Israel-Palestine: is there a way forward?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is back in the news cycle in the U.S., thanks to Obama's mention of the 1967 lines in his speech and his subsequent meeting with Netanyahu. As Stephen Hadley emphasized on the NewsHour Friday, Obama actually called for negotiated adjustments to the 1967 lines via land swaps, and if he had mentioned the land swaps first, his reference in the speech might not have been interpreted as such a big deal. Speaking later on the same program, David Brooks said that drawing "magic lines on a map" (I believe he used that phrase) would not solve a conflict whose roots are found in competing narratives, competing historical wounds, and so forth.

Brooks's remarks prompt a thought which I'm sure is not original (how many thoughts are?) but which I'm going to throw out anyway. Perhaps it has been a mistake to think in terms of 'solving' or 'resolving' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; perhaps it would be better to think in terms of moving the conflict into a new phase, one that is less unjust, more stable, and more manageable. In this context the establishment of a Palestinian state with agreed-upon borders (or even 90 or 95 percent agreed-upon), and a Palestinian state which both recognizes Israel and is recognized by Israel, would be a major accomplishment, even if the issues of refugees and the status of Jerusalem remain unresolved.

Contrary to what many people seem to suppose, it is really not necessary to resolve all the outstanding issues, or even every last single territorial issue, in order to arrive at a mutually agreed-upon two-state arrangement. India and China still have disagreements about certain aspects of their border; so, I believe, do Greece and Macedonia; so do Thailand and Cambodia. Although the Thai-Cambodia border dispute recently has sparked some shooting and fatalities, most border disputes do not entail much or any violence. Many of them just simmer for years, causing some irritation in diplomatic relations and some inconvenience for those who live in or near the disputed areas, but not much else. There is no reason why Israel and a new Palestinian state have to agree on 100 percent of their border. Particularly difficult areas that can't be taken care of by land swaps can be labeled 'in dispute' and some kind of temporary jurisdictional arrangement can be put in place. Just as India and China disagree about five percent (or whatever the figure is) of their border, so Israel and the new Palestinian state could agree to disagree about five percent of their border. An understanding that there is nothing especially strange about such an outcome, coupled with a shift in thinking from 'resolving' the conflict to moving it into a new and less conflictual phase, might help in any event to restart a 'peace process' that appears to be very stalled at the moment.

P.s. As Jon Western argues, the "strategic time-frame" in the region is not on Israel's side, which should, one would think, be an impetus to re-starting negotiations.

Diehl's unwise prophecy

Jackson Diehl's column in today's Wash. Post ("Abbas's formula for war," p. A19, print edition) is nothing short of bizarre. It's hard to know where to begin with this farrago of weirdness. Diehl appears to think that Abbas's commitment to seek "a U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September" is almost tantamount to a declaration of war. Diehl fastens on Abbas's statement in a recent NYT op-ed that a UN statehood vote would mean "Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another." Let's slowly read the first four words: Palestine. would. be. negotiating. Does that sound like a declaration of war? I didn't think so.

It gets worse. Diehl indicts the U.S. and its European allies for indulging "the soft bigotry of wishful thinking about Arab strongmen" by believing in Abbas's words rather than looking at his deeds. He implicitly compares those deeds to the actions of Syria's Bashar al-Assad. The latter has been shooting his own people in demonstrations around the country. Has Abbas been doing anything comparable? I didn't think so.

Abbas, Diehl concludes, "is trying to transform the Arab Spring into a mass movement against Israel," which "could trigger not just another intifada but another Middle East war." This has the inflammatory ring of a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy. What about the stalemated status quo, with a 'peace process' going nowhere? Doesn't that present dangers? Isn't there a chance that a UN General Assembly vote to admit Palestine, although mostly symbolic, might shake things up in a constructive way? Is it sensible to let the current situation, in which no serious talks are taking place, continue indefinitely?

