MFS1: Introduction

Musings on Failed States, Part 1

Because there are no more exams to grade and because I’m not quite ready to jump into the summer’s big project, I want to begin a series of posts on the issue of failed states. Why? Perhaps it’s a way of making the psychological transition from failed exams (the teaching function) to nation-states (the research function). It’s a transition that can be conceptualized something like this:

FAILED exam - i - nation STATE

(Okay, I admit I got way too much sun sitting through the commencement ceremonies last Saturday.)

The real answer to the question of why I want to write about failed states is this: A couple of posts on other blogs along with a couple of comments from a reader of Swords Into Plowshares have prompted me to begin thinking about failed states in somewhat different terms than I have in the past. So, I want to do the blogging equivalent of thinking out loud with some posts I’ll label “Musings on Failed States,” or MFS for short.

By way of introduction, let me share the posts and comments I’ve been trying to tie together.

First of all, in an exchange in the comments here, a reader mentioned a preference for limited government. (Something similar appeared in another comment recently. Apparently the blog has been infiltrated by libertarians.) That would have been unremarkable (after all, some of my best really self-interested friends are libertarians) and insufficient to prompt me to think about failed states except that, at about the same time I was responding to one of the comments, I read Matthew Gross’s post (here) pointing me toward an anguished commentary on post-Katrina New Orleans by Sports Illustrated’s Peter King.

Clearly, the United States has failed New Orleans thus far. Why? One possibility--just a possibility--is that those who are most committed to the proposition that government shouldn’t do much are not likely to be very good at doing what government must do. To put it differently, you might like going to a doctor who doesn’t believe in surgery, but when you conclude that you really do need surgery, she's not likely to be the one you want to have operating on you.

But what does any of this have to do with failed states? Perhaps nothing, but our failure to render adequate assistance to New Orleans makes me wonder just how different a typical failed state would be from a libertarian’s ideal state. (Of course, there is no "typical" failed state. Perhaps there's also no "ideal" state for libertarians.) The practical differences between, say, Somalia and some imaginary laissez-faire paradise would no doubt be enormous, but I suspect (1) the theories of "governance" would not be that different and (2) the practical differences could perhaps best be explained by reference to a tipping point that separates freedom from anarchy. (This needs more elaboration, I know, but I'll come back to it in part 2 on the "Zone of Democracy.")

A more systematic (although still highly problematic) way of thinking about this issue was presented, fortuitously, by a post I read at Coming Anarchy that pointed me in the direction of the Failed States Index recently published by Foreign Policy. The Index is based on an evaluation of the instability of states in twelve areas. Here are the top--or rather, the bottom--ten states in the ranking:

1. Sudan
2. Democratic Republic of the Congo
3. Ivory Coast
4. Iraq
5. Zimbabwe
6. Chad
7. Somalia
8. Haiti
9. Pakistan
10. Afghanistan

(Four more Stans appear among the bottom 45 on the list. Oddly, Berserkistan is nowhere to be found.)

There's much more to explore. In addition to the "Zone of Democracy," I want to consider the role of war in prompting (or preventing) state failure. There are also human rights issues to consider. But all of that must wait for MFS2 and beyond.

A Petro-Political Cycle?

Ernest Wilson has an interesting piece here on what he calls the "petro-political cycle." He writes, "At the top of the petro-political cycle"--precisely where we seem to be at present--"third world suppliers can both raise the prices they charge for their petroleum, and also try to alter some of the basic rules of the game." Furthermore, "we should expect to see more political assertiveness from exporting countries." As the comments on his post indicate, his timing was impeccable given Bolivia's nationalization of its oil and gas industry on Monday, one day after Wilson's post.

IR Blogs?

It's not as if I've got a lot of spare time in which to read more blogs, but I'm interested to know what I might be missing in terms of international relations-related blogs (especially ones focused on human rights and international security broadly defined). Any suggestions?

And while we're at it, perhaps I should solicit some feedback about this blog. What should be different here--other than the opinions expressed and the photo that probably makes me look a little younger than I am? Is it time to move on from Blogger? Should I at least include a blogroll? What do you think, Ben? Dale? Mom? (I have no illusions about my readership.)

I'm not sure I'll be making changes soon, if ever, but if I do, the summer would be the time to make them.

Fillmore on Foreign Policy

Millard Fillmore is hardly remembered, much less quoted, these days. However, the following lines from a message to Congress on December 2, 1850, are worth noting. They concern the rights and duties of states, applying the "Golden Rule" as the pertinent standard of behavior.

The great law of morality ought to have a national as well as a personal and individual application. We should act toward other nations as we wish them to act toward us, and justice and conscience should form the rule of conduct between governments, instead of mere power, self-interest, or the desire of aggrandizement. To maintain a strict neutrality in foreign wars, to cultivate friendly relations, to reciprocate every noble and generous act, and to perform punctually and scrupulously every treaty obligation--these are the duties which we owe to other states, and by the performance of which we best entitle ourselves to like treatment from them; or, if that, in any case, be refused, we can enforce our own rights with justice and a clear conscience.

Guernica

On this date--May Day--in 1937, over a million marchers took to the streets in Paris to protest the aerial bombardment of the Basque community of Guernica four days earlier. It was this march and the attendant newspaper coverage that inspired Pablo Picasso to paint his haunting anti-war masterpiece.

(For more on the painting and its history, go here.)

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

John Kenneth Galbraith, described in a Boston Globe obituary as "a towering figure in American intellectual life whose astringent wit and elegant iconoclasm graced the academic and political scene for seven decades," has died at the age of 97.

Galbraith was an economist who wrote bestsellers, dabbled in politics, and advised presidents from FDR to Clinton. Under President Kennedy, he served as the United States ambassador to India.

In 1989, Galbraith said (with his customary flair), "In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong." It is excellent advice.

Terrorism in 2005

Earlier this month, the National Counterterrorism Center issued its annual report on terrorist incidents. The NCTC Report on Incidents of Terrorism 2005 (available here as a PDF file) notes that there were over 11,000 terrorist incidents in 2005 resulting in over 14,500 deaths. Fifty-six Americans were killed in terrorist attacks, forty-seven of them in Iraq. (By definition, terrorist attacks are aimed at non-combatants; consequently, American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are not included in the total.) Worldwide, approximately 80 mosques were targeted in terrorist attacks.

The top ten countries by number of fatalities in terrorist attacks for 2005 were the following:

1. Iraq (8,299)
2. India (1,357)
3. Colombia (810)
4. Afghanistan (682)
5. Thailand (500)
6. Nepal (462)
7. Pakistan (338)
8. Russia (237)
9. Sudan (157)
10. Dem. Rep. of the Congo (149)

The Lesser of Two Evils

"One must remember that in choosing the lesser of two evils, one still chooses evil."

