The Republic of Dissent

Nous restons tous américains

Pertinent stuff from Glenn Greenwald:

It's certainly true that Americans are justifiably proud of certain nationalistic attributes: class mobility, ethnic diversity, religious freedom, large immigrant populations, life-improving technological discoveries, a commitment to some basic liberties such as free speech and press, historical progress in correcting some of its worst crimes. But all of those virtues are found in equal if not, at this point, greater quantity in numerous other countries. Add to that mix America's shameful attributes - its historic crimes of land theft, genocide, slavery and racism, its sprawling penal state, the company it keeps on certain human rights abuses, the aggressive attack on Iraq, the creation of a worldwide torture regime, its pervasive support for the world's worst tyrannies - and it becomes not just untenable, but laughable, to lavish it with that title.

Assertions of one's nation's exceptionalism are banal and create more obligations than privileges. 

The word is american and America is increasingly going to have an issue with how much others have learned from its recent years.

Primus inter pares

From Kevin Jon Heller:

Fortunately — though I know this comes as a shock to the US, which likes to pretend that it is primus inter pares — the US doesn’t get to unilaterally determine whether Palestine is a state. Nor does Israel (and note that that Rice’s “direct negotiations” lament is simply designed to give Israel a veto over Palestinian statehood by continuing to avoid negotiating in good faith).

My suggestion: at all future UN meetings, [Ambassador Susan] Rice should avoid turning her head toward the seat with the State of Palestine placard.  That will make it much easier for her to pretend that more than 70% of the world’s states didn’t recently vote to recognize Palestinian statehood.

Bien envoyé mais c'est plus compliqué !

International law and the American presidential campaign

Sentence du jour from Peter Spiro :

(...) the decline of IL as campaign-trail whipping post bodes well either way.

If only it were true, however,  to the contrary, it is this is the proof that two terms of Bush and yes, one term of Obama have made international law irrelevant in American politics for the consensus is that the POTUS has the right to supersede it when he believes it to be in the name of American national interest without much fuss domestically. 

Hate speech is just too expensive

I disagree strongly with Peter Spiro on this:

(...) the Benghazi protests were prompted by this film depicting the prophet Mohammed in not very flattering terms. The equation from the protesters at the US consulate in Benghazi: this film was produced by an American; we will hold America responsible for it.

The result: national foreign relations are seriously compromised by the irresponsible act of an individual. For structural and functional reasons, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. (....) our European friends would argue that democracy is better served by banning such material. Either way, our exceptionalism on this score doesn’t serve us very well.

There are two main reasons for my disagreement.  The first has to with the definition of hate speech and who/what decides what it is. The second  is that I believe that the 'European model' isn't democratic at all, but paternalistic (mainly because of recent history) for at its core is the presumption that a society can never be mature enough to handle filth and thus the state must intervene to avoid that the kids do harm to each other.

White man's international justice

Adrian Hamilton on the Charles Taylor's trial by The Special Court for Sierra Leone and its verdict:

Taylor's trial still has the smack of white man's justice to it – and not a little hypocrisy.

Taylor has been condemned for stoking up a rebellion in another country with appalling consequences for its civilian population. But what else was the West doing when it armed the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and how else would you describe the calls to send arms to the insurgents in Syria, however noble their cause?

Taylor's defence was right on one point. He wouldn't be there if his machinations had suited our purposes.

I don't agree with Hamilton's phrasing, but it is pretty clear that the trial of Charles Taylor was problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with white man's justice. The case against him was weak and its prosecution inadequate. It doesn't mean that Taylor wasn't responsible, it means that the process to determine his guilt was flawed. However, the essential question remains about the adequateness of the tools to achieve international justice and about how fair and equitable does the process have for its verdict to be just instead of just being about retribution.

Qaddafi and vindication

Juan Cole on the death of Gaddafi and the intervention of the US and Nato:

The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region’s remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, ““The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world… People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”

I don't agree with Juan Cole or rather with the way he chooses to phrase the issue for two reasons. The first is that I don't think that death of Qaddafi or of any dictator is the measuring stick as to whether American intervention in the country was successful. If it were the case, Iraq would be a success.

The second reason is that long term matters especially when the policy before intervention whether it was direct or not was to interact with Qaddafi's regime.  In short, my problem is that Cole is solely moralizing the issue because he agrees with the policy instead of judging it on its merit, which is what happens on the ground.

I have to admit that because I lived through the capture of Saddam Hussein and his death, there is something about these flashy events that unsettle me while I hope that everything ends well and while I know the conclusion  will depend on acts not on good feelings and intentions.

Americanizing international law

I 'm going to munch on this assertion from Kevin Jon Heller all weekend, but that's because I agree with him even when I'm trying desperately not to:

Indeed, for too many American international-law scholars, particularly conservative ones, it is meaningless to distinguish between the lex lata and the lex ferenda — international law is simply whatever the U.S. says it is.

I can't wait to see what Professor Anderson has to say (he has said something, but not on this point). I have a feeling that he will say that an American interpretation of international law isn't in itself wrong, because it is American, and may indeed be right. However is that the issue?

Humanitarian intervention, Syria, and legitimacy

Oh no, not again:

Humanitarian intervention in Syria, under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine so often mentioned in the halls of the United Nations, would send a powerful message to Syrians and the Middle East. The people would feel validated, their plight recognized. Simply put: it would instill hope in a part of the world in dire need of it.

What we are learning from Libya and from the past is that humanitarian interventions remain wars that have to be fought and won. Good intentions, legitimating  righteous uprisings and even fighting bad regimes are never enough to make humanitarian interventions work in a world where images are everything and where wars are fought on the cheap to put it bluntly!

Left and critical thinking

Quote of the week from Noam Chomsky:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There are times when I wonder whether Chomsky isn't too smart for his own good to understand that the world isn't a MIT classroom. That's said what he affirms isn't irrelevant, he just went again too far.

The universality of International law

Quote of the day from Anne Orford :

The bombing of Libya in the name of revolution may be legal, but the international law that authorises such action has surely lost its claim to be universal.

One question comes immediately to mind: does international law has to be universal to be just? My answer without much analysis is no.  However, international law does have to be consistent and to be aware of its contradictions to address its own obvious inadequacies. What bothers me about Libya isn't the act, but its consequences and its effectiveness. The possibility that the Libyan intervention may fail or succeed in such a manner that it becomes extremly expensive not financially, but morally is a problem.

