Master of Confessions

Two months ago, the appeals process ended in the case of Kaing Guek Eav, the only person to have been convicted thus far in Cambodia's special genocide tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Comrade Duch, to use the defendant's more familiar nom de guerre, was the top Khmer Rouge official at S-21, the infamous makeshift prison in Phnom Penh, where, between 1975 and early 1979, over 12,000 people were held and tortured before being transported to their executions in the killing fields outside of the city. The sentence handed down by the mixed Cambodian/international tribunal in 2010 had been 30 years in prison; the appellate division changed the term to life imprisonment for the 69-year-old Duch.

Four others who bear even more responsibility for the slaughter in Cambodia, people much older and more feeble than Duch, have been indicted by the ECCC, but it is entirely possible that Duch will be the only person the court ever convicts. Of the four remaining indictees, one died on March 14, 2013, and another had her case dismissed in November 2011 when she was deemed unfit for trial due to the advance of Alzheimer's disease. The two remaining named defendants, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, are 87 and 82, respectively. (There are two additional cases under investigation involving a total of five possible defendants, but their identities remain confidential at this point.)

During his trial, Duch confessed and apologized to his victims' families, many of whom crowded the visitors' galleries when he testified. At one point Duch said, "I sincerely regret to giving in to others' ideas and concepts and to accepting the criminal tasks I was asked to do. When I think about it, I am first angry at the steering committee of the party, who used all sorts of tricks to lead the country to a total and absolute tragedy. I am also angry at myself for agreeing on others' conceptions and for blindly respecting their criminal orders." Duch later angered those to whom he had apologized by asking the court to release him on the grounds that his case did not fall within the competence of the ECCC. He was not, his lawyer argued, a "senior leader" of the Khmer Rouge nor was he one of those "most responsible" for the crimes committed by the regime. The court rejected the claim.

French journalist Thierry Cruvellier has just published a book--The Master of Confessions--about the Duch trial. Farah Stockman, who met Cruvellier while both were covering the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, writes about Cruvellier, his book, and genocide trials here. She notes that Cruvellier is "the world's most dedicated genocide trial junkie," having covered trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the ECCC. Everywhere, she says, Cruvellier asked these questions: "Who is this expensive international justice for? The peasant farmers who give their testimonies, only to return home to poverty and meals less delicious than what the killers eat in UN jails? Was it for the 'international community,' which needed absolution for its failure to stop the killings? Or for killers to get one last shot at forgiveness?"

Stockman concludes that, perhaps, the trials are for history--to help us understand how and why genocide occurs so we can prevent it in the future. Maybe. But trials are a slow and cumbersome way to build knowledge. I would venture to say that the trials are simply for the sake of justice. Certainly not perfect justice: too many killers--in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and elsewhere--escape prosecution for us to speak of justice except in the highly qualified way that humans must always speak of justice. But, justice nonetheless--as an ideal, perhaps. So that even if Kaing Guek Eav is the only person ever convicted of crimes connected to the Cambodian genocide, we can still affirm that what happened was heinously offensive and that the victims deserve  recognition.

In what kind of world would we not at least attempt to do justice?

Update: George Packer of the New Yorker has a thoughtful review of Cruvellier's book here.

Fighting Words

A recent post on the "Wired Campus" blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education describes efforts by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to strengthen the dictionary's collection of words created by soldiers who fought in World War I. The OED is using crowdsourcing (a word coined in 2005) to find, for example, early references to the phrase "Zeppelins in a cloud" (as a substitute for bangers and mash or, to the unBritish, sausages with mashed potatoes).

As the article notes, wars tend to produce a lot of neologisms. Some originate in soldiers' mangling--or playful distortion--of foreign words and phrases they pick up while fighting in a different country or alongside troops speaking a different language. In World War I, British soldiers took the French phrase "jusqu' au bout" ("to the end") and turned it into "jusqu'auboutiste" ("someone who fights to the bitter end"). "Napoo," a synonym for "dead," seems to have come from the French phrase "il n'ya plus," which means "he is no more."

The OED Appeals web page is located here, for those who want to be part of the crowd helping the editors source these and other World War I words.