Abbas's prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has succeeded, as Diehl himself semi-acknowledges, in creating the conditions for statehood on the West Bank. Last September a World Bank report concluded that "if the PA maintains its current performance in institution-building and delivery of public services, it is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future" (quoted in Robert M. Danin, "A Third Way to Palestine," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2011, p.102). Diehl writes that the recent Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement "probably will obligate" Abbas to fire Fayyad. Probably will obligate? What does that mean? Diehl doesn't bother to explain. He's too busy excoriating Obama for his alleged pressure on Netanyahu.

This column is, arguably, worse than bizarre. It's irresponsible.

Barnett on humanitarianism

Michael Barnett discusses his book Empire of Humanity (Cornell U.P., 2011) in a talk recorded in early April. I listened to the first 28 minutes or so. He argues, among other things, that humanitarian movements and organizations ('humanitarianisms') are creatures of the historical contexts in which they developed, that they have always interacted with states and 'done politics,' and that the perception among aid workers of a sharp divide between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods is historically false. The first two of these points seem incontestable; the third might be more controversial. I'll leave that to those who know more about this than I do.

Vaccines funding

I'm on the email list of One, which is urging members to 'call the White House' to ask the Pres. to commit $450 million over the next 3 years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations at a donors conference in London next month. More info here.

Grammar grumpiness

Things have come to a pretty pass when not even the BBC is capable of matching a singular subject with a singular verb:

South Africans are going to vote in local elections after one of the most bitterly fought campaigns in years.

The delivery of basic services like water, housing and jobs have [sic!] been among the issues dominating campaigning.

Sorry. This is one of my pet peeves.

Schooled

This morning I e-mailed a friend who follows French politics: "What does it say about the French Socialist Party that an IMF chief has been its leading presidential prospect?" whereupon he replied, inter alia, that it's been a long time since the SP, "in France or anywhere else," is where one went looking for the "true left" (however defined). Allowing some leeway for a bit of hyperbole, I think that's true. Still, as I mentioned in my reply to his reply, there is something symbolic about the IMF, inasmuch as it stands for many as the institutional embodiment of neoliberalism. I should add that I know virtually nothing (that mantra again) about Strauss-Kahn's career.

Have we learned?

It would take too long to explain, but certain technical/computer problems (which I hope to solve in the reasonably near future) are requiring me to squat on the floor while writing this -- so it will be fairly brief (or at least briefer than it would otherwise be).

Many of us face the problem of too much to read -- too many books, magazines, journals, newspapers, blogs. We make choices and we take shortcuts. I can sometimes get a reasonably good idea about a book via a twenty-minute or half-hour's browsing of it in a bookstore. I did that this evening with Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars. Being familiar with his King Leopold's Ghost, I knew he was a very good writer, so my interest here was not so much savoring the prose as figuring out what he is doing. The answer is that this is a book mainly about the British experience in World War I, but with particular attention paid to the war's opponents (including, e.g., some COs who physically suffered for their convictions) as well as a more conventional cast of dramatis personae. There are some very familiar stories here (e.g., that of Rudyard Kipling and his son) but no doubt also some less familiar ones.

I was struck by the way the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has chosen to pitch the book on the inside front jacket flap. The last line of the jacket description is something like "will we ever learn from the past?"

Some would argue that we already have. It is virtually impossible to imagine a replay of the First World War, in which large armies from the most supposedly 'advanced' countries in the world slaughtered each other in numbers mounting up to the millions while competing, at least on the Western Front, over tiny bits of territory. The last sustained armed conflict involving a direct clash between great powers was World War II (true, U.S. and Chinese troops fought in Korea, but the active fighting occurred over a relatively limited period). Some political scientists (most notably John Mueller) have made a fairly convincing case that the chances of another major great-power war are extremely remote -- not because nuclear weapons would come into play and make it short but because most countries no longer think in such terms, i.e., major war is no longer an option on the conscious menu of policy-makers. This thesis is controversial and it's not too hard to find some evidence that cuts the other way, especially if one looks, for example, at Pentagon planning documents, at the size of some defense budgets (especially but not only that of the U.S.), or at the amount of money that India, for instance, is planning to spend on weapons over the next decade.