BHL, Germany and Libya

Bernard-Henri Lévy on Germany's stand on the Libyan intervention (it abstained on the UN security council's vote of  resolution 1973 establishing a No fly zone):

We lost a great deal of time because of the Germans, which is a disaster, mainly for the Libyans, but also for the Germans, who will pay bitterly for abstaining. What happened here will leave a lasting impression in Europe. And Germany will run into problems in its legitimate effort to secure a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel jettisoned all principles of German foreign policy since the end of World War II: There was the principle that something like National Socialism should never happen again. Never again crimes against humanity. Merkel and (German Foreign Minister Guido) Westerwelle violated this pact. This is a serious incident, not a minor detail. (...) Angela Merkel has the worst foreign minister Germany has had in a long time. Guido Westerwelle is a disaster. Immediately after the German abstention, he told your magazine: "Gadhafi has to go." It's really Westerwelle who ought to go, but he doesn't even seem to be ashamed of his decision, of this valley of shame.

I have stopped taking BHL seriously on those matters (it took me a long time because often I agree with his conclusions, but never with his argumentation)  because even when he is right, he can't get out of his own way and resist the temptation of self-righteousness.  The fact that he was so involved on Sarkozy's decision to take the lead in Libya worries me not because BHL is an unsavory and unserious character, but because he doesn't understand foreign policy when it becomes about more than postures, grand gestures, and cinematographic heroism.

Elusive vindication

I disagree strongly with the following assertion by Norman Geras:

Whatever you may think about it, similar to and/or different from the intervention in Iraq, the Libyan action is a vindication of sorts for Tony Blair and his doctrine of liberal intervention.

What!? Why by the same token isn't it a vindication of the crusades or simply of war in general? Geras's assertion is as true as saying as the financial collapse of 2008 is a vindication of Marxism.

It isn't all about the concept, the context does matter so do actions and their consequences.  I'm sure that if people look hard enough they can find events to vindicate all the wrongs in history and those who made fanatically, in spite of evidence, the conscious decision to do the knowing full well that smart people like Geras will always find reasons in the future to clean their dirty hands. Juan Cole has a persuasive post, which explains why Libya 2010 isn't Iraq 2003.

Questionable Intervention

Sugary excerpt of the day from Rory Stewart on the 'use of force' in Libya:

If the crises of Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have consumed more than 100,000 lives, four trillion dollars and absorbed a million foreign soldiers from 60 countries, have not made us more prudent, they should at least have made us wiser. For two decades our policies in these countries have been described, explained and criticised by political philosophers, civil servants, human rights activists, journalists, development workers, film-makers and 10,000 consultants. Parliamentarians round the world refer confidently to ‘Chapter 7 resolutions’, ‘no-fly zones’, ‘the experience of the Kurds’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’. But the basic questions about intervention seem to remain as obvious as they are unhelpful. You do not need to be able to name four cities in Libya to have four arguments against or for what we are doing. You can simply deploy those which were used in 1960s Vietnam, 1920s Syria and 1860s Afghanistan.

Just one question: does the rightfulness of an intervention depends on or is tied to its success?

The means can derail the end

Eugene R. Fidell says all that has to be said in a few words about the trial of Ghailani and the uproar following its verdict:

(...) it is important not to lose sight of the root cause of the outcome: he was subjected to coercion during his interrogation. There's the problem.

Thus, the outrage over United States v. Ghailani has nothing to do with the rule of law, but everything to do with politics. It offers one more proof that the Obama administration is weak on this issue for it is constantly backtracking because it is scared of being blamed for not using any means necessary to protect America if the worst happens. In short, the Obama administration is afraid to stand behind the rule of law not really because of ideology, but fear and politics.  There is nothing sadder than seeing an administration that  pledged to be better different than its predecessor being Bushlike out of fear rather than because of principles.

The consequences of symbolic indulgence

I agree with David Bromwich on this:

The truth is that Obama exposed himself to the worst the Republicans can do by his conciliatory tone from the first days of his administration. He gave assurance when he entered office that he would not look exactingly into the conduct of the last administration. Bush and Cheney received from him a legal indulgence for any conceivable transgression, on the theory that after the bombings of September 2001, anything that public servants did was a hasty but honourable response to a dreadful emergency by well-meaning persons. To Obama at the time, this must have seemed a magnanimous deed as well as a signal of non-aggression to tamp down the savagery of the Cheney circle. Yet his decision to make justice begin today achieved a different end. It made sure that none of the people from whom Obama had most to fear would ever fear him. It also robbed of reality all his talk of a profound commitment to justice – a justice which he had suggested went beyond considerations of bridge-building for the sake of domestic policy or national expedience. By broadening the claim of state secrets to prevent the disclosure of evidence of torture and extraordinary rendition, the Obama administration has lent credence to the original claim of Bush and Cheney that their actions were dictated by necessities of state. In doing so it has foregone the only assurance the law affords against the repetition of such acts.

I believe that in a way Obama gave himself very little choice but to support the statu quo ante when he became president because of the fact that he ran as the change candidate and that he never had it in him to die, politically that is, for what he ran on, which I don't think is what he believes.  To become Potus, Obama made himself more exotic than he really is, but because he is a great politician and a typical American, he realized that Americans only really likes the appearance and the symbols of change. Those symbols give American the complaisant impression that they don't have to pay and to work hard to improve/change their country.  In short, because Obama was never different than the people he riled against, he was always going to govern as most of presidents did before him by doing everything not to rock the boat and not appear to un-Americanize America by governing as the Change President.

It is sad to admit but out of all of the credible people who ran for president in 2008, the one who was always going to be the least able to 'change' America was Barack Obama. That fact is ironically one of the reasons he won because people thought that he was change.

Western disaggregation

Sugary excerpt of the morning is from Professor Kenneth Anderson:

I continue to find mystifying the Western academic international law world’s infatuation with the ideals of the diminishing importance of states and membership in states.  Particularly when that mostly seems to refer not to a universal aspiration, but only to the inability of the leading Western-states-in-decline to persuade themselves to exercise the coherence that makes states socially useful - and that largely through the cultural and class predilections of the political classes of those societies.  When are we going to see proper analytic attention to the Globalized New Class as a phenomenon?  In any event, the rising new powers understand that states are about coherence, and that the constant struggle of most states, most of the time, is to remain coherent and prevent “disaggregation” of the state into internal groups of power and “public choice” struggles for primacy and the resources of politics to economic ends.

Disaggregation is attractive to many Western intellectuals, I’d suggest, however, because our species-being, so to speak, has gradually come to be purely contractual free agency.  We gave up on any kind of “fiduciary professional” model of the intellectual when we discovered that we could leverage our knowledge skills, at least until China and India caught up, across a needy global economy.  It required freeing ourselves from the strictures of local communities; but the opportunities for globally marketizing our professional expertise being very large, we have moved a long, long way from RH Tawney’s post-war British model of the professional as community leader through expertise.

I'm flustered by Professor Anderson's use of the terms "West" and "Western" for I have no idea what he means or rather I don't think that the assumptions that he makes in using those terms are relevant or even justified. That said, Professor Anderson is simply dancing around the central issue, which is as Jean-François Bayart would that the State is the product of Globalization and neither its victim or nor its enemy combatant. The issue never really is whether the State matters, but rather what it can do and ought to do. Incoherence always occurs when there is an understandable and I would argue an useful disharmony between two.

