20,000

I don't know who all the readers of this blog are (although the readership is small enough that it probably wouldn't take long for me to shake hands with everyone), but someone logging in from Wartburg College in Iowa last night was the 20,000th visitor.

Thanks to all of you who stop in from time to time--especially those of you find your way here deliberately.

And if I knew who Visitor #20,000 was, I might have to send him or her some sort of prize--unless he or she turned out to be the person who called me on the phone two weeks ago to berate me for being a "liberal twit." (Really!)

Breathing Earth

Via FP Passport, here's an interesting site that provides a real-time simulation of CO2 emissions, births, and deaths on a world map. It's called, appropriately, Breathing Earth.

The End of the NPT?

There is an excellent article on nuclear weapons proliferation ("Restraints Fray and Risks Grow as Nuclear Club Gains Members") on the front page of today's New York Times. William E. Broad and David J. Sanger provide some of the history of non-proliferation efforts and note that, in addition to the nine existing nuclear weapons states, "as many as 40 more countries have the technical skill, and in some cases the required material, to build a bomb."

Broad and Sanger generally concur with the pessimistic views regarding the future of the nuclear non-proliferation regime that I heard expressed two weeks ago at the ISA-West meeting by Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr., former general counsel and acting director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Dr. William C. Potter, director of the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and Mary Beth Nitikin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Broad and Sanger write:

In March 1963, President John F. Kennedy said, "I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of 4, and by 1975, 15 or 20." That timetable proved to be inaccurate. But in recent years there has been a sense around the globe that President Kennedy's prediction is about to come true, three decades late.

Unfortunately, the failure of the international community to head off North Korea's nuclear test or to impose costs on Pakistan for the actions of the A. Q. Khan operation has brought us to the point at which the benefits of acquiring nuclear weapons may be perceived as outweighing the costs.

Diplomacy in the Style of Kim

Via The Coming Anarchy, here's the KCNA [Korean Central News Agency] Random Insult Generator for your weekend amusement.

2006 Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank.

Yunus, who earned a Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt University, began making microfinance loans to poverty-stricken families in his native Bangladesh in 1974 during a devastating famine. Soon thereafter, he decided to conduct a test of microfinance by establishing Grameen Bank ("Bank of the Villages"). The idea was to make small loans to families who otherwise would be unable to get credit in an effort to help them establish home-based businesses.

As of May 2006, Grameen Bank had 6.61 million borrowers with branches providing services in over 70,000 Bangladeshi vilages. Ninety-seven percent of borrowers are women. In 2005, the average loan balance per borrower was $85. In spite of the small average balance, Grameen Bank has loaned almost $6 billion in the thirty years since its establishment. Its loan recovery rate is an astonishing 98.85 percent and, since 1995, the bank has operated without donations.

Grameen Bank, which has earned a profit every year except 1983, 1991, and 1992, has a program of interest-free loans for the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh. The "Struggling Members Programme" has 81,000 members who repay their loans at a rate as low as 4 cents per week.

What does any of this have to do with peace? In the conclusion of Seeking Security in an Insecure World, Dan Caldwell and I note (pp. 186-87) that "security today is indivisible" so that even "a narrowly self-interested security policy cannot be narrowly self-interested."

Everywhere we look, we see connections between various sources of insecurity. Economic insecurity may lead to slash-and-burn agriculture, with deforestation (and environmental insecurity) as a result. The devastation of an ecosystem may, in turn, create a refugee crisis that leads to ethnic conflict. An intrastate war may generate a market for arms traffickers. Trafficking in small arms and light weapons may then open up a network through which chemical, biological, or even nuclear materials are traded. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction may make it possible for terrorists to acquire a nuclear device. And so on.

Poverty alone does not generate conflict. The vast majority of the world's poor suffer quietly. But poverty is an underlying factor that can lead to instability. Even the Bush administration, in the most recent iteration of The National Security Strategy of the United States acknowledges this fact, calling assistance to the poor "a strategic priority" and stating that "America’s national interests and moral values drive us in the same direction: to assist the world’s poor citizens and least developed nations and help integrate them into the global economy."

In 2004, the Nobel Committee recognized the connection between environmental security and peace by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Wangari Maathai. This year, the Committee has recognized the connection between economic security and peace.

The Editor of the Lancet Responds

Richard Horton, editor of the respected British medical journal that has just published the much-discussed Johns Hopkins study of civilian casualties in Iraq, describes the methodology of the study and draws pertinent lessons in a commentary available here. The entire piece is well worth reading, but here are two key paragraphs:

Why is this Lancet estimate so much higher than the figures put out by President Bush or the Iraq Body Count website? They put the number of casualties in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, Iraq Body Count does not claim to publish accurate absolute numbers of deaths. Instead, their figures are valuable for measuring trends. But the reason for the discrepancy between these lower estimates and the new figure of 650,000 deaths lies in the way the number is sought. Passive surveillance, the most common method used to estimate numbers of civilian deaths, will always underestimate the total number of casualties. We know this from past wars and conflict zones, where the estimates have been too low by a factor of 10 or even 20.

