Warlords and Child Soldiers

Today's New York Times "Week in Review" includes an important story on child soldiers by Jeffrey Gettleman. Here's the introduction:

In the early 1980s, in the lowlands of Mozambique, a new technology of warfare emerged that would sweep across Africa and soon the rest of the world: the child soldier.

Rebel commanders had constructed a four-foot tall killing machine that cut its way through village after village and nearly overran the government. Its trail was smoking huts and sawed off ears.

The Mozambicans learned that children were the perfect weapon: easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless and, most important, in endless supply.

Today, human rights groups say, there are 300,000 child soldiers worldwide. And experts say the problem is deepening as the nature of conflict itself changes--especially in Africa.

Here, in one country after another, conflicts have morphed from idea- or cause-driven struggles to warlord-led drives whose essential goal is plunder. Because those new rebel movements are motivated and financed by crime, popular support becomes irrelevant. Those in control don't care about hearts and minds. They see the local population as prey.

The result is that few adults want to have anything to do with them, and manipulating and abducting children becomes the best way to sustain the organized banditry.

Read the complete story here.

Voting Rights in Florida

Two months before the 2004 presidential election, I noted in this post that approximately 4,700,000 Americans would be ineligible to vote because of state restrictions on voting by convicted felons. The disenfranchisement of felons, which is a matter of state rather than federal law, has been most common in the South where it is a legacy of the Jim Crow era. It is generally viewed as a violations of international human rights law.

Yesterday, Florida's clemency board voted to allow most of the state's 950,000 disenfranchised ex-felons to regain their right to vote. The decision, pushed by Republican governor Charlie Crist, leaves only Virginia and Kentucky on the list of states with lifetime bans on voting by ex-felons.

Before the vote, Gov. Crist said, "This is Holy Week, a week that is all about forgiveness. Restoring civil rights is the right thing to do."

Amen.

Comfort Women: Why Now?

Why is the issue of the Japanese military's use of "comfort women" roiling Asian politics over sixty years after World War II ended? Foreign Policy gets answers from Columbia University's Gerald Curtis in this installment of "Seven Questions."

Returning to Form

I haven't had time to check the stats, but I suspect March 2007 was the lightest month ever for posting on Swords into Plowshares. Rather than make excuses, I'll simply announce my return and promise to do at least a little better in April.

Thanks for checking in.

On Fundamentalisms

James Carroll offers a critique of all types of fundamentalism in this column published yesterday in the Boston Globe.

After defining fundamentalism and noting its troublesome effects, Carroll considers his own faith's version of the tendency. Noting Pope Benedict's recent "Apostolic Exhortation" and its assertion that certain values are "not negotiable," Carroll writes that "culture consists precisely in negotiation of values, and change in how values are understood is part of life. Moral reasoning is not mere obedience, but lively interaction among principles, situations, and the 'human limitations' referred to in the 1993 Vatican statement," which condemned religious fundamentalism.

Consider some of the values that good people might consider "not negotiable." Consider opposition to abortion or the defense of marriage as an exclusively heterosexual union. Or consider the promotion of democracy or of free-market economic principles. Consider support for human rights or opposition to all forms of war.

Steadfast defense of a principle without regard to circumstances--"mere obedience"--is easy. It absolves the one engaged in such a defense of the need to think about contexts or consequences. On the other hand, recognizing that values may come into conflict or that ends and means are both important--engaging, that is, in "moral reasoning"--is more difficult because it entails responsibility. It forbids the excuse that is so common among those who do evil without even realizing it: "I was just following orders."

Do-It-Yourself Country

If you've ever wanted to create your own utopian state (or maybe a dystopia is more your style), you can do it online here.

(Someone please let me know if it's worth messing around with. I don't have time to try it right now.)

[Thanks to Chelsea McCollum for the tip.]

Hyping the DPRK Threat

Joseph Cirincione makes a compelling case that the Bush Administration handled intelligence on North Korea's nuclear weapons program with the same disregard for inconvenient facts that it displayed with respect to Iraq. He writes:

What once appeared the exception now seems the rule. Officials in U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration are gingerly walking back from claims that North Korea was secretly building a factory to enrich uranium for dozens of atomic bombs. The intelligence, officials now say, was not as solid as they originally trumpeted. It does not seem that the North Korean program is as large or as advanced as claimed or that the country's leaders are as set on building weapons as officials depicted.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The original claims came during the same period officials were hyping stories of Iraq's weapons. Once again, the claims involve aluminum tubes. Once again, there was cherry-picking and exaggeration of intelligence. Once again, the policy shaped the intelligence, with enormous national security costs. The story of Iraq is well known; that unnecessary war has cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and an immeasurable loss of legitimacy. This time, the administration's decision to tear up a successful agreement--using a dubious intelligence "finding" as an excuse--propelled the tiny, isolated country to subsequently build and test nuclear weapons, threatening to trigger a new wave of proliferation.