Gitmo and Obama forever

The quote of the day is from Glenn Greenwald:

Guantanamo -- the closing of which was one of Obama's central campaign promises -- will still be open as of 2013, by which point many of the detainees will have been imprisoned for more than a decade without charges of any kind and without any real prospect for either due process or release, at least four of those years under a President who was elected on a commitment to close that camp and restore the rule of law. None of this is news to anyone even casually watching what's been going on, but there are several aspects of this article which are so noteworthy for illustrating how this administration works.  Let's begin with this:  Obama officials -- cowardly hiding behind anonymity as usual -- raise the typical excuse which they and their defenders perpetually invoke for their "failures" to fulfill their campaign positions:  it's all Congress' fault ("They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame," Savage writes)

Drones, paradigms and international law

The sugary excerpt of  the day is from Kenneth Anderson on the implications of what one views of the Obama administration's decision to use drones as essential weapons to fight its war on terror:

If you talk about international crimes being committed by the CIA, each and every time it carries out a strike, those are words with consequences. It is hard to talk about merely “correcting” state practices to conform to international law in some general sense of the government of the United States, when the paradigm is that there are individuals who under principles of international criminal law, should not be undertaking a course correction by the administration. If that’s what you mean — and, please to observe, I don’t think this is the case at all — but if that’s what you mean, well, It should be indictment, arrest, and prosecution. For murder and extrajudicial execution and assassination. That’s what you mean if you invoke about international crimes; the whole paradigm is designed, by its nature, to reach to individuals and not simply “sides” in international law and politics

The war on terror and its pervasive effects on gender

Quote of the morning from Gita Sahgal:

Torture was seen as something that primarily applies to men and not to the more routine ways in which women experience harm. Thus, the 'war on terror' has had a very profound effect on women’s rights. Yet there is really very little analysis of what has happened. So much commentary has concentrated simply on what Bush or Blair said about women’s rights at one time or another to further their own instrumental agenda, that we have simply ignored the areas where advances in women’s rights have been undermined - either because of a fundamentalist backlash to enforce what they consider their cultural and religious rights, or by human rights professionals who, as they see it, are trying to protect the purity of the human rights framework.

Setting a bad example on how to fight terrorism

Essential questions from Robert Wright on the assassination of suspected terrorists and drone policies of the Obama adminsitration:

If Harold Koh — the state department lawyer assigned the job of justifying Obama’s strategy — carries the day, America will be telling the world that it’s O.K. to lob missiles into countries that haven’t attacked you, as long as you think a terrorist may live there. Do we really want to send that message to, for example, Russia and China, both of which have terrorism problems? Or India or Pakistan?
And are we sure we want to say that, actually, due process of law isn’t really guaranteed all American citizens so long as there’s a war on terrorism — which, remember, is a war that may continue for eternity?

The answer to Wright's questions is of course no. That doesn't matter because the US or rather the Obama administration has found what it believes to be a cheap and effective way to fight terrorism everywhere. It is going to keep using it until the blowback.

Kill not to detain

Sugary excerpt of the day from Asim Qureshi lamenting that the Obama doctrine in the war on terror is more deadly than Bush doctrine since it is choosing to kill even US citizens suspected of terrorism rather to detain them:

The US would like us to believe that we should simply trust that they have the relevant evidence and information to justify such a killing, without bringing the individual to account before a court.
The assumption that trust should be extended to a government that has involved itself in innumerable unlawful and unconscionable practices since the start of the war on terror is too much to ask. Whatever goodwill the US government had after 9/11 was destroyed by the way in which it prosecuted its wars. Further, the hope that came with the election of Barack Obama has faded as his policies have indicated nothing more than a reconfiguration of the basic tenet of the Bush Doctrine – that the US's national security interests supersede any consideration of due process or the rule of law. The only difference – witness the rising civilian body count from drone attacks – being that Obama's doctrine is even more deadly.

Pakistan, Drone attacks, and the Obama administration

For more on the use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere by the Obama administration and its implications, read Professor Anderson's excellent article on the subject, Predators over Pakistan. Harold Koh gave a speech defending the Obama administration and its positions on international law. Kevin Heller offers a convincing rebuttal to Koh's arguments.

Humanitarian interventionism and maturity

Conclusion of Mark Mazower's must-read essay on humanitarian interventionism and its decline::

(...) the ending of the era of humanitarian interventionism may come to be seen as a sign of the waning of Western power, and mourned as consigning more of the world’s peoples to the mercies of the tyrants who rule them. But it is possible to view it more positively, as the belated emergence of a new maturity in international relations.

I would like to see that the fact that  humanitarian interventionism is less popular than it used to be as a sign of maturity. However, I'm convinced that it is the consequence of the slow and painful realization the people who have  to be saved/reed, more often than not, have a strong dislike for any kind of lasting intervention (which is required in most cases to be successful), within their own affairs.  They resent it and end up resisting it violently or in others ways because they perceived it as a form of imperialism and of recolonization, which are still  the most evil of ills in most parts of the world.  To say differently, Le devoir d’ingérence, the duty to intervene to help has become stop to be viewed as humanitarian to be viewed as both paternalistic and symptomatic of a complex of superiority of the interventionists. Salvation doesn't work when the ones supposed to be saved are suspicious of their purported saviors.

Killing all lawyers

Quote of the morning from Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represented Gitmo detainees: 

(...) as the years went by, the right did learn one thing useful about Guantanamo detainees. The public can’t distinguish one from another. If imprisoned endlessly, the detainees will furnish an endless source of scaremongering — that rich mulch in which votes will grow.
And so Cheney and Grassley beaver away to Keep America Scared. Some Americans will see the rule of law as a threat, and lawyers as the enemy. Small men with loud voices will exploit their fears on cable television. Petty politicians will mine them for votes. It’s been this way since Shakespeare’s famous policymaker Dick the Butcher said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’’

Authorizing torture

I agree with David Cole on this:

Responsibility for the illegal brutality inflicted on CIA and Guantánamo detainees cannot be limited to Yoo and Bybee. It extends to all those who approved the tactics—even those so eager later to condemn Yoo’s reasoning. And unless we as citizens demand that these lawyers be held to answer for the wrongs done in our name, responsibility extends to all of us, too. We must continue to insist on accountability—whether in congressional hearings, citizens’ commissions, civil lawsuits, or the marketplace of ideas. The essential lesson must be that torture and cruel treatment are not policy options—even when a lawyer is willing to write an opinion blessing illegality.

It is too easy to put the blame on Lawyers and to ignore the ones who approve the opinions by framing the issue in such a way that they got the advice that they wanted to receive and that gave them so political covers. As much as I dislike John Yoo's lawyering, I recognize that he was the tool of an administration who needed ideological lawyers to justify a serious break with international law in order to avoid having another 9/11 on their watch. After all, the fact that the Obama administration is still unable to break completely with the Yoo-Cheney tactics to fight 'the war on terror', tells us all we need to know about where one should look to ask for some accountability.