Only when you go out and knock on the doors of families, actively looking for deaths, do you begin to get close to the right number. This method is now tried and tested. It has been the basis for mortality estimates in war zones such as Darfur and the Congo. Interestingly, when we report figures from these countries politicians do not challenge them. They frown, nod their heads and agree that the situation is grave and intolerable. The international community must act, they say. When it comes to Iraq the story is different. Expect the current government to mobilise all its efforts to undermine the work done by this American and Iraqi team. Expect the government to criticise the Lancet for being too political. Expect the government to do all it can to dismiss this story and wash its hands of its responsibility to take these latest findings seriously.

At the end of the commentary, Horton offers this conclusion that sounds much like one of the points that Dan Caldwell and I made in Seeking Security in an Insecure World:

We can truthfully say that our foreign policy--based as it is on 19th-century notions of the nation-state--is long past its sell-by date. We need a new set of principles to govern our diplomacy and military strategy--principles that are based on the idea of human security and not national security, health and wellbeing and not economic self-interest and territorial ambition.

"Long past its sell-by date." I like the way he puts it.

War Is Hell

Let us assume that the new study from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University--the one that puts the number of Iraqis who have died violent deaths since the U.S. invasion at over 600,000--is way off. Let's assume the sampling techniques were flawed, that respondents lied to those who gathered the data, that in the absence of bodies there can be no meaningful estimates of the number of deaths in a chaotic place like Iraq. What are we left with if we assume that the number is significantly lower--say, one-tenth the Johns Hopkins researchers' estimate?

We are left with the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people in what began as a war of choice, not of necessity. We are left with a fiasco that brings a flood of headlines like these drawn from a quick Lexis-Nexis search:

• "110 Bodies Found in Baghdad in Two Days" (Oct. 10)
• "Bomb Kills 14 in Iraqi City that Bush Had Lauded as Safe" (Oct. 8)
• "4,000 Iraqi Police Killed in 2 Years, U.S. Official Says" (Oct. 7)
• "Baghdad Blast Kills 35 Waiting for Fuel" (Sept. 24)
• "Attacks in Iraq Leave 23 Dead as Talks Lag on Autonomy" (Sept. 19)
• "Blasts in Kirkuk Kill 23; 36 Die Elsewhere in Iraq" (Sept. 18)
• "Nearly 100 Killed in Baghdad Over 24 Brutal Hours; Scores of Corpses Dumped in Streets" (Sept. 14)

We are left, in short, with a reminder of why war must always be a last resort. Michael Walzer asks, and promptly answers, the key question in Just and Unjust Wars (p. 22):

Why is it wrong to begin a war? We know the answer all too well. People get killed, and often in large numbers. War is hell.

The Last King of Scotland

Like other films that portray grave human rights abuses--Schindler's List, Hotel Rwanda, and The Killing Fields come to mind--The Last King of Scotland is difficult to watch. But, like these other films, it has an important message and deserves a large audience.

The Last King of Scotland follows Idi Amin's rise and fall in Uganda during the 1970s through the eyes of a fictional young doctor from Scotland, Nicholas Garrigan. Amin, an uneducated Ugandan army general, ousted President Milton Obote in a coup in 1971. His charisma and his willingness to stand up to former colonial powers initially made Amin very popular in Uganda, but he quickly became more and more paranoid, repressive, and brutal. By the time he was ousted in 1979, Amin had established one of the most abusive regimes in Africa's post-colonial history. It is estimated that 300,000 Ugandans were killed during his bloody reign.

In its broad outlines, The Last King of Scotland offers a solidly historical portrayal of Idi Amin's Uganda. As most critics have noted, Forest Whitaker does an outstanding job--Oscar-quality, perhaps--of capturing Amin's charisma and his paranoia. (For more on Amin, including speculation that he may have suffered from dementia brought on by syphilis, see this obituary that appeared in the Guardian shortly after his death in exile in 2003.)

The main fictional character, Dr. Garrigan, seems in some respects to be unnecessary--Amin's rise and fall is morbidly fascinating even without making the central character an idealistic young white man whom Amin will befriend and then torture--but it's a type of character that filmmakers tackling subjects like this one often rely on. It's an "empathy character"--someone with whom white American and European movie-goers can identify. When director John Boorman tried to tell the story of Myanmar's military dictatorship in the 1995 film Beyond Rangoon, he used an American woman visiting the country (played by Patricia Arquette) as the eyes through which the audience would see the unfolding events. When director Roland Joffe depicted Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s in The Killing Fields, he focused on New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg (played by Sam Waterston) and his perspective on what happened. Even director David Lean's majestic Gandhi employed various British and American characters (Rev. Charlie Andrews, a reporter named Vince Walker, and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White) to offer Western views of non-Western events.

It is unfortunate that the boundaries of our empathy require filmmakers to tell every story using characters who look like the whites in their audiences. But at least stories like this one--the tragedy of Uganda under Idi Amin--are actually told occasionally so that some moviegoers will be forced to confront unpleasant events of the not-too-distant past. But more people need to see films like The Last King of Scotland.

(If you've seen The Last King of Scotland, I'd like to know what you thought of it.)