Books for Understanding

How do you decide what to read when you need insight into Syria, Egypt, North Korea, climate change, refugee issues, or the United Nations? The online options alone seem endless, but often the best insights and most detailed information are only to be found between the covers of a book. That's where Books for Understanding, a website maintained by the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), comes in.

Since shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the AAUP has been producing bibliographies--highlighting academic book titles--on issues in the news. The books listed are not generally new releases that speak directly to the latest developments in a news story but backlisted titles that offer background information--precisely what we often need to form our own judgments.

Nuclear Myths

Ward Wilson of the Monterey Institute of International Studies has an op-ed in today's New York Times arguing that continuing support for nuclear weapons in the United States and abroad is based on five unsubstantiated beliefs about their utility and their inevitability. These myths, Wilson asserts, have formed a major obstacle to the objective of abolishing nuclear weapons.

Wilson's book on the subject, Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons, has just been released by Houghton Mifflin.

Private Empire

Private Empire:  ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll is being released today.  Coll is the author of Ghost Wars:  The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, which won a Pulitzer Prize.  Private Empire promises a look inside what may be the most powerful corporation on the planet.

Coll will be discussing the book in Los Angeles at the Petersen Automotive Museum (6060 Wilshire Boulevard) at 7:30 p.m. on May 10, thanks to Zócalo.  (The talk is free, but reservations are requested.)

For a sense of what to expect (from the book and the talk), here's part of the Zócalo description:

Put aside that the annual revenues of ExxonMobil exceed the GDP of Norway.  It only overstates the power of Norway.  In fact, in many oil-rich nations, ExxonMobil exercises more sway over day-to-day policy and economics than the United States government.  It also spends more on lobbying in Washington than almost any other company.  In short, ExxonMobil has a huge influence on the United States and the world.  And yet we know almost nothing about it.  What goes on inside the black box?

Dwight Garner reviewed Private Empire in the New York Times last Thursday.

Arms Control: History, Theory, and Policy

Arms Control:  History, Theory, and Policy has just been published by Praeger Security International, an imprint of ABC-Clio.  The two-volume work contains thirty full-length essays by twenty-nine different authors including some of the most noteworthy experts in the field.  There are also thirteen biographical sketches of individuals who have made significant contributions to disarmament and arms control efforts, from Bertha von Suttner to Thomas C. Schelling and Jody Williams.

Among the essays are "Strategic Arms Control since World War II" by Jeff Larsen, "NGOs, Social Movements, and Arms Control" by Jeff Knopf, "Israel, Iran, and the Arms Control Paradox in the Middle East" by Brent Talbot, and "Dilemmas of Arms Control and Cybersecurity" by Chris Demchak.  My own contributions are an introduction entitled "Arms Control's Third Era" and an essay on "Arms Control and International Law."  My co-editor Paul Viotti contributed essays entitled "A Template for Understanding Arms Control" and "Arms Control and European Security During the Cold War."

For more information, click on the book cover beneath the blog archive on the right.

Ethics Beyond War's End

Georgetown University Press has just published Ethics Beyond War's End, a book based on papers presented at a conference hosted by Georgetown in April 2010.

The book, edited by Eric Patterson, includes contributions from a number of leading just war theorists including Michael Walzer, James Turner Johnson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Brian Orend.  My own chapter--"A More Perfect Peace:  Jus Post Bellum and the Quest for Stable Peace"--begins with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's observation that "the legitimate object of war is a more perfect peace."  Sherman's statement, which echoes the emphasis that both Aristotle and Augustine placed on ending wars in a way that would secure peace, should prompt us to rethink the idea of a war to end all wars.   It is not a utopian objective.  World War II, after all, was the war to end all wars in Western Europe, thanks in part to the careful steps taken to create "a more perfect peace" than that which had been created after World War I.  Notwithstanding talk of intervention in Syria or a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, the great goal of laying interstate war to rest actually seems to be within reach.  Getting the peace process right when wars do occur is, I believe, an important part of ending not just particular wars but war in general.

Over the course of the past decade, the concept of jus post bellum has gone from being a possibility broached by a few isolated thinkers to a widely accepted element of just war theory that has attracted the attention of a broad spectrum of scholars and practitioners.  Ethics Beyond War's End makes it clear that thinking about justice after war is essential, but that no consensus yet exists on the ethical principles that should guide that process. 