This is just the introduction; Cirincione provides many specifics in the paragraphs that follow.

The charge of cherry-picking intelligence on the subject of North Korea's nuclear weapons program adds a new dimension to the consensus expressed by proliferation experts at a recent conference hosted by the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA: The Bush Administration has failed miserably in its handling of North Korea.

On the Record

Today, on the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, it is important to remember that this was a war of choice, not of necessity, for the United States. This searchable database of 237 statements made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, and National Security Adviser Rice about Iraq makes the point very effectively.

Sudanese Slaves

The BBC reports that thousands of Sudanese slaves, most seized by Arab militias during raids on southern villages that were conducted during Sudan's two-decade-long civil war, have still not been released in spite of a 1999 agreement by the Sudanese government to facilitate their return home.

War on Terror: The Board Game

Consider this an advisory rather than an endorsement:

From the U.K. comes a board game based on the "war on terror." Seriously.

[Thanks to Kevin Iga for the tip.]

My Country

Today, on a day of anti-war protests across the country, I spotted a bumper sticker with the following message: "I love my country, but I think we should start seeing other people."

In Zambia

For those who are interested in experiencing the Peace Corps vicariously, let me recommend Caitlin Dunn's blog. Caitlin is a 2006 Pepperdine graduate who has recently begun a two-year stint in Zambia. Her blog is a candid and detailed (if somewhat sporadic) account of life in the Northwestern Province of Zambia. Give Caitlin's blog a look--and be sure to leave her a note in the comments.

Not For Sale

For those in the vicinity of Malibu, I have a last-minute recommendation: David Batstone, author of Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade--and How We Can Fight It and founder of the the Not for Sale Campaign, will be speaking at Pepperdine tonight. Batstone teaches ethics at the University of San Francisco and writes on ethics for USA Weekend.

Dr. Batstone's talk will be in Stauffer Chapel at 8:00 p.m.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day, a day that commemorates a number of significant events in history that occurred in March, including several associated with the labor movement in the United States. (For example, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which over 140 female workers were killed, occurred on March 25, 1911.) In honor of International Women's Day, I've decided to describe briefly the contributions of one woman associated with the American labor movement, Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930).

One of the most important labor advocates in American history, "Mother Jones" began as an organizer for the Chicago chapter of the Knights of Labor in 1871 soon after losing all her possessions in the Great Chicago Fire. (Just four years earlier, Jones had lost her husband and four young children in a yellow fever epidemic in Tennessee.) From 1871 until the end of her life almost sixty years later, Jones was a part of every significant strike in the United States.

Jones was especially concerned with conditions in which coal miners were forced to worked. In fact, her work with the United Mine Workers earned her the nickname "the Miners' Angel." In 1898, Jones founded the Social Democratic Party. Seven years later, she helped to established the Industrial Workers of the World.

Jones liked to tell audiences, "I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser." She was indeed a hell-raiser, but she raised hell on behalf of those who were victims of economic exploitation.

Independence, Texas-Style

Happy Texas Independence Day to Texans and those who wish they were. (That latter category has no doubt decreased in number over the past six years, but, anyway . . .)

Here, for your historical enlightenment and reading pleasure is the Texas Declaration of Independence, signed on March 2, 1836.

Losing Power

"It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts."

--Aung San Suu Kyi

Abe and "Comfort Women"

From 1937, when Japan invaded Manchuria, to the end of the Pacific War in 1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 women were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army. So-called "comfort houses" were established throughout Asia, from Sakhalin Island to the Dutch East Indies and beyond. Wherever the Japanese military went, "comfort women" were "recruited" to serve the sexual desires of soldiers. Toward the end of the war, when most Japanese forces were withdrawn to the home islands, even Japanese women were forced to become military base prostitutes.

In 1993, not long after official documents detailing the Japanese military's role in procuring "comfort women" were unearthed, Japan issued a formal apology to the women involved and established a victims' compensation fund supported by private donations. Today, however, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe began to reverse his nation's progress toward the acceptance of responsibility for the terrible crimes perpetrated against tens of thousands of women. Abe said, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion."

Signs of the Japanese shift in policy were on display last month as government ministers reacted negatively to hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives on Japanese sex slavery during World War II. The nationalist tendencies of the Abe government seem destined to harm relations with Japan's East Asian neighbors and the United States as well.