The Burqa and the 'emancipation' of women

I agree with Thomas Hammarberg on this:

Prohibition of the burqa and the niqab would not liberate oppressed women, but might instead lead to their further alienation in European societies. A general ban on such attire would be an ill-advised invasion of individual privacy. Depending on its precise terms, a prohibition also raises serious questions about whether such legislation would be compatible with the European convention on human rights.

I do think that the debate is that simple. Do women have the right to make all the choices available to everybody else even if it means that some view that choice as an affirmation of inferiority or simply submission? I'm yet to hear a single convincing argument that would justify it is something other than  'benevolent' and self-satisfying paternalism to argue that women can never freely make the choice to wear a piece of clothing especially if it is agreed that a woman is never defined by her body

Cynicism and the political instrumentalization of 'genocide'

I agree with Joshua Keating's conclusion to his post on the political intrumentalization of the Armenian genocide by American politicians:

All in all, the level of cynicism in Washington around this tragic historical event  is pretty disheartening. Like President Bush before him, President Obama was for using the word "genocide" as a candidate before he was against it as president. Former House Majority leader Dick Gephart, who supported recognition as a congressman, is now lobbying against it on the Turkish payroll.
Outside the Armenian-American community, whose grievance on this issue is understandable and shouldn't be dismissed, most Americans would probably prefer that the congress focus its efforts on preventing and ending current conflicts.

France passed a law recognizing the Armenian genocide in 2006 and it just gave politicians an occasion to grandstand or to argue that Turkey didn't have its place within the European Union for it was made much news since or has no impact neither in France or in Europe on the important questions. The argument is that genocide should be something politicians play football will and that only historians ought to write history.

Agathe Habyarimana, dirty hands, and responsibility

Philip Gourevicth on the arrest of the former first lady of Rwanda, Agathe Habyarimana and what it says about the new and improved relation between France and Rwanda

French statesmen are not in the habit of travelling to small African countries that they used to run as puppet regimes to eat fistfuls of crow. But that is precisely what Sarkozy did last week when he stood beside Kagame in Kigali and declared that France had made mistakes during the genocide, and had to reckon with them. Afterwards, commentators made much of the fact that Sarkozy had not issued a full apology. But in a country whose history is still bloodily contested, Sarkozy’s frank acknowledgment of the truth of his former antagonist’s reality sent an unmistakable message. Without France’s cover, the pretense that Rwanda’s genocide is an open question is stripped barer than ever. With this morning’s arrest, we can see that France’s change of attitude toward Rwanda was at least partly influenced by the facts presented in the case against Madame Habyarimana. In November of last year, a pair of French judges went to Kigali to study the evidence assembled by Rwanda’s Genocide Fugitives Tracking Unit. Meanwhile the French case against Kagame’s coterie appeared to be crumbling. Whether France will extradite Madame Agathe to Rwanda remains to be seen. She has already been released on bail. But such is the warm mood between the two governments that Rwanda’s prosecutor general, Martin Ngoga, declared today that he had every confidence in the French judiciary—a statement that was simply unimaginable from a Rwandan official six months ago.

I don't think that Madame Agathe will ever be extradited to Kigali. She is one of the few remaining relics of a stubborn an still alive past and she is the symbol of what used to the French Rwandan policy. Extraditing her is a risk that France cannot afford to take because it would force it to consider the responsibility of its own politicians and government officials. To me, the key question remains how far Kagame  is willing to go to prosecute of the members of the Habyarimana regime and those who played a role in the genocide and more importantly what price he is willing to pay to have them judged by a court of law. I may be wrong and it is surely too easy to say what I'm about to say far away from the situation, but I believe that an inflexible obsession with punishing all of those who have dirty hands as Sartre would say may hinder reconciliation for it is clear that the genocide happened because the majority of the population got their hands dirty or did nothing while people were being viciously slaughtered like animals. Thus, in short, the central issue is what does a country do when it becomes obvious that almost all of its citizens bear some responsible for the darkest hours of its history, what level of responsibility becomes forgivable or at the very least tolerable to move it forward?

Troubling American contradictions

I agree with David P. Forsythe on this:

The American penchant for at least the rhetoric of freedom and democracy morphed into the modern human rights movement after World War II under the leadership of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. During the Cold War U.S. alignment with brutal authoritarians like Mobutu in Zaire, or the overthrow of even elected governments, as in Chile in 1973, or the supervision of torture in Latin America never destroyed the dream of America as moral beacon. In public we accepted the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture. In the shadows we played the game about as tough as anyone else.
9/11 accentuated this duality, perhaps schizophrenia. George W. Bush said al-Qaeda hated us for who we were, our personal freedoms in thought, including religious thought, and our gender-blind democracy. They hated us because we rejected their deferential and patriarchal theocracy. But in secret we engaged in forced disappearances, torture, cruelties arguably just below that level of abuse, denial of reasonable dues process in places like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, and military brigs in South Carolina. In defense of our moral greatness we engaged in policies that undercut that greatness. As Winston Churchill paradoxically noted in World War II, truth was so important it had to be defended with a  bodyguard of lies. So for us after 9/11, the rule of law and personal rights were so important they had to be defended by secret detention and torture.

What is troubling me more than anything is that Bushism is winning by default, without any attempt by Obama to offer an alternative that doesn't involve solely giving a speech, changing the facade while performing the same acts. It was because for this reason, because I sense within Obama, a reluctance to be bold when it comes to policy not campaigning that I had couldn't force myself to get behind Obama during the election. I  have always believed that because Obama was thought to embody change, to epitomize it because he was part black,  that he was going to have no incentive, no effective pressure to change America for the better.

Exceptionalism and Solitude

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

The U.S. -- first under the Bush administration and now, increasingly, under Obama -- is more and more alone in its cowardly insistence that special, new tribunals must be invented, or denied entirely, for those whom it wishes to imprison as Terrorists (...) . 

I guess Obama really does believe in American exceptionalism after all. I just have the feeling that clashes are inevitable for how long can a president grandstand about being far superior than his predecessor while imitating him? May be the answer is forever for it is starting to occur to me that Obama might actually be the son of God.

The Others

No comment necessary to discuss this "it is US against Them" mindset illustrated by Marty Peretz's comments except a brief one to wonder about its policy implications and its usefulness, well maybe those are just foolish/wimpish considerations:

Why are so many liberal Democrats reluctant to concede that there is an intricate international network of ideological gangsters who recognize each other as ikhwan? These brothers do not define themselves by nation. They define themselves by religion, although there are many hundreds of millions of Muslims who are defined out--and define themselves out--of the bloody fraternity of the faithful. Sometimes, they too are stigmatized as enemies, which means they are also targets. And, of course, there are the boundaries of sect, in which Sunnis commit mass murder of Shi’a at prayer (and vice versa).
Then there are the other designated victims: outsiders … us. Not just Westerners and certainly not just Americans. Or Jews, for that matter, although they have a very special place in the demonology of Islam, and particularly in the armed demonology of Islam. Jihad.