--Hannah Arendt

Human Trafficking: A New Study

On Monday, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released a new report entitled Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns (available here in PDF format). According to the report, there are 127 countries in which human trafficking originates, 137 countries that are destinations for human trafficking, and 98 countries that serve as transit points for trafficking. The United States is listed as one of the ten top destination countries.

Easter 1916

Ninety years ago today, Ireland's Easter Rising began. For almost a week, starting on the Monday after Easter, militant Irish republicans occupied several key buildings in Dublin and proclaimed the existence of an independent Irish Republic. Poorly organized and outgunned, the Irish revolutionaries were quickly defeated by the British. The leaders of the movement were executed or imprisoned.

In spite of the military failure of the Easter Rising, Britain's harsh reprisals stirred Irish support for independence and created an atmosphere in which it was possible for Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins to organize the War of Independence, which began in 1919.

William Butler Yeats eulogized the martyrs of the Easter Rising with a poem entitled "Easter 1916," which follows.

Easter 1916

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Amnesty's Scorecard

Last week, Amnesty International introduced a new website providing information on the human rights records of those UN member states that have announced their candidacies for a seat on the new Human Rights Council. The site provides information on each state's human rights record, the status of its acceptance of international human rights treaty obligations, and its record of cooperation with UN treaty-monitoring bodies.

Presidential Preventive War

Historian and former presidential adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. writes today in the Washington Post that "there is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war." The essay, "Bush's Thousand Days," examines the possibility of a third war for President Bush before he leaves office.

American Prometheus

J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the most fascinating--and important--figures of the twentieth century, was born on this date in 1904.

Oppenheimer is best known as the "father of the atomic bomb." When the United States Government began in 1942 to consolidate its research into the possible military uses of atomic fission, an effort code-named the Manhattan Engineering District and better known as the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was selected by Gen. Leslie Groves to head the central laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Research and design work at Los Alamos, together with uranium enrichment efforts at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and plutonium production at Hanford, Washington, culminated in a successful test on July 16, 1945, at a location in the New Mexico desert that Oppenheimer called the Trinity site. (At the time he was asked to name the site, Oppenheimer had just read John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, which begins, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God.")

Earlier this week, an important new biography of Oppenheimer--American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin--was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

For an excellent on-line biography of Oppenheimer, see the site created to honor the centennial of his birth by the University of California at Berkeley (where Oppenheimer taught physics before World War II). The Avalon Project at Yale Law School includes some of the documents associated with the decision of the Atomic Energy Committee to withdraw Oppenheimer's security clearance in 1954.

Another Milestone

Crude oil prices closed above the $75 per barrel mark yesterday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Traders are predicting even higher prices due to tight supply and uncertainty over Iran, the second-largest oil producer in OPEC. (For information on the relationship between crude oil prices and gasoline prices, see this Department of Energy site.)

For Texans Only

Happy San Jacinto Day.

China's Organ Trade

My brother's business is spreading violence among schoolchildren all over North Texas. (Did I say violence? I meant violins.) He imports the instruments from the People's Republic of China.

China's violin trade, however, is quite different from its organ trade. It's the latter that has been the subject of scrutiny by doctors and human rights activists.

The British Transplantation Society has issued a report condemning China for the sale of human organs taken from the bodies of executed prisoners according to The Guardian. A statement [Word document] issued by the organization of surgeons said that "an accumulating body of evidence suggests that the organs of executed prisoners are being removed for transplantation without the prior consent of either the prisoner or their family."

Transplants in China, said to range in cost from $62,000 for a kidney to $140,000 for a heart, are apparently attracting Japanese, Korean, and Chinese-American patients unable or unwilling to wait for organ donations. The China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center advertises services geared toward foreign patients with an English-language web site that states, "Viscera providers can be found immediately!"

Moisés Naím's Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy addresses the trade in human organs in the context of trafficking in "niche" products such as art works, endangered species, and hazardous wastes. On the organ trade in China, Naím writes,

Prisoners have been used for organ supply under dictatorships at various times in Argentina, Brazil, and Taiwan. Today the Chinese prison system is a major supplier of organs for both the domestic and international market. On Hainan Island an intermediary offered a bulk deal to the activist Harry Wu, who was working undercover: fifty prisoners' organs over a year, at prices ranging from $5,000 for a pair of corneas to $25,000 for a liver. In another case, a doctor reported witnessing both kidneys being extracted from a still-living prisoner due to be executed the next morning. The proceeds of prison organ harvesting go to the authorities. Some researchers suspect that the lucrative organs market is one additional reason that China has broadened the range of capital offenses: more executions mean more profit. (p. 162)

Incidentally, President Bush hosted President Hu Jintao of China at the White House today.

Kristof's Pulitzer

The 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday. New York Times foreign affairs columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has probably done more than any other person to try to get Americans to care about genocide in Sudan, won the prize for commentary. The citation reads:

For distinguished commentary, in print or in print and online, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times for his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world.

With his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, Kristof won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for reporting on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing.

War with Iran?

Will the United States go after suspected nuclear facilities in Iran? Ivo Daalder concludes that the Bush administration faces many more obstacles to a war with Iran in 2006 than to a war with Iraq in 2003. But he acknowledges that there are no guarantees with Bush, because "good arguments, huge potential costs, and the absence of political and international support have never been decisive in his calculations."

Carroll on Iran Policy

The end-of-the-semester grading crunch is making it difficult to post much this week, but let me recommend James Carroll's column in today's Boston Globe.

Pardoning Rumsfeld?

Former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke examines the revolt of the generals and says Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld must go:

The major reason the nation needs a new defense secretary is far more urgent [than accountability alone]. Put simply, the failed strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be fixed as long as Rumsfeld remains at the epicenter of the chain of command.

Notwithstanding President Bush's recent vote of confidence for his embattled SecDef (something along the lines of "You're doing a fine job, Rummy!"), Yale Law professor Jack Balkin thinks the only question now is whether Bush will send Rumsfeld out with a presidential pardon.

Text Messaging Crackdown

According to The Guardian, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently received a misdirected text message containing a joke suggesting Iran's leader might need to bathe more often. The dissident web site Rooz Online reports that the head of Iran's mobile telephone service has been fired and four people have been arrested as a result of the incident.

For a sampling of jokes making the rounds in Iran, see Robert Tait's story in The Guardian.

William Sloane Coffin Jr. (1924-2006)

William Sloane Coffin Jr., a minister and social activist, died yesterday. Rev. Coffin was a Freedom Rider in the early 1960s, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War while serving as chaplain at Yale University, and an advocate of nuclear arms control while serving as the senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York City. He was also the model for Rev. Sloan in Gary Trudeau's comic strip, "Doonesbury." Rev. Coffin described his frequent dissent from the policies of the United States government as a "lovers' quarrel."

On June 1, 2002, Rev. Coffin said, "President Bush rightly spoke of an 'axis of evil.' But it is not Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Here is a more likely trio calling for herculean efforts to defeat: environmental degradation, pandemic poverty and a world awash with weapons."