Mann in Zimbabwe

Simon Mann, the leader of a failed 2004 plot to use mercenaries to overthrow the corrupt government of Equatorial Guinea, has had his latest effort to avoid extradition to Equatorial Guinea denied by the High Court of Zimbabwe where he is being held. Mann, who will now appeal to Zimbabwe's Supreme Court, has claimed that he will likely be tortured if sent to Equatorial Guinea. His fear is very reasonable given the documented human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea, but Zimbabwe's judiciary seems unlikely to place human rights considerations above politics.

The story of Mann's coup attempt was detailed in The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa by Adam Roberts.

"Push and Push and Push"

According to The Terror Presidency, a new book by former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (and current Harvard Law professor) Jack Goldsmith, attorneys within the Bush Administration pressed hard using faulty legal arguments to expand executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. David Addington, Vice President Cheney's legal counsel at the time, said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."

The New York Times Magazine will publish a lengthy piece on Sunday (available here) about Goldsmith and the challenges he faced trying to resist the Bush Administration's legal maneuverings. According to Goldsmith, the president's lawyers adopted a "go-it-alone" perspective on the presidency "because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it."

Needless to say, similar ironies can be found in most of the Bush Administration's counter-terrorism policies.

The Devil Came on Horseback

Beginning in January 2004, Brian Steidle served as a military observer monitoring the ceasefire in Darfur on behalf of the African Union. He left that post in September 2004 and returned to the United States to try to raise awareness about what was happening in the Sudan. Through public lectures and displays of his photographs, Steidle has provided eyewitness testimony to the genocide. In March, his book entitled The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur, was released by PublicAffairs Books.

Now, a documentary based on Steidle's experience in Darfur (and bearing the same title as his book) is coming out. The film will be in limited release beginning on July 25. For more information, including the trailer and a list of scheduled screenings, go here.

The Gators

Washington Post writer Laura Blumenfeld, whose book Revenge: A Story of Hope recounts her effort to find the terrorist who shot her father in Jerusalem in 1986, has an interesting story in today's paper about three interrogators (or "gators," as they're called in the U.S. military)--one who worked in Iraq, one who worked in Northern Ireland, and one who worked in Israel.

Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

Molly Ivins, one of the great political writers and wits of our time, died today in Austin at the age of 62.

She responded to Pat Buchanan's somber speech about America's "culture war" at the 1992 Republican National Convention by noting that the speech "probably sounded better in the original German." Of the first President Bush she wrote, "Calling George Bush shallow is like calling a dwarf short." When George W. Bush first ran for governor of Texas, Ivins began calling him "Shrub."

Her progressive politics belied her conservative upbringing as the daughter of an oil company executive living in Houston. She offered some thoughts about the origins of her views in the introduction to her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (The book's title was derived from the line plastered on billboards in Dallas by her employer, the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald, in an effort to defuse--and perhaps capitalize on--an uproar generated when Ivins wrote about a congressman, "If his I.Q. slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day.") Ivins wrote:

I'm supposed to explain myself in this introduction--specifically, how come I came out so strange. Having been properly reared by a right-wing family in East Texas, how'd I turn out this peculiar? I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point--race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, "Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty." In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean. Children can be horribly logical.

The first great political movement to come along in my lifetime was the civil rights movement, and I was for it. The second great question was the war in Vietnam, and I was against it. So they told me I was a double-dyed liberal. I said, "O.K." What did I know? Later on, people took to claiming it meant I was for big government, high taxes, and communism. That's when I learned never to let anyone else define my politics.

I suspect there are a couple of other factors accounting for the odd hitch in my getalong. Being female, for starters. Can't say I've ever come to any particularly cosmic conclusions about gender, but when you start out in a culture that defines your role as standing on the sidelines with pom-poms to cheer while the guys get to play the game, it will raise a few questions in your mind. Another problem is my size. It wasn't that I ever rejected the norms of Southern womanhood. I was just ineligible. I was the Too Tall Jones of my time. I grew up a St. Bernard among greyhounds. It's hard to be cute if you're six feet tall.

