offered to halt the proceedings if he agreed to become an informant on the IAP and other Islamic organizations. The FBI warned him that if he refused and was deported to Jordan, officials there would not be so understanding, according to three lawyers who worked on his case. Says Pennington, "The FBI said he would be treated a lot better by them than he would be by Jordanians." Elise Healy, a lawyer who represented him during the early deportation proceedings, adds, "He was perfectly willing to give information if he had it. But he was unwilling to be a lifetime mole." Dahduli not only rejected the government's offer but made it public, and news of it soon appeared on the Internet. "He became useless to them," says Healy. The INS began deportation proceedings but set him free on $50,000 bond.

Meanwhile, Dahduli was pursuing several avenues in immigration court to stay in the United States. He also filed an asylum claim, arguing that the FBI would paint him as a terrorist if he was returned to Jordan, rendering him vulnerable to torture. Amnesty has documented Jordan's practice of torturing terrorist suspects. In a trial last year in Jordan of Al Qaeda associates accused of planning bombings in Israel and Jordan during the millennium celebrations, the defendants testified that they had falsely confessed after beatings that included shabeh (suspending the victim by the feet with arms tied behind the back) and falaqa (lashings on the soles of their feet, sometimes followed by dousing in salt water). In the mid-1980s, in order to penetrate the Abu Nidal organization, responsible for 900 deaths or injuries in twenty countries, Jordanian security moved against suspects' family members.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, INS officials revoked Dahduli's bond and arrested him on September 22 at his home in Richardson, Texas. A few days later, news accounts said, the name of Dahduli had turned up in an address book of Wadih el Hage, a former personal secretary to Osama bin Laden who was convicted in the 1998 bombings of the two US embassies in Africa. Pennington says that in the 1980s, when the two were students in Tucson, Dahduli and el Hage were members of the same mosque, the Islamic Center of Tucson. Later, they had a brief encounter in 1998 at a Dallas restaurant.

In late November, Dahduli gave up his asylum claim and agreed to be deported to Jordan. Now, in the Dallas Muslim community, "everybody is sick and worried," said a colleague at Dahduli's mosque, where he was a leader. INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said the INS accompanies deportees who pose a risk of flight or a risk to public safety. He declined to comment on Dahduli and denied the possibility of torture. "As a signatory of the torture convention it is a US policy not to deport someone to a country that there is reasonable cause to believe that person will be tortured or physically or mentally abused," he said. (Chabot's voicemail says she won't return calls until December 11. Lynn Ligon, INS spokesperson in Dallas, says Chabot is "on leave" until then. The Jordanian Embassy did not return e-mails or calls.)

Other 9/11 detainees could encounter similar problems. The government has reported links to Al Qaeda among only ten to fifteen detainees; the rest are being held on material-witness warrants and on immigration charges for violations like overstaying visas or lying on documents. It is doubtful that they'll be allowed to stay, although under the revamped "responsible cooperators" program, some who offer helpful information might remain. Many, however, will likely be deported, often to countries that don't offer protection from interrogational abuse.

It's possible that the Jordanian government is holding Dahduli as part of a routine check on a man with a native passport who has been detained in the United States; or maybe Jordan has some information on Dahduli; or Dahduli may have made an extradition deal with the United States and Jordan, in which he agreed to work as an informant (his lawyers and wife deny this); or perhaps, as Pennington fears, the FBI hopes to reap the benefits of interrogation tactics that contravene US law.

Why did Dahduli decide to abandon his fight with the US government and agree to be deported to Jordan? Pennington says it was because his application to the United Arab Emirates took too long, and he wanted to get out of jail. An Amnesty memo on post-September 11 human rights abuses, which describes Dahduli's case without naming him, says he was shackled during contact visits, held in solitary confinement for months and allowed only one hour of exercise per week. "He seemed to be treated more harshly than other detainees," said Wright of Amnesty. Could America's justice system have appeared so bereft of due process that he preferred the possibility of torture in Amman? "We had exactly that discussion," said Pennington. "If he didn't end up killed in Jordan, he thought he would be treated much more fairly there. He thought he would get out much more quickly."

See also "The Afghan Humanitarian Crisis," by Matt Bivens.