Reason and Error

[Note: Last week, Dan Caldwell and I wrote the essay below for publication in Pepperdine's campus newspaper, the Graphic, as a response to two presentations (with essentially the same content) on campus by Dinesh D'Souza. The editor of the Graphic chose not to publish the essay in the paper, so we offer it here instead. As needed, the essay has been updated to reflected the passage of a week since its intended publication.]

Two weeks ago, a court in Germany sentenced Ernst Zundel to five years in prison for his contributions to a web site that denies the Holocaust ever occurred. Here in the United States, the First Amendment would have protected the ignorant and offensive things Zundel has written. In fact, it did protect them for the two years that Zundel lived in Tennessee.

Although it was not always the case, the United States today places a higher value on freedom of speech than any other country in the world according to comparative law scholars. Because Americans recognize the importance of the free exchange of ideas in a democracy, our courts commonly give wide latitude to political speech. And we support that as a fundamental right guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Some of our national confidence in the value of free speech comes directly from Thomas Jefferson. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson said, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

We raise this point because Dinesh D'Souza, author of a recently published book with an ignorant and offensive premise, spoke on campus last week. In fact, his appearances at the School of Law and Seaver College one week ago were specifically designed to promote his book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

D'Souza argues, in his own words, that "the cultural left in the country is responsible for causing 9/11." The "cultural left" is not everybody in the Democratic Party, but it includes an awful lot of people (almost all of them Democrats) who have a commonality that only D'Souza seems capable of intuiting. He specifically attacks, among others, President Jimmy Carter, Senator Robert Byrd, Senator Hillary Clinton, philanthropist George Soros, and journalist Bill Moyers.

D'Souza's false thesis, which is elaborated throughout the book, is ignorant and offensive enough, but there are others that are equally ludicrous. For example, we learn in chapter six that the cultural left was also responsible for the Abu Ghraib scandal. D'Souza writes, after pretending that Charles Graner and Lynndie England were the only soldiers involved in the torture and degradation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, "For many Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring." Really?

Sadly, there's much more like this. Really.

The Jeffersonian--and, in fact, the quintessentially American--response to obnoxious views like the ones D'Souza is currently peddling is not censorship but reason. This, it seems to us, is where scholars have not only the right but the obligation to speak.

So, let us be among those to confront falsehoods with truth and reason. D'Souza's opinions about liberals, as with most prejudices, bear little relationship to reality.

He attributes motives and desires to liberals for which there is no evidence, thereby defaming many good people. He treats political differences, including those born of opposition to preventive war or to torture, as evidence of moral depravity. He engages, very freely, in ad hominem attacks.

He purports to know the mind of Osama bin Laden, but his conclusions are at odds with both expert analyses and many of bin Laden's own statements.

D'Souza's views about his fellow Americans are deeply offensive--and even libelous, according to a recent op-ed by his fellow neoconservative and Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson. He has, sadly, abandoned even the pretense of civility. We say "sadly" because it is civility that allows those who disagree nevertheless to engage in conversation, as often occurs, thankfully, on this campus.

While we're willing to be among the first to challenge D'Souza's false and malicious ideas, we certainly hope we're not the last. On the contrary, we would like to know exactly what those who brought D'Souza to Pepperdine and gave him a platform to present his offensive beliefs think of his view that liberals--people like us--are responsible for 9/11 and for the Abu Ghraib scandal.

One of the most important philosophers of political conservatism, Edmund Burke, wrote, "It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph." Offended by D'Souza's false and malicious claims, we choose to speak out. What about others?

[Update (3/1/07): The Graphic has now posted this piece online here.]

Banning Wikipedia

According to this story in the New York Times last week, the history department at Middlebury College has decided to prohibit students from using Wikipedia as a source for research papers submitted in history classes. Welcome to the club.

As I've noted before, Wikipedia is a remarkable web phenomenon. It has much to recommend it, especially for those who need a quick, online source of information to serve as a starting point for research. In this respect, it's like other encyclopedias. But there are problems with using any encyclopedia as a source for a research paper in college.

Professor Thomas Beyer of the Russian department at Middlebury could be speaking for me and most of my colleagues with whom I've discussed student research when he said, "I guess I am not terribly impressed by anyone citing an encyclopedia as a reference point, but I am not against using it as a starting point."

Students, take note.

The World of Recycling

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting series of articles (published last week) on the state of recycling in seven major cities (Paris, Stockholm, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, and Berlin). The report on Santa Monica's recycling program notes that plastics may go to Mohawk Industries in Alabama to be turned into carpet or to China for a variety of potential transformations. Glass may end up being recycled into new wine bottles for Gallo Wineries while cans may come back around as beer cans for Anheuser-Busch.

In spite of an impressive recycling program, Santa Monica still contributes to one of the largest landfills in the world--the Puente Hills Landfill 35 miles east of LA.

[Via Foreign Policy Passport.]