In a sermon once he said: "The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love."

And then there's this line: "No nation, ours or any other, is well served by illusions of righteousness. All nations make decisions based on self-interest and then defend them in the name of morality."

Rev. Coffin's obituary in the New York Times is available here. For a 2004 interview conducted by Bill Moyers, go here.

Franz Jägerstätter

Franz Jägerstätter was someone who possessed the extraordinary courage necessary to resist the "banality of evil" of which Hannah Arendt wrote in her account of the Eichmann trial.

An Austrian farmer, Jägerstätter was the only person in his village to vote against the Anschluss--Hitler's annexation of Austria--in 1938. In 1939, he was drafted into the German army but refused to serve. As a consequence, he was imprisoned, first in Linz and then in Berlin. On August 9, 1943, he was beheaded for his defiance of the Nazi regime.

The pacifist scholar Gordon Zahn brought Jägerstätter's story to light in 1968 in a book entitled In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter. It is said that Daniel Ellsberg read the book and was inspired to leak the Pentagon Papers to a reporter in hopes of hastening the end of the Vietnam War.

Currently on stage at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles is the English version of a powerful play by Israeli writer Joshua Sobol recounting Jägerstätter's final days. The play--iWitness--raises the same kinds of questions about conscience and authority that Sophocles' Antigone raises. It is well worth seeing.

Jägerstätter's basis for resisting authority is summed up in this statement from one of his letters from prison: "For what purpose, then, did God endow all men with reason and free will if, in spite of this, we are obliged to render blind obedience?"

Eichmann in Jerusalem

On this date in 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. Eichmann, who had been abducted by Israeli agents from Argentina the previous May, was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity based on his role in Nazi Germany's campaign to exterminate the Jews.

Eichmann was convicted on all charges in December 1961. In May 1962, he was hanged.

Hannah Arendt published an account of the trial in a series of New Yorker articles later collected in a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt described Eichmann as a follower, "a leaf in the whirlwind of time." For this reason--Eichmann's ordinariness--Arendt wrote in the end of "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."

Great crimes, Arendt argued, can arise out of the ordinary impulses of people and can be resisted only by acts of extraordinary courage.

Against "Christian Politics"

There are many unanswered questions in the essay (e.g., What does it mean to be the "salt of the earth"?), but Garry Wills--a Catholic, a historian, and a social critic--provides considerable food for thought in this op-ed published in yesterday's New York Times.

The Diplomat's Dilemma

"A Foreign Secretary is always faced with this cruel dilemma. Nothing he can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion."

--Harold Macmillan, Foreign Secretary (and later Prime Minister) of the United Kingdom, 1955

Petro-Imperialism

Kevin Phillips, the former Republican strategist who helped Richard Nixon win the presidency in 1968, is not happy with the Bush Administration's energy policy. In fact, part of his critique in his newest book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, echoes the critique offered by Michael Klare in Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. Phillips writes (p. 78):

Old-fashioned colonialists, regal and unembarrassed, took physical control of territories, sent in ostrich-plumed governors, minted coins, and printed local postage stamps on which kings or queens gazed proudly over scenes of natives cutting cocoa pods or harvesting tea. By contrast, petro-imperialism--the key aspect of which is the U.S. military’s transformation into a global oil-protection force--puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes), and seeks to secure, protect, drill, and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs. Still, the way in which the United States has begun to organize its national security and military posture around oil is hardly new in spirit, albeit unprecedented in scope.

Yesterday's radical critique has become today's conventional wisdom. Even President Bush has now acknowledged (in the State of the Union address) the dangers of being "addicted to oil."

Losing a Continent

The BBC's Gavin Esler writes:

It is one of the most important and yet largely untold stories of our world in 2006. George W. Bush has lost Latin America.

While the Bush administration has been fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, relations between the United States and the countries of Latin America have become a festering sore--the worst for years.

Virtually anyone paying attention to events in Venezuela and Nicaragua in the north to Peru and Bolivia further south, plus in different ways Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, comes to the same conclusion: there is a wave of profound anti-American feeling stretching from the Texas border to the Antarctic.

And almost everyone believes it will get worse.

It's difficult to identify any place in the world where the foreign policy of the current administration has improved American standing.

Preemptive vs. Preventive War

Former senator Gary Hart has recently published a book on international security entitled The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons. It makes many of the same points that Dan Caldwell and I make in Seeking Security in an Insecure World, but it focuses more specifically on the security policies of the current administration than Seeking Security does.

Hart writes the following on the distinction between preemptive and preventive war, a topic I took up here many months ago:

Dependence on an ancient right to preemptively forestall an imminent attack is based on several conditions. The first is that we can know when an attack is being prepared. The second is that we can distinguish between a theoretically possible attack and an attack that is threatened imminently. If it is the first, as was not the case in Iraq, then a first strike is not preemptive, it is preventive, an entirely different and considerably more dangerous doctrine. In either case, highly reliable intelligence is required to know which states have weapons of mass destruction and the ability to deliver them and which states have those weapons, the means to deliver them, and the intent to do so within a reasonably foreseeable time period. (63)

The distinction between preemptive and preventive war is one we need consider more carefully in the context of Iran than we did in the context of Iraq.

Taylor's Plea

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, on trial for war crimes, entered a not guilty plea today in his initial hearing before the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Taylor is charged with recruiting rebels in Sierra Leone's devastating civil war. The war, which ended in 2002, resulted in the deaths of 50,000 people and the maiming of thousands more.

Dueling Delusions

Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, has a brief essay in the New Yorker that surveys the Iraq delusion. It draws on the recently published Cobra II by Michael Gordon and Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor and a U.S. Joint Forces Command study of decision-making in Saddam Hussein's Iraq to demolish whatever beliefs might remain that the Bush Administration got something--anything--right with respect to Iraq.

It's a short piece, so go read it. Meanwhile, here's a brief excerpt that illustrates one of the many tragic mistakes of this war:

As for weapons of mass destruction, there were none, but Saddam could not bring himself to admit it, because he feared a loss of prestige and, in particular, that Iran might take advantage of his weakness—a conclusion also sketched earlier by the C.I.A.-supervised Iraq Survey Group. He did not tell even his most senior generals that he had no W.M.D. until just before the invasion. They were appalled, and some thought he might be lying, because, they later told their interrogators, the American government insisted that Iraq did have such weapons. Saddam "found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having W.M.D.," the study says. The Bush war cabinet, of course, clung to the same illusion, and a kind of mutually reinforcing trance took hold between the two leaderships as the invasion neared.

This, in part, is why wars of choice are wrong.

[Via Talking Points Memo.]