Torture and other niceties

I agree fully with Adrian Hamilton on this: 

Torture isn't a matter of niceties. You can argue the circumstances in which you might feel it useful or even necessary. You can try and épater le bien-pensant by writing "A Modest Proposal for Preventing Poor People in Britain from Being Endangered by Torturing Their Children and Their Mothers", only without Jonathan Swift's wit or intention to satirise.
You can sincerely believe it right to cripple the grannies and dismember the family pets in what you conceive of the greater community good. What you cannot do, as the Government is trying to, is get around the fact that Britain, along with most of the developed world, has decided to ban the practice.
And for good reason. After centuries of abuse, torture has been found to be neither productive nor containable. It rarely provides accurate intelligence. It produces fantasy and misleading information born out of the desperation of the victim. For all the discussion of the "ticking time bomb" and the films of Dirty Harry and Spooks, there is no reported case where an explosion has been prevented because of the use of torture.
What its proponents never like to answer is the question of just who would decide who should be tortured. The answer, of course, is the "state". And once you add that to the equation you are on a straight line to General Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and all those other characters whom successive British governments were wont to support in their heyday.

Bush isn't dead, he lives in Obama

Unsurprisingly, I agree with John B. Bellinger III  (hat tip: Julian Ku) when he makes the following point:

President Obama may be able to do more to translate his words into action with respect to international law and institutions in his second year in office. But given the continuing threat of terrorism against the United States and election-year politics, we should not expect dramatic shifts in U.S. policy. When it comes to international law, the international community may find that there will be more continuity than change between the Bush administration’s pragmatic second term and the Obama administration.

I'm starting to believe that the problem has never really being Bush (on the issue of international law), but rather that for too many American policy makers international law doesn't matter unless it serves uniquely American interests and that it can be superseded when it doesn't. It is neither a controversial nor an illegitimate point of view to have, but the trouble comes when the world becomes more interdependent and that it becomes necessary to have less American-centric arguments to defend international actions. The problem with the Obama administration now is the same as it was with the Bush administration: it believes neither in the relevance nor in the universality of International law, which in its eyes is solely the weapon of those fighting evil to humble/crush their enemies.

Legalism and the definition of just wars

Brendan O'Neill has a thought provoking article on Elizabeth Wilmshurst and her arguments for the illegality of the Iraq war:

There are three irritating things about this strictly legalistic opposition to the attack on Iraq. First, it is delusional. It is based on the massive self-deception that international law and its brave defenders and practitioners – lawyers – kept the world in tip-top shape until that cowboy George W Bush and his heel-snapping poodle Tony Blair came along and ruined everything.
(...) The second irritating thing about the legalistic opposition to the war in Iraq is that it is deeply dishonest, duplicitous even. Many of those who moan about the illegality of Iraq were fervent supporters of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Yet that futile and fatal intervention also did not win the support of the UN Security Council, and thus was ‘illegal’. A Guardian writer penned the 10 Days to War drama, and the Guardian has been singing the praises of Wilmshurst’s performance at Chilcot over the past week. This is the same Guardian which in 1999 slated those who said Bill Clinton and Tony Blair should wait for UN backing before bombing Yugoslavia. The UN is not ‘the only legitimate law-giver’, the Guardian insisted. Indeed, the UN constitution is a ‘recipe for inaction’, and ‘its imprimatur cannot be the sole trigger for international action to right an obvious wrong’.
The third and most irritating thing is that the legalistic-not-political critique of war (well, of certain wars) is inhumane. Judgements about military interventions are made, not from the basis of what is good for humanity, or from any analysis of what terrible consequences the war might have for those on the receiving end and for international peace more broadly, but rather from the lawyerly approach of making sure that all the boxes are ticked and all the right procedures were followed. Legal niceties are elevated over people’s lives, over questions of democracy, sovereignty, stability, equality.

I agree with O'Neill on his main point that the law isn't the main tool to define just or rather unjust wars, that other factors have to be taken into considerations, and those who fail to at least, accept that the complexity of the concept of "just war" are ideologues and hypocrites. I think that even if the Iraq war could have been justified (my feeling is that it couldn't have been, but I'm willing to consider the possibility that I'm wrong) under the international law principles established by Wilmshurst and others, it would have still been an unjust and I'm making this statement, of course, with the help of hindsight. The main reason is that it was both unwinnable,  unnecessary, and too expensive since its most touted accomplishment is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. International Law is a tool among many other indispensable to determine the justifiability of a war. If the French without the backing of the UN had intervened and had stopped the genocide, what would be the argument of legal scholars today who wouldn't have a crystal ball to know that that unlawful intervention had stopped the dead of hundred of thousands innocent people. The point is that even as a lawyer, I'm forced to accept the despairing realities that laws are minimal, but essential tools to address grave societal problems and that more often than not it doesn't provide an acceptable solution to issues, which politicians and the people should have the guts to confront directly.

An hooray for internationalism

More theories on why Obama got the Nobel from Roger Alford :

Obama’s approach—particularly when juxtaposed with the Bush Administration—reflects a return to a spirit of internationalism that has been a hallmark of the United States for much of its history and that has always featured prominently in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. Again, on this theory it’s not about Obama, but what he represents as one who is committed to internationalism.

What an idean ! So it is acceptable now to argue that what people symbolize is more important than what they do ! That kind of thinking scares the hell out of me because it can only lead to disaster for symbolism only works in poetry.

International justice, politics, and money

Rob Lyons on the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the sole convicted culprit of the Lockerbie bombing, international justice, and politics :

(...) from a political point of view, the release of al-Megrahi in this way seems the best option. The US and UK governments avoid any awkward revelations at an appeal hearing. The Scottish government gets to assert itself as an independent force in world politics, even though it has no foreign policy authority as such, while appearing to be principled and humane. The Libyan government is presenting the release of al-Megrahi as a diplomatic triumph, as yesterday’s welcome party for him shows.
The driving force behind every episode in this case has been the interests of governments, particularly the major Western powers, not the lives of the people unfortunate enough to get caught up in their machinations. Sadly, justice has got nothing to do with it.

I'm only wondering whether al-Megrahi would have been released if Libya was still viewed as a sponsor of international terrorism and if it wasn't an oil-rich nation. I don't think he would have no matter how sick he was.Unfortunately, the lesson of this case is that la raison d'état always prevails over much everything else especially when economical interests are at stake. It is hard not to be impressed over the way Qadaffi has been able to buy himself a new image.What does it say about our world if it is possible to buy respectability without ever fulling atoning or even acknowledging the mistakes of the past?