My copy of Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? was signed by Ivins. She wrote: "Texans-in-exile. Come home! You know we get to laugh more here--we have more to laugh about. Hang in and keep fightin’ for freedom. And keep laughin’ too. Best wishes--Molly Ivins."

Ivins wasn't just funny; more often than not she was on to something important. In the weeks right after 9/11, Dan Caldwell, Russ Burgos, and I gave a series of lectures at Pepperdine on terrorism. I began one of my lectures with an observation that Ivins had made a week or two earlier in her column: "In 1950, the United States got involved in a war and called it a police action. We are now involved in a police action that we’re calling a war. The semantic confusion is having unfortunate effects on everyone." Slowly, more and more experts have come to the same conclusion that Ivins reached immediately after the declaration of a "war on terror."

In the next-to-last column Ivins wrote, dated January 8, 2007, she promised to make every one of her columns thereafter about the war in Iraq "until we find some way to end it." Sadly, the cancer that was first diagnosed in 1999 took Molly Ivins' life before much progress could be made toward ending the war.

Ivins believed that we all need to take an active part in the political life of our community and our nation. That's why in her final columns she urged "Bubba," the good ol' boy in Texas who'd rather drink beer and watch football than get out and vote, to take matters into his own hands concerning the war. Ivins once wrote, "Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." It's a sentiment worth remembering from a woman worth remembering.

Robert F. Drinan, S.J. (1920-2007)

Father Robert Drinan--a tireless defender of human rights, the first Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, and, at the time of his death, a professor of law at Georgetown University--died on Sunday at the age of 86. The Boston Globe provides a complete obituary while Chris Borgen offers a more personal tribute at Opinio Juris.

Drinan was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts in 1970 on the strength of his opposition to the Vietnam War. During his second term in Congress, in 1973, he filed a resolution of impeachment against President Nixon--not because of the Watergate burglary and coverup that eventually forced Nixon's resignation but because of the bombing of Cambodia in violation of congressionally imposed limits on the war in Southeast Asia.

In 1980, after he was forced to relinquish his seat in the House when Pope John Paul II barred priests from serving in elective office, Drinan returned to teaching, public speaking, and writing, with most of his work focused on human rights.

Drinan's 2001 book, The Mobilization of Shame: A World View of Human Rights, concludes with these words:

The human race has been struggling for centuries to stop injustice and to offer reparations to its victims. There is no one pattern or force that prompts nations to be just. Sometimes it is the voice of the victims that accomplishes such a feat, but more often it is the conscience and moral outrage of nonvictims. Traditionally, they more than any others have championed the rights of those who have been victimized.

Solon, the ancient Athenian jurist, summed up this truth in words that have a striking relevance: "Justice will not come until those who are not hurt feel just as indignant as those who are."

Father Drinan was not a victim, but, to use his own words, he nonetheless "championed the rights of those who have been victimized."

Ten Favorites

Before I take a break from blogging--and from just about everything else--for the holidays, I thought I might post a list of my favorite books from this past year. Just to be clear, not all of the books on this list were published in 2006. They just happened to be among the books I read over the course of the past twelve months.

1. James Carroll, House of War
2. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
3. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
4. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
5. Moisés Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
6. Philippe Sands, Lawless World
7. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
8. Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
9. Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By
10. Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy

There's not a lot of pleasure reading on this list. Two books that ranked high in my "just for fun" category were a brief and very readable work by historian Paul Johnson, The Renaissance, and a trip back to Charlottesville via the words of Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson's University.

I think I'll need to work a little more fiction into my reading diet in 2007.

Chavez and Chomsky

Hugo Chavez yesterday gave the most entertaining--and undiplomatic--address so far in the 61st General Assembly's general debate. It was also apparently the most vigorously applauded.

While the UN website that provides links to video and text for all of the speeches to date curiously says "text not available" next to the listing for President Chavez, the New York Times offers a summary and a few choice quotes. According to Helene Cooper's story, applause for Chavez "lasted so long that the organization’s officials had to tell the cheering group to cut it out."

What did Chavez say that fired up his cheerleaders? It might have been this unsubtle reference to President Bush, who spoke on Tuesday:

The devil came here yesterday, right here. It smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.

Sticks and stones, W, sticks and stones.