Justice, Samoan Style

Can anyone explain to me why Samoa--the Independent State of Samoa (formerly Western Samoa), not the not-so-independent American Samoa--seems to be favored by those who elect judges to serve on international courts? Tuiloma Neroni Slade of Samoa was one of the original judges elected to serve on the International Criminal Court. (He is, however, no longer on the Court.) The presiding judge of Trial Chamber II of the Special Court for Sierra Leone is Richard Lussick of Samoa.

In spite of the fact that international justice is a growth industry, there are not that many positions available for international court judges: fifteen spots on the International Court of Justice, eighteen on the ICC, eleven on the Special Court for Sierra Leone, sixteen permanent judges and nine ad litem judges on both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. That equals ninety-four. We could throw in a few more for various regional courts, but we're still talking about a pretty small number. And yet, until January of this year, two of whatever that small total is were from Samoa, a country with a population approximately equal to that of Reno, Nevada or Knoxville, Tennessee.

And while we're on the topic of Samoa, can anyone tell me (1) why the caramel/chocolate Girl Scout cookies used to be called "Samoas" and (2) why they're not anymore?

General Jaruzelski

In 1980, a major crack appeared in the facade of Soviet-style communism when an independent labor union called Solidarity was established in Poland. Solidarity challenged from within the fiction that the states of Eastern Europe were workers' paradises.

As Solidarity's membership grew to over 10 million, the Polish government led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski decided to crack down. In December 1981, martial law was imposed and Solidarity's leaders were arrested.

Last week, Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, a body responsible for investigating human rights abuses under Nazi occupation and communist rule, filed charges against Jaruzelski for his actions in the period from March 27, 1981 to December 31, 1982.

As the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "Justice is like a train that is nearly always late."

[Update: There are several books on justice and reconciliation that deserve a mention here. The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness by Mark Amstutz is an excellent scholarly study of what happens (or at least what should happen) in the aftermath of serious human rights abuses. Two journalistic treatments--one focused on Latin America and one focused on Eastern Europe--that are a bit dated but nonetheless quite helpful are Lawrence Wechsler's A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers and Tina Rosenberg's The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism.]

House of War

On Monday, James Carroll's column previewed his new book, House of War. It's another one I'll have to add to my reading list.

Why I Teach

Last night was not the usual weeknight at my place. But that was a good thing.

Two recent graduates--Diana Rozendaal and Andrea Docherty--returned to campus on Monday. Both were very active in human rights work while at Pepperdine and so were near and dear to my heart. They know each other well, but the timing of their return to Malibu was coincidental, so I decided to invite them to dinner last night so they could visit with each other and I could visit with both of them. I also decided to invite three kindred spirits just a month away from graduation--Melissa Mayes, Ben Young, and Heidi Laki--to join us. So, sitting around my table last night--with a vegan meal that Stephen and I prepared in spite of our own fondness for meat--were five extraordinary young people: one just back from doing medical work in Kazakhstan, one on a college tour on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one planning to marry this summer and work for Upward Bound in Colorado, one keeping fingers crossed about a pending application to work in the developing world with Samaritan's Purse, and one heading for the Republic of Georgia to work with the Peace Corps. It was an inspiring evening for me and, I think, for my 15-year-old son as well.

And that's an important part of why I teach: It's not so much to inspire (although it's nice when I can do that) as it is to be inspired. Last night I was inspired.

Dying to Read

P. J. O'Rourke said, "Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." That is, I think, pretty good advice.

I've lived through some pretty good books lately, among them Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moisés Naím, The Renaissance by Paul Johnson, and War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.

Here are a few titles I'd like to read--all the way to the end, if possible:

• American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips
• Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen by Michael Sledge
• The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the Twenty-first Century by Michael Mandelbaum
• The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050 by MacGregor Knox
• The Limits of International Law by Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner

I'm alway open to recommendations.

Peace

It is a glorious thing to 'stablish peace, and kings approach the nearest unto God by giving life and safety unto men.

William Shakespeare, Edward III, Act V, Scene I

Best of the Decade

Q: According to the International Studies Association, what's the best book in the area of international studies published in the last decade?

A: Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics

A Protest Opportunity

Jon Kyl (R-AZ), one of the main sponsors of the Senate's version of anti-immigrant legislation, is scheduled to be the commencement speaker for the School of Right-wing Public Policy's graduation on April 21, 2006. Perhaps some of the half a million people who marched in Los Angeles over the weekend should be invited to Pepperdine for the occasion.

May the Farce Be with You

Over 70,000 people (0.37 percent of the population) listed "Jedi" as their religious preference in the 2001 Australian census. Apparently most did so in response to an e-mail hoax that said the Star Wars faith could be recognized as an official religion in Australia if enough people expressed a preference for it.

This, of course, is very old news, but I just learned of it today while reading an article in USA Today about another modern religion: Pastafarianism, or worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yeah, I know. This ranks right up there with my recent post about the computer virus spreading to humans. (Incidentally, a technically astute person explained to me today how that might actually be possible. Bottom line: Make sure you've got up-to-date virus protection if you ever have a programmable pacemaker implanted.)

But at least there's a Pepperdine connection here. Mark Coppenger, father of 2005 grad Chesed Coppenger, is quoted in the USA Today story.

Massive Protests

An estimated 500,000 people marched in Los Angeles yesterday to protest the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Immigration Control bill that is scheduled to be taken up by the Senate this week. According to the Los Angeles Times, the protest may have been the largest in the city's history.

The immigration bill, which would subject illegal immigrants to criminal penalties as well as deportation, calls for 700 miles of fence to be constructed along the U.S.-Mexico border. It also makes it a crime to assist illegal immigrants.

Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, has said he would instruct priests within his diocese to disobey the law if it enters into force. On Wednesday, Mahony published an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune to explain his views. As Mahony notes, "Part of the mission of the Roman Catholic Church is to help people in need. It is our Gospel mandate, in which Christ instructs us to clothe the naked, feed the poor and welcome the stranger."

Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles has passed a resolution opposing the federal legislation and the city council in Maywood, California has declared the community a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

International Studies

If I were a more diligent blogger, I would have been live-blogging from the International Studies Association annual meeting in San Diego this past week. But I'm not, and so I didn't. Still, there were a few things worth noting from the conference.

First, pirates are finally getting their due. A panel on Saturday was titled "The Pirate: Historical and Theoretical Aspects of Piracy as a Recurring Feature of North/South Division." Three of the four papers on the panel were by scholars from the London School of Economics, so apparently LSE has become pirate central in the academic world. My favorite title from the panel was this one: "Taking the 'Arr' out of IR: Private Security Responses to Piracy and Waterborne Non-State Political Violence." (I wonder about the sub-title, though, since piracy is "waterborne non-state political violence." Nonetheless, those who recall this post will know why I like the title.)

Second, I learned that Rowman & Littlefield has an edited volume coming out in May entitled Harry Potter and International Relations. One of the editors, Daniel Nexon, blogs at The Duck of Minerva.