Matters of convenience and justice

Ian Bell has an article in the Sunday Herald on International justice and its contractions, which is worth reading. It asks questions about the International Criminal Court (ICC) for which I’m afraid there are no good answers. I believe that the trouble with international justice is that it is neither truly international nor truly justice that it seeks to administer justice since it takes too many other extra-legal factors into consideration. It deals solely with people against whom there is an almost surmountable presumption not only of guilt, but also of inhumanity. This presumption is always stronger with people who lost power or come from countries with no influence, which explains why international justice solely deals with losers and people of a particular nationality. Sugary excerpt:

It started, in effect, at Nuremburg, of course. Certain hazy concepts were brought into focus. The idea that crimes could be committed against humanity itself began to gain ground. Yet read any of the Nuremburg transcripts and you will find nothing resembling a fair trial. That was never the purpose of the exercise, not with Stalin's prosecutors weighing in, with no sense of irony.

No one cared, or cares: the accused were Nazis. They got better, in terms of a hearing, than they deserved. Should we then conclude that the Allies committed not a single war crime? Dresden might have made for an interesting trial. Do we then decide that the Soviets were spotless? The raped and tortured women of Berlin, in their tens of thousands, might have stood as witnesses.

None of this is meant to excuse the Nazis, or Karadzic, or al-Bashir, or any of the rest of a sick company. Of course not. No- one ever stood trial, anywhere, for the 1915 Armenian genocide, and to this day the Turks refuse to say an honest word about their nation's killing of 1.5 million people. But victors' justice and victors' guilt are often not so very different. Many Serbs believe the ICC is a plot against their nation. Many Africans believe their continent is picked on. They would, wouldn't they?

[…] KARADZIC's lawyer will waste his time if he attempts any of this sort of stuff, of course. Men such as his client understand political realities. Besides, they rarely have useful alibis. It is simplistic, nevertheless, just to celebrate the bringing of a known, shameless killer to justice. Karadzic, like Saddam before him, probably concludes that his only real mistake was to lose. Had he been smart or lucky, like an al-Bashir or a Mugabe, he could have told international jurists where to stick their international justice.

Cold facts?

Via Spiked, Tara McCormack on “Liberal Interventionism”:

It seems that liberal interventionists will not learn any lessons from recent disastrous interventions. The next intervention will always be ‘the one’, the great and pure and successful example that will finally prove the moral superiority of crusading Western elites and rehabilitate the idea of humanitarian intervention. Frankly, it appears that they do not care how much blood is spilt or how many lives lost in the process. All that is needed is for the UN or the ICC to intervene in the right way and all will be resolved.

For advocates of the ICC [International Criminal Court], its establishment has heralded a victory for the powerless victims of state oppression, ushering in an era in which human rights and justice will reign and in which states will be held accountable on behalf of their citizens. The reality is that the citizens of weak and fragile states are further disempowered in this brave new world as the international community intervenes with impunity in the name of human rights and international law.

If only it were that simple, the reason why “liberal interventionism” is still in vogue is that there is nothing else exists to take its place to help the elites and other get rid of the guilt of not intervening especially when a tragedy is occurring which can be hollywoodize and thus leads to a popular call for action.

The failures of international justice

The best article I read last weekend was Stephanie Nolen’s article in the Globe and Mail on the failures of international justice in Africa. It’s an enlightening read because it shows the importance of context, which can when it is not understood, undermine noble endeavors. Sugary excerpt:

After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the international community, which had stood by and watched as 800,000 people were hacked to death in 90 days, stepped forward and offered up a United Nations criminal tribunal for the alleged perpetrators, housed in a vast, air-conditioned building, all blond wood and high-tech gizmos. Twelve years and an estimated $1.2-billion later, it has obtained 25 convictions.

The Rwandan tribunal established some important precedents: For the first time, rapists were found guilty of a war crime; suspects were arrested abroad and returned to Africa to face trial; members of the clergy were convicted for any roles they had played.

But almost from the start, it was also clear that the tribunal would be considered a failure — or, at best, not considered at all — by those most affected: Rwandans. The court sits two days' drive away in Tanzania; for the first seven years, it neither made its judgments available in Kinyarwandan, the language of Rwandans, nor did any outreach with them. It was achingly slow and outrageously expensive and few Rwandans polled saw it as justice for what was done.

[…] In Africa, critics are more common: They accuse the ICC and other international-justice initiatives of derailing prospects for peace in some of the more intractable conflicts, deepening the gulf between states such as Sudan and the West, and being highly political and subject to a Western agenda. Perhaps most gravely, they say, the courts have done little or nothing at all for victims.

"I'm not putting a price tag on justice, but whose justice is this?" asks John Caulker, who heads an organization called the Forum for Conscience in Freetown. "In whose interest do we have the ICC? I should not be saying this, as a human-rights advocate, but when I put on my Sierra Leonean hat, I have to ask: Is this justice to please the international community or to meet the needs of ordinary Sierra Leoneans?"

It is almost impossible for international justice to exist when administered in a context where the officers of the court cannot relate to the accused and the victims and where the rules and the laws used is too vastly different from the local ones. The point isn’t that international justice is an utopia or a form of western paternalism in Africa, but rather that the principle that is so valuable in the American justice system “judged by a jury of one’s peers” is capital to its success. When that principle is forgotten the judgments, which international tribunals render may be just in the sense that they punish people who have committed atrocities, but also unfair because too much emphasis is on punishment that it leads to the subversion of principles on which international justice itself is grounded. Thus, the problem isn’t so much in creating an international justice system, which functions in Africa and elsewhere, but in creating one which is able to take into consideration the culture and the context. The most vicious African war criminals need to be able to mount an effective defense without successfully putting the legitimacy of the process to trial.

Fighting the lords of war

Tony Judt argues in an article in the New York Review of Books that one of the reasons why America has become increasingly willing to use force and is willing to use torture in this century is because it has never learned some of the most important lessons of the twenty-first century and has forgotten the ones that it did learn:

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. […] I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

[…] Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy. […] We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them" —are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

Judt offers only part of an explanation because it doesn’t answer why a few European lefties such as Bernard Kouchner and André Glucksmann, who know as much about the twentieth century as Judt have become willing to fight wars or rather to intervene to use Benedict XVI language in countries in the name of human rights and for humanitarian reasons. My own explanation to this puzzling turn of history is that to these humanists the most important lesson of the twentieth century is that war is preferable to injustice, to genocide because it prevents them or at least stops them from becoming bigger crimes, crimes against humanity. To them, the use of force and other methods, objectionable most of the twentieth century, has become like the use of an amputation of a body part to prevent the spread of cancer throughout one’s body. Their argument is that war is an evil, which can become a good even if it not used as the last resort as long as its objectives are noble. Thus, the goodness of war depends not on whether it is an effective method to achieve a goal or whether everything was done to prevent it, but rather on its objectives. One of the problems with history is that it isn’t a thing in itself since people must interpret it and do so with the help of their own experience and biases.  One of the troubles with the beginning of this century is precisely the fact that people have sacralized, objectifies, and politicized history in attempts to justify both follies and the unjustifiable.