During the speech, Chavez held up a copy of Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky and recommended it to his audience. (And I thought my product placement ad for Seeking Security in an Insecure World during yesterday's Founder's Day Convocation at Pepperdine was good.) Later, according to the Times, at a news conference, "He suggested that Americans read Mr. Chomsky’s book instead of spending all their time 'watching Superman and Batman' movies."

That, Mr. Chavez, is going a bit too far.

[Update: You can see the portion of the speech in which Chavez recommends Chomsky's book here on YouTube. FP Passport provides a photo and a brief comment on the speech's impact on the Amazon.com sales rank for Hegemony or Survival.]

Seven Sins

Having just posted on the subject of John Bolton's performance at the UN, this might be a good time to mention a new book I've just received. Loch K. Johnson of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia has just published a book entitled Seven Sins of American Foreign Policy. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I can list the sins. (In fact, however useful his summary and discussion may be, Johnson is not breaking any new ground here. Most people could probably come up with a similar list of sins without ever having seen this book.) Here they are:

1. Ignorance
2. Executive Branch Dominance
3. Excessive Emphasis on the Military
4. Unilateralism
5. Isolationism
6. Lack of Empathy
7. Arrogance

As Johnson aptly notes (p. xvi), "The sins of American foreign policy have roots that extend more deeply than just the controversial decisions of the second Bush administration." As an example of this point, it's worth noting that when President Clinton traveled to Rwanda to offer an apology for the United States' failure to respond to the genocide in 1994, he disingenuously apologized for American ignorance rather than for the nation's lack of empathy. Still, the current administration seems to be breaking records--and perhaps counting on some cheap grace.

Treaties Rejected by the Senate

In 1933, W. Stull Holt (1896-1981), a historian at the University of Washington, published a work entitled Treaties Rejected by the Senate: A Study of the Struggle between President and Senate over the Conduct of Foreign Relations. The textbook I used in my undergraduate American diplomatic history course in 1978--American Diplomacy: A History (3rd ed.) by Robert H. Ferrell--called Holt's book "still the best work on the subject" (p. 446).

One of the reasons Holt's book could stand as "the best work on the subject" for over forty years is that the Senate has defeated very few treaties since its publication. In fact, three out of every four treaties rejected by the Senate in the entire history of the United States were available for Holt to investigate by 1933. (The Senate rejected two other treaties in the two years after the book's publication.)

Here are a few questions for the diplomatic historians out there to ponder:

1. How many treaties have been defeated by the Senate?
2. How many treaties have been defeated by the Senate since World War II?
3. What was the last treaty to be defeated by the Senate?

(Treaties that remain on the calendar of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee do not count.)

Answers are posted in the comments.

And, by the way, Holt's book is available online at Questia.

Armstrong on Muslim Fundamentalists

Karen Armstrong, whose book entitled The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is currently occupying about a third of my reading time (along with James Carroll's House of War and R. A. Scotti's Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter's), has an essay in tomorrow's Guardian on the divide separating radical Muslims from their moderate brethren. Armstrong is a very perceptive observer of world religions and her assessment of Islam in this essay helps to situate jihadists within the broader realm of religious fundamentalisms.

Armstrong's Guardian commentary is available here. For a review of The Battle for God by Chris Hedges, go here.

Taming American Power

Along with Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God and Jonathan D. Spence's Mao Zedong (a brief Penguin Lives biography), I'm currently reading Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy by Stephen M. Walt. It is a very good analysis of the problems posed by the United States' post-Cold War position in the world. It reminds me that, for all of its limitations, realism has much to recommend it as a framework for the analysis of foreign policy. Walt's book is also a reminder, however, that modern realism involves much more than power politics. It borrows a good deal, in fact, from the post-World War II liberal internationalism with which it was engaged in the "Great Debate" of the 1950s and 1960s. Power politics may be central to Walt's analysis, but questions about American values appear over and over again in the book.

The Year's Best (So Far)

Since I seem to be doing more reading than blogging lately, I thought I would post a list of books. Here--one per month--are the best books related to international politics that I've read this year.

May 2006
The Mighty & the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs
Madeleine Albright

April 2006
The Shield & the Cloak: The Security of the Commons
Gary Hart

March 2006
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
Moisés Naím

February 2006
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
George Packer

January 2006
Lawless World
Philippe Sands