Third, Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars continues to inspire reflection and debate. A panel I attended on Thursday--"The Moral Foundations of World Order"--invoked Walzer repeatedly.

Fourth, feminist IR is alive and well. J. Ann Tickner, a pioneer in the field, is the new president of ISA. Her presidential address drew heavily on the insights of feminists working in the field.

As I have time, I'll try to comment more on what I learned at ISA.

Thomas Lubanga

On Friday, Thomas Lubanga was turned over to the International Criminal Court by the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to stand trial for war crimes. Lubanga, founder of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), becomes the first person to be turned over to the ICC for prosecution.

The ICC issued warrants for the arrest of five members of the Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group, in July of last year. There is also an investigation into the situation in Darfur ongoing by the ICC.

Tsotsi

Last night I saw Tsotsi, the South African film that won the Academy Award for "Best Foreign Film." Based on the 1989 novel by Athol Fugard, it's a powerful story that shows the enormous gulf separating rich and poor--Jo'burg and Soweto--in modern South Africa.

How Many More?

We've already learned many of the disgusting details of torture perpetrated by Americans in Guantanamo, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Now we learn about a special interrogation facility in Baghdad called Camp Nama. Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall write in today's New York Times,

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

How many more stories like this one are out there waiting to be discovered? Or consider this question from Marty Lederman, former Attorney Advisor in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel: "How many stories such as this must be published before the rest of the world justifiably views the U.S. as one of the world's principal purveyors of torture and inhumane treatment?"

Three Years On

The war in Iraq is now moving into its fourth year. General George Casey, who last July predicted there would be significant reductions in the number of American forces in Iraq beginning this spring or summer, has stated that those reductions will now have to wait until late this year at the earliest.

Meanwhile, former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi is less optimistic, according to the Guardian (London):

In London, Mr Allawi told BBC 2's Sunday AM programme: "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Britain's defence secretary, John Reid, rejected that assessment. In Baghdad's green zone, he said that most of Iraq was under control: "There is not civil war now, nor is it inevitable, nor is it imminent".

In Washington, the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, also appeared on television to play down ideas of civil war. He told the CBS programme Face the Nation that the surge in attacks aimed at fomenting sectarian conflict simply reflected the insurgents' "state of desperation".

The remark echoed a similarly optimistic phrase used by Mr Cheney in March last year, when he claimed the insurgency was in its "last throes". Yesterday, he maintained that that description was still "basically accurate".

Three years on, and Vice President Cheney remains clueless. The very fact that there's even a debate about whether a civil war exists should tell him something. Indeed, it should tell all of us something.

Cyber Threats Meet Biological Threats

Every once in a while, I'm tempted to buy one of the tabloids I see while standing in the supermarket checkout line. Tonight I saw this headline on the front page of the Weekly World News: "Computer Virus Spreads to Humans!" It was, of course, accompanied by a photo of a woman sitting in front of a computer blowing her nose--visual proof of the headline's veracity!

In Seeking Security in an Insecure World, Dan Caldwell and I placed considerable emphasis on the fact that many of the security threats we face today are interconnected. I have to confess, though, that we failed to anticipate the possibility that computer viruses might become the next biological threat.

(Incidentally, if you click on that Weekly World News link, I'm pretty sure you'll lose points off your IQ.)

Bones

In Chris Hedges' War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (a book I highly recommend), there is this anecdote from the post-Napoleonic period, drawn from the London Observer, November 18, 1822:

It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighborhood of Leipzig, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granularly state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.

I have not previously read or heard this grim account of the Napoleonic Wars' aftermath. Has anyone seen other descriptions of turning human bone into fertilizer following these, or any other, wars?

A Clash with Pirates

Two U.S. warships were involved in a clash with suspected pirates off the coast of Somalia early this morning. Sailors aboard the USS Cape St. George, which was patrolling in the Indian Ocean along with the USS Gonzalez as part of a Dutch-led maritime security operation, fired on a fishing boat in international waters after men aboard the boat brandished a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and fired on the American vessel. One suspect was killed, five were wounded, and twelve others were taken into custody.

This is the second encounter between U.S. Navy ships and suspected pirates this year. Last November, a luxury cruise liner was attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. The cash-strapped Somali government signed a $50 million contract with an American company late last year to provide protection against pirates, but it is not clear what, if anything, the American company is doing about the problem.

Immigration Reform and Reality

Rosa Brooks, writing in today's Los Angeles Times, has a good idea for a new reality show:

Call it "Aliens." The contestants will be drawn from the U.S. Congress. To start, they'll have their credit cards, cellphones, computers and cars confiscated. Next, they'll be sent--with their families--to live in rural villages and urban shantytowns in poor countries. Each will be assigned a menial job in his new home, for which he will receive a dollar a day.

Most members of Congress won't last more than a few episodes, of course. Their kids will quickly lose the puppy fat that comes from a hearty American diet and instead gain the bloated tummies that characterize children with nutritional deficiencies. This development will frighten off the faint of heart.

The remaining contestants will be given the opportunity to compete in an even tougher game. They'll be instructed to make their way to a distant country, but they won't be provided with money, a passport or transportation. Hardships along the route will include fording flood-prone rivers, crossing dangerous deserts on foot and evading the armed gangs of smugglers and traffickers who will attempt to rob, rape and kidnap them.

Contestants will then have to covertly cross a border into a country guarded by armed agents.

Those who make it will then have to find food, shelter and employment in a place where they don't know the language and are in constant danger of being detected, detained and deported by the authorities. The only jobs available to them will be low-paying and often backbreaking labor.

What's the prize, you ask? Any contestants who manage to survive a full season will be offered the opportunity to draft a new immigration reform bill for the United States.

Or we could just build a fence along 2,000 miles of border like this wacko suggests, also in today's Los Angeles Times.

The New Human Rights Council

I am slow posting about this, but the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday voted 170-4 (with three abstentions) to create a new Human Rights Council. The United States, along with Israel, Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, voted against the resolution creating the new Council.

Human Rights Watch summarizes some of the key features of the new Human Rights Council:

• The council will meet at least three times a year for ten weeks--an improvement on the commission’s single annual six-week meeting--with a right for one-third of the council members to call additional sessions “when needed.”
• The old commission’s system of independent “special rapporteurs” and other special procedures, which is one of the great strengths of the U.N. human rights system, will be retained, as will the tradition of access for human rights NGOs.
• Members of the council are committed to cooperate with the council and its various mechanisms--an improvement on current practice, in which some members of the commission refuse to grant unimpeded access to U.N. human rights investigators.
• The right of the council to address serious human rights situations through country-specific resolutions is reaffirmed.
• A new universal review procedure will scrutinize the records of even the most powerful countries--an important step toward redressing the double standards that the commission was often accused of applying.

For more, see the Washington Post story here. The Amnesty International USA news release, which emphasizes the need for states that respect human rights to be elected to the 43-member Council, is available here.