Genocide denial

Arundhati Roy on Genocide denial:

Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining, that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation than to the United Nations.

The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military might.
In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur.

Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take.

The past, the present, the future

This video is an excerpt from The Remains of the Day, the film based on the superb novel of Kazuo Ishiguro. In this excerpt, different European and American dignitaries are at a conference organized by a British Nazi sympathizer, Lord Darlington, whose ambitious goal is to avoid a second war with Germany. They all end it by making a toast saying that Germany wants peace and is a Friend not a foe, until the American dignitary, Mr Farraday played by the late Christopher Reeves, stands up and calls them all of amateurs who don't know anything about foreign policy. I think that it is a toast that could be made today even though I wonder whether Amateurism hasn't become the norm in the diplomatic arena.

Humanitarianism, war, and torture

John Laughland has the best article has read so far this morning on Comment is Free. He makes the point that it isn’t surprising that those who believe in “Humanitarian wars” also believe in torture:

Torture and "humanitarian war" are similar in many ways. Both involve the inflicting of violence in order to force a change of behaviour. Both are predicated on the assumption of guilt: torture is justified because the victim is said to be a terrorist, or an "illegal combatant" who has committed or is about to commit a terrible crime, while pre-emptive war is justified because a state is said to be "a rogue state" violating international law (Iraq) or committing crimes against humanity (Yugoslavia). It is therefore no coincidence that the US administration that justifies its wars in the name of claims about humanity and its right to liberty also advocates the use of torture to protect these.

I wish that I could argue forcefully that Laughland is wrong, but he is on to something even though things may not be as simple as he seems to believe that they are. I think that the term “Humanitarianism” has undergone a worrisome evolution that makes it possible for too many people with good intentions to justify the unjustifiable. However, experience has shown that good intentions can lead to catastrophes. The point is that I fear that increasingly the most important thing in the debates on torture and on the concept of just war, which are similar as Laughland shows, is the end; the means don’t matter as long as they lead to what it perceives to be a just end. In other words, the “modern” world has gone backwards since it has realized that its survival was at stake, the simplistic principle of the end justifies the means, whose dangers and contradictions was proven by Camus and others, has not only regained its prevalence, but it is at the center of our lives.

Politics and genocide

I find this article on the politics of Genocide (What a terrible expression) alarming because it shows how polarizing history becomes when it is placed in the hands of politicians who even with the best interests in mind can only do harm. Sugary excerpt:

Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the interest of governments in convening scholars to explore questions of scholarship. But in this case, scholars who study the period say that the leaders of Turkey and the United States — along with that handful of scholars — are engaged in a profoundly anti-historical mission: trying to pretend that the Armenian genocide remains a matter of debate instead of being a long settled question. Much of the public discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused on geopolitics: If the full House passes the resolution, will Turkey end its help for U.S. military activities in Iraq?

But there are also some questions about the role of history and historians in the debate. To those scholars of the period who accept the widely held view that a genocide did take place, it’s a matter of some frustration that top government officials suggest that these matters are open for debate and that this effort is wrapped around a value espoused by most historians: free and open debate.

“Ultimately this is politics, not scholarship,” said Simon Payaslian, who holds an endowed chair in Armenian history and literature at Boston University. Turkey’s strategy, which for the first 60-70 years after the mass slaughter was to pretend that it didn’t take place, “has become far more sophisticated than before” and is explicitly appealing to academic values, he said.

The fact that politicians are “messing” with genocide worries me for two simple reasons. The first one is that it politicizes history by making the norm for politicians to write or rewrite history or even to simply create it. This isn’t the case with the Armenian genocide, but I think that the involvement of the US Congress and of the French parliament last year is counterproductive because it takes the focus away from historical events to put it on present events, which in turn diminishes what I believe is a sacred issue. The second reason why the politicization of genocide worries is that I’m afraid that it sets both a terrible precedent and a terrible example. What will the United States say if a country such as Iran for example writes a law to say that the US was guilty of genocide against Native Americans? What will the French say if, no when, an African country parliament writes a law that states that France was guilty of crimes against humanity and of genocide because it once was a colonial power? The point is a pandora box has been opened because politicians forgot that it is better to do nothing than to do something that will have dangerous consequences and that some things are just above politics.

Lobbying and ethnicity

Gideon Rachman had a great post at the end of last week on his blog on ethnic lobbying in America. He talks about the influence that the Armenian lobby had on the attempt of the US Congress to vote a text recognizing the Armenian genocide. Last year, the French parliament did the same thing and I condemned it like I am condemning the American Congress's foolish attempt for the same unique and simple reason: I don’t think politicians need to write history and I think that allowing them to do so even when the cause is noble sets a dangerous precedent. However, to comeback on ethnic lobbying, I think that the bigger issue beside the one of their influence on American foreign policy is whether the method is right. In other words, can we really say than ethnic lobbying does more harm than god and more importantly, should we excuse bad policy decision by blaming lobbies for after all, isn’t the role of a politician to make decisions that are the best interest of the governed and can’t s/he blame ethnic lobbying when failing to do so. What should we think of a political class who cannot resist ethnic lobbying when it advocates policies, which aren’t in the best interest of its country?

The meaning of the debate on torture

Bret Stephens makes the disturbing and alas increasingly popular point that it is dangerous to define torture down because it makes it difficult to fight efficiently terrorism:

But by maintaining the "distinction between 'torture' and 'inhuman or degrading treatment,' " the court sought to preserve the "special stigma [attached] to deliberate inhuman treatment causing very serious and cruel suffering."

These distinctions are not "legal sophistries," as the Times would have it. They are a juridical necessity to ensure that our definition of torture does not become so diluted as to render its prohibition unenforceable. But the abuse of the word does have its rhetorical uses: As with the militant anti-abortion movement, which believes that every abortion is murder and thus that every abortionist is a "murderer," the Times editorialists and their fellow travelers would characterize anyone who favors so much as touching a hair on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's head as "pro-torture." This isn't argument. It's moral bullying.

For the record, count me as one who does not object to the interrogation to which KSM was reportedly subjected, including waterboarding. This is not because I take the use of waterboarding lightly (although I have a hard time concluding that a technique, however terrifying, to which CIA officers are willing to subject themselves experimentally can properly be counted as torture). It's because I take the threat posed by KSM seriously.