"Some Damn Fool"

In his Boston Globe column today, James Carroll recounts a frightening experience during his youth on the border of East and West Germany and draws a tough parallel.

After Annan, Ban

If the vote taken today by the UN Security Council holds up, Ban Ki-moon of South Korea will be the next secretary general of the UN.

Ballots in the Security Council at this stage in the election process "encourage," "discourage," or "express no opinion" on candidates. Ban was "encouraged" by fourteen of the Council's fifteen members. One member, not identified, expressed no opinion.

An informal norm at the UN requires that the secretary general's position be rotated among the different regions of the world. The last Asian to serve as secretary general was U Thant of Burma, who occupied the post from 1961 to 1971.

For more on the role of the secretary general, go here. Information on previous secretaries general is available here.

Leaving Las Vegas

I apologize for the long gap between posts. Part--although not all--of the explanation lies in my trip to Las Vegas this past weekend for the International Studies Association-West annual meeting. It was my first trip to a regional ISA meeting and I have to say I'm sorry I waited so long.

There were a number of very good papers presented at the conference. Some of the papers are available in an online archive located here. Here are my personal recommendations:

• Christian Enemark, "'Non-Lethal' Weapons and the Occupation of Iraq: Technology, Ethics, Law and Medicine"
• Rebecca Glazier, "Just Intervention in Genocide: Extending the Theoretical Applications of Just War Theory"
• John Barkdull, "From International Ethics to Global Ethics"
• Francis Harbour, "The Just Soldier's Dilemma"

The paper I most want to read (without having heard it being presented at the conference) is one by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry entitled "Mean Girls: The Theoretical Significance of Women's Violence in Global Politics."

If I can find the time, I'll try to comment further on the conference--and on my visit to the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.

Tackling Torture's Defenders

Alfred W. McCoy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison systematically dismantles the rationale for torture (or "alternative procedures," to use the euphemism that President Bush adopted in a recent speech) in an article entitled "The Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb." I highly recommend it.

"Are We So Fearful?"

Ariel Dorfman, author of the widely performed play Death and the Maiden, has a powerful essay on torture in today's Washington Post. He asks,

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

A good question, certainly, but so is this one that Dorfman also asks: "Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?"

Read his essay here.

Unpopularity Contest

G. John Ikenberry has an explanation for the world's dislike of American foreign policy that goes beyond the miscues of the Bush administration. There's a short version of his thesis and a long version.

The "Central Front"

Many experts have been saying this for years, but now the National Intelligence Estimate, the classified assessment that represents the consensus view of U.S. government intelligence agencies, is saying it as well. Here, from a story to appear in tomorrow's New York Times, it is:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Bush has said just the opposite many times. For example, in a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy on October 6, 2005, he stated, "The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror."

How will the Iraq fiasco be justified now?

Undiplomatic Language

In comments here, PW points to an op-ed by Peggy Noonan from the Wall Street Journal. Noonan rightly criticizes the over-heated rhetoric (hellish rhetoric might be a better term post-Chavez) that seems to be circling the globe these days. It's almost as if Kim Jong-il had become the avatar of diplomatic discourse.

Noonan writes:

U.N. speeches are, by history and tradition, boring. You daydream to them. This is not all accident, not only the result of the fact that a nation's diplomats don't usually come from the more scintillating parts of its elites. (They rose to the U.N. in the first place because they didn't fatally offend anyone back home.) Their speeches are dull because they know divisions can be dodged or blunted by a heartening vagueness. And so their words are blankets, not bullets; meant to envelop, not pierce.

Noonan obviously didn't have John Bolton in mind when she wrote that UN representatives "rose to the U.N. in the first place because they didn't fatally offend anyone back home"--unless she meant the term "fatally" to be taken with great literalness. But I digress.

Many others have made similar observations about the language of diplomacy. Isaac Goldberg said, "Diplomacy is to do and say / The nastiest things in the nicest way." Caskie Stinnett, in a 1960 book entitled Out of the Red, defined a diplomat as "a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip."

Traditionally, diplomats have tried to keep their discourse diplomatic even when the policies they are defending have not been. Otto von Bismarck noted that "even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness."

As Noonan points out, "Harsh words inspire the unstable." But Noonan fails to recognize that George W. Bush has based his presidency on harsh words and simplistic categories. We could certainly use more of the bland language of diplomacy--at the UN and elsewhere--and a good place to start might be in convincing the president of the United States to consider the impact of his words on foreign audiences.

" . . . We're Winning the War."

The ellipsis obscures an important qualification.

Earlier this week, General John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, was asked if the United States is winning the war in Iraq. He replied, "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war."

[Via Peter Howard at The Duck of Minerva.]

Ali G at da UN

Peggy McGuinness at Opinio Juris performs a great public service by posting a clip of Ali G's visit to the United Nations. Ali G asks, "War. What is it good for?" He also interviews former Secretary General Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

John Kerry at Pepperdine: The Video

A video of Senator Kerry's speech at Pepperdine is available here.

(Thanks to James Wiser for pointing me in the direction of the link.)

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.]