Abu Ghraib: 279 Photos

Salon.com has posted 279 photos and 19 videos from Abu Ghraib. The images and accompanying documentation come from the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, which first investigated the scandal on the basis of materials provided by Spc. Joseph Darby.

The introduction to the collection of photos and videos is well worth reading for context and commentary. It concludes with these words:

Finally, it's critical to recognize that this set of images from Abu Ghraib is only one snapshot of systematic tactics the United States has used in four-plus years of the global war on terror. There have been many allegations of abuse, torture and other practices that violate international law, from holding prisoners without charging them at Guantánamo Bay and other secretive U.S. military bases and prison facilities around the world to the practice of "rendition," or the transporting of detainees to foreign countries whose regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights violations inside detention facilities in Iraq. Abu Ghraib in fall 2003 may have been its own particular hell, but the variations of individual abuse perpetrated appear to be exceptional in only one way: They were photographed and filmed.

[Via Body and Soul.]

Workers without Rights

What's it like to be a Latino day laborer in the United States? This article in yesterday's Washington Post profiles Daniel Rodriguez, a day laborer from Nicaragua who lives and works in the Washington metropolitan area.

The Genocide Continues

Our attention has wandered. We (most of us, anyway) were never very focused on Darfur, but the focus we once mustered seems to have disappeared. And yet the genocide continues.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times continues to press Americans to focus on what is happening in Darfur and now, increasingly, in neighboring Chad. Last month, writing in the New York Review of Books, he recounted some of what he has seen:

On one of the first of my five visits to Darfur, I came across an oasis along the Chad border where several tens of thousands of people were sheltering under trees after being driven from their home villages by the Arab Janjaweed militia, which has been supported by the Sudan government in Khartoum. Under the first tree, I found a man who had been shot in the neck and the jaw; his brother, shot only in the foot, had carried him for forty-nine days to get to this oasis. Under the next tree was a widow whose parents had been killed and stuffed in the village well to poison the local water supply; then the Janjaweed had tracked down the rest of her family and killed her husband. Under the third tree was a four-year-old orphan girl carrying her one-year-old baby sister on her back; their parents had been killed. Under the fourth tree was a woman whose husband and children had been killed in front of her, and then she was gang-raped and left naked and mutilated in the desert.

Kristof also provided both some important information about the background of the genocide and some suggestions for what should be done. He pointed readers in the direction of an aid worker's blog, Sleepless in Sudan (now closed, but still well worth reading), and two recently published books: Darfur: A Short History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal and Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide by Gerard Prunier.

Read Kristof's NYRB essay here and then look for the December 5, 2005, entry in Sleepless in Sudan to see what we should be doing.

Milosevic

One of the most important trials in the history of international criminal law has ended with the death of the defendant, apparently of natural causes. Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader who engineered ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, had been on trial for crimes against humanity since 2002 before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He was found dead in his jail cell last night.

Today's New York Times story on Milosevic's death notes,

Mr. Milosevic was the first former head of state to stand trial for genocide before an international tribunal, and its proceedings, which began in February 2002, had already produced the longest war crimes trial in modern history. His death came as the trial was drawing to a close: he was in the final weeks of his defense, and his concluding statement was expected in late April or May. The judges' verdict was expected by the end of this year.

For more on Milosevic, see this obituary, this news analysis by Roger Cohen, and this brief statement by Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the ICTY.

Double Standards

The State Department released the 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices today. In the section on Saudi Arabia, we find the following statement:

Ministry of Interior (MOI) officials were responsible for most incidents of abuse of prisoners, including beatings, whippings, and sleep deprivation. In addition, there were allegations of beatings with sticks and suspension from bars by handcuffs. There were allegations that these practices were used to force confessions from prisoners.

Compare the State Department’s criticism of Saudi Arabia to this report from the Observer (London) dated January 2, 2005:

A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply into his wrists.

People in other countries pay attention to these inconsistencies. Americans, by an large, seem not to.

A God of Tolerance?

As Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq attack one another in an effort to avenge grave religious offenses, including the attack on the Askariya shrine, and as Muslims in many other parts of the world turn to violence to express their outrage over offenses against the prophet Mohammed, James Carroll reminds us that, "in history's supreme irony, holy war is the most savage war of all."

But, Carroll suggests, the haste with which believers of all kinds rush to defend God may come from a misunderstanding of the divine.

Believers--whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian--tend to view God as Someone like us--only much, much greater. In the words of a beautiful Irish hymn, God is the "High King of Heaven." In Arabic, the idea is expressed by the expression Allah akbar! (God is great!) In English (at least as spoken by Americans in the twenty-first century), the preferred expression may be "God is awesome!" (The state of Washington has allowed someone to reduce the phrase to license-plate English: AWSMGOD. I know, because I saw a car bearing such a plate parked on campus today.)

Carroll points out that the divine is more nearly apprehended in each of the great monotheistic religions through an awareness that God is beyond all human comprehension. God is, in other words, wholly other. This, according to Carroll, should make all of us--Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike--see belief in God as a reason for toleration.

In Islam, as much as Judaism and Christianity, as this Christian understands it, the core theological tradition so affirms such otherness of the deity that no merely familial, tribal, or national claims can be made upon it. Indeed, that the Holy One is wholly other is the first principle of human toleration, since no single person or group has an exclusive claim on the divine. The second principle of toleration is that God, as its author, belongs to the entire cosmos, not to any mere part of it.

God is other, yet, as each tradition affirms, God is also the creator, fully invested in creation. "I was a hidden treasure," as the Koran reports God telling the Prophet. "I loved to be known. Therefore I created the creation so that I would be known." God creates, that is, to be known by all that God creates. God's family, tribe, and nation--are everyone and everything.

Obviously, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have all had trouble keeping these principles of toleration straight, with each of the monotheisms having regularly reduced God to a tribal deity, and loyalty to God to a cause of war. We see just such a thing unfolding in the streets of Muslim cities today, as self-appointed defenders of the greatness of God are the ones, in fact, defiling it.

The brief version of the lesson is this: If God is beyond the comprehension of any one person or group or sect, then it is an offense against God to attack those who understand God differently.

The longer version of the lesson is in Carroll's column here.

Birds and Humans

In today's Boston Globe, James Carroll considers what the spread of avian flu means for the troubled relationship between humans and nature. Here is his conclusion:

The deep memory of Genesis posits a human dominion over nature, but the banishment from Eden indicates an alienation from it. Today, the so-called environment is discussed as if it is a surrounding bubble, like a space capsule that can be replaced when it is trashed.

Judging from our reckless disregard, we humans seem to imagine that we can have a destiny independent of the earth on which live; even that word "on" suggests the problem, since the truth is that we humans are the earth. It is more than where we come from, where we go. Indeed, we get our name from "humus," the word for earth. Did we think we could forget that and not suffer for it?