That makes it difficult for me to subscribe to the "So be it" line of reasoning. Taken seriously, it says that the civilized world would be better off sustaining a nuclear 9/11 than tarnishing its good name, that righteous victimhood is a finer thing than an innocent life saved through morally compromised methods, and that self-preservation is not the most fundamental requirement of democratic life.

H.D.S. Greenway answers Stephen’s points by focusing on the effectiveness of torture and the image of the United States:

The trouble with torture is that a prisoner will say anything he thinks you may want to hear. Take Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. After being severely tortured he has confessed to such a wide-ranging number of crimes as to be unbelievable.

The long-range problem with the Bush administration's efforts to subvert national and international bans on torture is that it hurts us deeply in the struggle against Islamic extremism. It revolts the conscience of the world, which makes it harder for the West to convince Muslims that we are not the enemy of Islam. It encourages converts to Al Qaeda. It stays the hand of moderate Muslims who may otherwise want to cooperate with us. It undermines our international standing and our national security.

The fact that there is a debate on the United States about the use of torture worries me for two reasons. The first reason is that if in a country as great and as influential as the United States it is possible to argue for the use of torture then it becomes justifiable in the rest of the world. No matter what the anti-Americans, the Isolationists, or the patriots with a superiority complex toward the world say, the United States does leads by example and the standards that it sets has repercussions around the globe because it frames the debate. I am afraid this debate has pushed the world backwards because the fact that torture may be morally acceptable has entered not only the American, but the world consciousness since the  emphasis is not on the means and values, but on survival and security. The second reason why the debate on torture worries me is that it is a strike against the enduring American principle that the United States is a country of laws and not of men human being. The “24” mindset that wants to make torture or torturous tactics just means of survival and of fighting terrorism ignores the fact that Jack Bauer’s world is limited and even sterilized for it simplifies the debate by making it about us versus them, life or them, good versus evil. The point is that Jack Bauer, no matter how compelling and how efficient of terrorist fighter he is, is an island that is a man without history, without past, and without traditions. The United States cannot escape its history, its past, and its traditions to focus on its survival because it was founded precisely on principles contrary to survival. After all, if the founders had been so worry about survival, they would have remained loyal to England for they would have believed that there was no way that simple men could defeat the British army. The point is that America, the American life isn’t about surviving, it is about thriving and about perpetually refusing to obey base human  instincts to reach for greatness even when that means living dangerously.

Mitterrand, France, national interest, and Rwanda

Le Monde had an article this morning, which the Independent discusses, which confirms what many suspected to be true: Mitterrand knew about the Rwandan Genocide, but feigned ignorance because it didn’t want to intervene. Sugary excerpt:

Among the evidence to suggest France was informed of the mounting genocide is a diplomatic telegram from October 1990 in which the French defence attaché in the Rwandan capital Kigali alerts Paris of the "growing number of arbitrary arrests of Tutsis or people close to them". The cable adds: "It is to be feared that [it could] degenerate into an ethnic war.''

Another diplomatic memo, sent by French ambassador Georges Martres on 19 January 1993, quotes a Rwandan informant as saying that the president of the country, Juvenal Habyarimana, had suggested "proceeding with a systematic genocide using, if necessary, the army''.

These revelations show something, which Tara McCormack seemed in her article in Spiked not to be able to acknowledge when she argued that Kouchnerism was grandstanding interventionism disconnected from national interest and that is that real politik can lead to disaster because countries will always find it in their best interest not to intervene in messy and bloody affairs such as the Rwandan Genocide.

I doubt that even if Mitterrand had acknowledged that he knew and that massacres were happening in the ground that France would have intervene in a strong and decisive manner to stop the Genocide. What happened later in Côte d’Ivoire, in my opinion, demonstrated how difficult it is for France to play a peacekeeping role in Africa given its history and its deep ties to many parts of the continent. The sad truth is that there wasn’t enough public pressure and public outrage at that time to force actions because people believe that it was just another unavoidable African tragedy, which would had no bearing on the interests of the Western powers. I think that Mitterrand was just a faithful follower of real politik. He didn’t want to intervene because he knew that he was too weak politically to do so. He believed probably that on the contrary to the first Gulf War, he wouldn’t have allies willing to join in and more importantly that intervening meant engaging France in long process, which would never be sealed by a victory. It is sad. It is even shameful. Nevertheless, it is the way the world works and will continue to work as long as atrocities are tolerable. Some human lives are more valuable than others, we only need to look to Darfur to see that this is true.

Getting rid of child labor in a globalized economy

Susan Aaronson argues that there is a solution within the globalized world for child labor. She writes specifically about the globalized chocolate industry and points out the shortcomings of the current sector-specific strategy, which has produced the Cocoa Protocol, can’t “address the economic and cultural factors that perpetuate forced child labor in West Africa.” Sugary excerpt:

[…] the Cocoa Protocol may reduce child labor in one sector, it cannot guarantee that children won’t continue to work in other sectors. Their exploitation will only stop when policymakers in the industrialized and developing world meet their human-rights obligations and enforce the law; when companies take responsibility for their supply chains and develop strategies to ensure that their suppliers don’t rely on forced labor; and finally, when policymakers address the lack of opportunities, power, and education as well as cultural mores that allow individuals to be abused.

Gitmo,war, and image

David rivkin jr. and Lee Casey make an argument for Guantanamo in the Wall Street Journal by reaffiming its necessity to the war on terror. They argues that closing Gitmo wouldn’t appease critics who don’t understand the war and don’t believe in. Sugary excerpt:

Nothing illustrates this better than the continuing challenges to Guantanamo Bay. Even European officials who have visited the American base acknowledge conditions there--including housing, food, medical care and recreation--are better than in most civilian penitentiaries around the world. What most critics really object to is the entire "laws of war paradigm" that has been employed since 9/11 by the Bush administration.

Some claim, incorrectly but passionately, that the U.S. cannot be at war with a non-state like al Qaeda, and that the classification of al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners as "unlawful enemy combatants" violates the Geneva Conventions. Others care less about the legal questions, but assert that Guantanamo and the "war on terror" have done fundamental damage to the U.S. diplomatic position around the world--sullying its reputation, straining its alliances and undercutting its leadership of the international community.

However, Rivkin and Casey don’t address what is one of the essential questions and that is whether Gitmo is accomplishing its objective that is protecting Americans against hardened terrorists. After all, if one doesn’t believe in the power of symbols, then one has whether Gitmo is an efficient tool against terrorism.

Darfur and Iraq : Genocide, civil war and military intervention

Mahmood Mamdani argues in a provocative that there are many similarities between Darfur and Iraq and the only difference is that one conflict is named Genocide and the other a Civil War. Mamdani's argument is that the naming of these deadly conflicts has to do with politics  because genocide is a" label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies." In other words, the US and others are less risk averse when it comes to Iraq and are willing to intervene because the perception is that the civil war can be stopped while they are most risk averse when it comes to Darfur because a genocide is harder to stop and to police. In other words,:

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.