If the worst case unfolds, and the dreaded transmission mutations occur, avian flu might be taken as nature's revenge for the human despoiling of the planet. The best case will be that this outbreak came as a timely reminder that the health of humanity and the health of nature, including beloved winged creatures, are the same thing.

Read the entire column here.

The Neocons' Mess

Francis Fukuyama, a professor at SAIS in Washington, D.C., has an article in today's New York Times Magazine on the neoconservatives and what should be done to clean up the mess they've created in American foreign policy. He argues for a "realistic Wilsonianism" that recognizes the important role the United States has played and should continue to play in support of human rights and democracy around the world while also recognizing that there are serious limits to the promotion of such values by military means.

As I have argued since November 2001, Fukuyama suggests that "war" is the wrong label for the struggle against terrorism. As he puts it,

we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

The entire article, entitled "After Neoconservatism," is well worth reading not only for its policy prescriptions but for its brief description of what it is that animates the neoconservatives.

[UPDATE: Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin has a few interesting comments about Fukuyama's article, including this one: "What struck me . . . was how many of his claims about what was wrong with the Bush Administration's policies were available in 2001, and, indeed, were stated over and over again by critics of the Administration in the run up to the Iraq war."]

Indian Reservations as Weak States

In Seeking Security in an Insecure World, Dan Caldwell and I note that "by failing to extend the rule of law over all of their territories, weak states may provide safe havens for terrorists, transnational criminal organizations, international fugitives, and other actors that are a menace to international society" (p. 124). The role played by weak states in international drug trafficking illustrates the point very well.

In Afghanistan, opium production is booming as a consequence of the inability of Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul to control the country's hinterlands where warlords and tribal leaders hold sway. In Colombia, narcoterrorists and revolutionaries who support themselves by trafficking cocaine have long operated beyond the reach of the government. And in Nigeria, corrupt officials and a weak central administration have made that country a major hub of drug trafficking in spite of the fact that few drugs are actually produced there.

Many of the same conditions that afflict weak states around the world--dire poverty, high rates of unemployment, weak law enforcement, and failing social services--are present on Indian reservations within the United States. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that reservations have become the newest hubs of international drug trafficking. According to this story in the New York Times, "large-scale criminal organizations have found havens and allies in the wide-open and isolated regions of Indian country." The comparison between Indian reservations within the United States and weak states around the world seems inescapable:

For traffickers of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, painkillers and people, reservations offer many advantages. Law enforcement is spotty at best. Tribal sovereignty, varying state laws and inconsistent federal interest in prosecuting drug crimes create jurisdictional confusion and conflict.

The deep loyalty that exists within tribes, where neighbors are often related, and the intense mistrust of the American justice system make securing witnesses and using undercover informants extremely difficult. And on some reservations, Indian drug traffickers have close relationships with tribal government or law enforcement officials and enjoy special protection that allows them to operate freely, investigators say.

At home and abroad, promoting good government, meeting human needs, and building capacity in weak states are all essential elements in any effort to address the problem of drug trafficking.

Means and Ends

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."

--Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (1942)

Arar's Suit

A federal judge in Brooklyn has dismissed a lawsuit brought by Maher Arar under the Torture Victim Protection Act. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was detained by Homeland Security officials at New York's Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 and sent to Syria where he was tortured for a year before being released without having been charged.

For more on Arar's story, see this post from February 2005.

The New Abu Ghraib Photos

The Sydney Morning Herald has fifteen of the Abu Ghraib photos shown for the first time on Australian television last night. The SMH also reports that, according to a recently released poll, 60 percent of Australians now have a "mainly negative" view of the United States.

Still More Abu Ghraib Photos

Dateline, an Australian news program, has sixty of the Abu Ghraib photos that, up until now, have been suppressed by the Pentagon. The program airs soon, so expect extensive news coverage tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos has some of the new photos here. (Warning: The images are disturbing.)

[Via Kevin Drum.]

Misunderstanding Muslims?

According to James Carroll's column in yesterday's Boston Globe, both the cartoon controversy and the war in Iraq indicate that we are.

Cheney

Okay. You know what this post is going to be about.

I genuinely believed that Dick Cheney's "hunting accident" over the weekend would be beyond satire. One-liners? Not a problem. There will be a million of them floating around by the time the late-night comics have finished with the story. But some things (like Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize, at least according to Tom Lehrer) just appear to be beyond satire.

Clearly, I underestimated Tom Borowitz. His column today begins with these words:

Vice President Dick Cheney revealed today that he shot a fellow hunter while on a quail hunting trip over the weekend because he believed the man was the fugitive terror mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Mr. Cheney acknowledged that the man he sprayed with pellets on Saturday was not al-Zawahiri but rather Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old millionaire lawyer from Austin, blaming the mix-up on “faulty intelligence.”

Go ahead. Read the whole thing. Then come back. I'm not done with this yet.

Here are my modest contributions to the Cheney-palooza:

• So Cheney shot a lawyer. What's the big deal? The legal limit in Texas is ten.
• In spite of the fact that there was an ambulance present in the vice president's entourage, Cheney insisted on carrying Whittington to the hospital strapped to the hood of his pickup truck.
• Of course, most Americans were simply relieved that Cheney wasn't the one shot. If anything were to happen to him, George Bush would become president.
• Before Whittington was taken to the hospital, Cheney insisted that the ambulance driver stop at a taxidermist's so he could get an estimate.
• I'm not suggesting anything, but doesn't Dick Cheney sometimes go hunting with Antonin Scalia?

Foreign newspapers and on-line news sites got a little more creative with their headlines about the Cheney story than most American papers did, but it's worth noting that the Washington Post seems to have loosened up a bit. Columnist Eugene Robinson's comment on the episode ran under the headline "Ready, Fire, Aim." Dan Froomkin criticized the slow response of the White House in a column entitled "Shoots, Hides and Leaves."

Care to see what the professionals said? Read on.

Jon Stewart: "Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, (was) shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird."

Jay Leno: "I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, 'Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal?'"

David Letterman: "But here is the sad part: before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy's request for body armor."

Jon Stewart (again): "Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. . . . But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. . . . Moms, dads, if you're watching right now, I can't emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don't care what kind of lucrative contracts they're trying to land, or energy regulations they're trying to get lifted, it's just not worth it."

The Nation notes that it is now obvious that Cheney's five draft deferments were a good thing: "It has become clear that Cheney was doing the country a service when he avoided service."

Just don't forget to read Borowitz.

[Update: Borowitz does it again. Here's the opening line of his second Cheney column: "Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced today that his department would immediately implement a “Cheney Alert” system to warn Americans if an attack by Vice President Dick Cheney is imminent."]

America's Shame

An investigation by the widely respected National Journal of government records relating to 446 detainees at Guantanamo has uncovered a shameful story of official lies, routine abuses of due process rights, and, not surprisingly, the long-term detention of many innocent people. Stated briefly, the facts are these:

1. Contrary to frequent assertions that the prison at Guantanamo holds only the worst terrorists--those who would be killing Americans in Afghanistan or plotting the next 9/11 if freed--most are victims of mistaken identity or are, at worst, low-level Taliban or Al Qaeda soldiers with no knowledge of operational issues.
2. Due to the frustration that Pentagon officials felt over their inability to gain information from these prisoners (who, of course, had no useful information to provide in the first place), increasingly harsh interrogation techniques were authorized by the Pentagon and employed at Guantanamo.
3. Torture produced information--almost all of it false.
4. On the basis of false accusations, innocent people being held at Guantanamo were "proved" to be dangerous terrorists.

If this sounds far-fetched, please read the story. Or at least consider some of these excerpts, which, I remind you, are based on government files and Combatant Status Review Tribunal records:

A. False Accusations

Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.

Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers--not lawyers--who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man--the aforementioned accuser--had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.

The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.

B. Flimsy Evidence

"There is no smoking gun," said John Chandler, a partner in the Atlanta office of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. One of his Guantanamo clients, picked up in Pakistan, is designated an enemy combatant in part because he once traveled on a bus with wounded Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan. The prisoner denies it, saying it was only a public bus. But then there's the prisoner's Casio watch. According to the Defense Department files, his watch is similar to another Casio model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda has used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine other detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world and is worn by one National Journal reporter. The primary difference between Chandler's client's watch and the Casio in question is that the detainee's model hasn't been manufactured for years, according to the U.S. military officer who was his personal representative at the tribunal.

C. Coerced Statements

One man slammed his hands on the table during an especially long interrogation and yelled, "Fine, you got me; I'm a terrorist." The interrogators knew it was a sarcastic statement. But the government, sometime later, used it as evidence against him: "Detainee admitted he is a terrorist" reads his tribunal evidence. The interrogators were so outraged that they sought out the detainee's personal representative to explain it to him that the statement was not a confession.

A Yemeni, whom somebody fingered as a bin Laden bodyguard, finally said in exasperation during one long interrogation, "OK, I saw bin Laden five times: Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." And now his "admission" appears in his enemy combatant's file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama bin Laden."

I continue to wonder why Americans aren't outraged. More and more, I'm being forced to conclude that Americans' commitment to human rights may be, on the whole, very weak.

(For two appropriately outraged reactions, see Stuart Taylor's editorial in the National Journal and this commentary at Body and Soul, where I first saw the story.)

Muslim Protests

Muslims all over the world have joined in an increasingly violent series of demonstrations protesting a set of cartoons that depict the prophet Mohammed. The cartoons, which originally appeared last September in a Danish newspaper, have recently been reprinted throughout Europe and elsewhere.

One explanation for the spread of the protests was offered by an unidentified government official in the United Arab Emirates: "You have no choice but to join the chorus. Anyone who doesn't speak up will look as if they tacitly accept the prophet to be insulted."

This situation brings to mind Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington, arguing that conflict between Christians and Muslims has very deep roots, states that conflict is "a product of difference, particularly the Muslim concept of Islam as a way of life transcending and uniting religion and politics versus the Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God and Caesar" (210).

However offensive the cartoons may be, the Muslim world's reaction can't help but baffle most Westerners. Muslim anger and Western bafflement together lend support to the notion of a "clash of civilizations." And that, in turn, lends support to the forces of reaction on both sides.

Bono in D.C.

In a sermon--yes, a sermon--reminiscent of the speech he gave at the Labour Party Conference at Brighton in September 2004, Bono yesterday challenged an audience that included President Bush and many members of Congress to view aid to Africa as a matter of justice, not charity:

Justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

Sixty-five hundred Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about justice and equality.

Take a few minutes to read Bono's sermon. It's important. It's what we once called "speaking truth to power."

[Via Sojourners.]

"Addicted to Oil"

These words were spoken by President Bush in his State of Union address earlier this evening. He said, "Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world."

Several points that Dan Caldwell and I make in Seeking Security in an Insecure World support the concern expressed by President Bush:

• "The extent of American dependence on oil can best be captured in two key numbers. Petroleum accounts for 40 percent of the energy consumed in the United States; in the transportation sector, the figure is 97 percent." (p. 160)
• "Questions surrounding the dependability of oil-exporting countries (that is, the combination of their internal stability and their willingness to supply particular customers, including the United States, Japan, and the European Union) take on considerable urgency when one looks at who the leading oil exporters are. The top ten net petroleum exporters are Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Kuwait, Nigeria, Mexico, and Algeria. Only Norway and Mexico are considered 'free,' according to the annual assessment of political liberties and civil rights conducted by Freedom House. Saudi Arabia's monarchy, in contrast, is considered one of the world's most repressive regimes. Several countries on the list are also among the world's most corrupt business environments." (p. 161)
• "The dilemmas associated with petroleum politics are becoming more, not less, difficult to address, because oil consumption continues to increase worldwide. The U.S. Department of Energy projects global oil consumption to grow an average of 1.9 percent per year between 2003 and 2025. For its part, the United States, which used 19.71 million barrels of oil per day in 2001, will be consuming 28.30 million barrels per day by 2025. The annual rate of growth in petroleum consumption in the United States from 2003 to 2025 is projected to be almost double what it was from 1980 to 2003. Meanwhile, domestic production peaked in 1970 at 9.6 million barrels per day and has been slowly declining ever since." (pp. 161-62)

This last point describes the problem that President Bush seeks to address through his proposals for new fuel technologies designed to reduce American dependence on imported oil. His prescription is good--as far as it goes.

If only he could have also brought himself to mention conservation--the one solution that doesn't require years of research and development.

Tonight's SOTU

According to the Borowitz Report, the White House has decided to simulcast tonight's State of the Union address in English in an effort to boost President Bush's sagging approval ratings.

Are We at War?

James Carroll asks an important question in his column in today's Boston Globe: "Is America actually at war?"

Certainly there is a war ongoing in Iraq, but Carroll suggests that we have no enemy there: the insurgents who almost daily attack American troops merely want the invader and occupier to leave. With respect to the broader "war on terror," Carroll notes that the United States is not actually engaging its real enemy "because Al Qaeda is a free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network."

The nature of the insurgency in Iraq is more complicated than Carroll suggests, but it's hard not to be struck by the fact that the most serious part of the conflict there began only after President Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" almost three years ago. It's equally difficult to ignore the fact that Osama bin Laden and his associates continue to taunt the United States via videotape over four years after the 9/11 attacks prompted Bush to proclaim a "war on terror."

Declaring a "war on terror" was a mistake in part for what it has done for bin Laden. Carroll makes the point well:

Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up.

Saddam Hussein is on trial, but what no doubt amazes observers in the Muslim world is that Osama bin Laden is not.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day--the Day of Remembrance. It commemorates the victims of the Holocaust on the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

For more on the anniversary, and for a moving poem by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, go here.