Still, whatever one thinks of the obsolescence-of-major-war thesis, it seems to me too pessimistic to suggest that the attitudes that propelled Europe into its collective suicidal madness of 1914-1918 are anywhere near as strong today as they were a hundred years ago. Militarism and hyper-nationalism are certainly not extinct (and their strength varies in different parts of the world), but in general they do not have anything like the hold over mass publics and elites that they did in the early and middle years of the last century. The notion advanced by the historian David Bell that the "war on terror" represents a kind of apocalyptic thinking about war that dates from the Napoleonic era may have an appearance of plausibility, but I am more inclined to see discontinuities and some learning -- for lack of a better word -- in the history of the last 200 years.

P.s. Hitchens reviews To End All Wars in the NYT Book Review.

OBL and McVeigh

I put up a post with this title but it disappeared when Blogger went down, and now I don't feel like recreating it. I refer anyone interested to the comment thread attached to the Crooked Timber post "Justice Like a Hawk". (The link for CT is at the sidebar.)

Scotland forever

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has scored gains in local elections and looks set to win a majority in the Scottish parliament. According to the linked article: "The SNP's leader, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, promised to push for a referendum on Scottish independence during the next four years."

With the caveat that I know nothing about this (it's becoming a mantra here), I suspect that Scottish independence looked more plausible when the EU was in better shape than it is right now. Who needed Britain when an independent Scotland could get the benefits of economic integration and a common currency as an EU member? But the EU at the moment may not appear to be as strong a reed to lean on as it once did. Plus, seceding from the UK would mean no more good seats at royal weddings. Though I guess an independent Scotland could join the Commonwealth? Somehow I don't think that's in the SNP platform.

Scale back the drones

The death of OBL offers an opportunity to change some U.S. approaches in Pakistan and Afghanistan, starting with a reduction in drone strikes.

From the Democratic Individuality blog:

According to neocon foundations, the drones kill 5 civilians for every “Taliban." The Pakistan government says the number is 600 innocents for every “Taliban.” But even the neocon figure is bad enough....
Perhaps it is no wonder that starving crowds in Pakistan chant “death to Obama” or that Obama’s ratings in the Arab world, according to the Pew foundation (cited by Andrew Sullivan last week), are near the same dismal level as George Bush’s. The need for a redirection of policy could not be more glaring.

My problem with patriotic display; or, What I saw at the Kennedy Center last night

For whatever reason, I've never been very comfortable with overt manifestations of patriotism. I did not display the flag after 9/11 (or before it). I don't especially like the post-9/11 practice of singing 'God Bless America' at the 7th-inning stretch of baseball games; isn't the national anthem before the game enough? Nor can I look too kindly on the college students who congregated in front of the White House chanting 'USA' after the killing of bin Laden, though I recognize that they probably represented a fairly small fraction of their peers and I agree with DPT on the need for some humility about one's own reactions in this respect.

This issue presented itself in another guise for me last night, when I attended the 40th annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and delivered this year by Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History. Her lecture, "Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian," was thoughtful and quite interesting, if not exactly what I'd expected. What I want to focus on just now, however, is what preceded it. The U.S. Marine Band, "The President's Own," played for about 25 minutes, with Civil War images flashing on a screen above it, as people filed into the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, which was the venue. Then a Joint Color Guard presented the colors, which involves uniformed representatives of each of the military services presenting their flags in a stylized ritual, to the accompaniment of flourishes from the Marine Band, and with two rifle-wielding soldiers (were they Marines? I'm not sure) on either side of the flag-bearers. Then right after the Presentation of Colors (or was it right before? I can't remember) there was the national anthem. The Marine Band of course is a very tight ensemble (if you've never heard the Marine Band, you don't know how tight "tight" can be), and their renditions (including the Marine Corps hymn "From the Halls of Montezuma") were quite stirring. After all this, the audience was no doubt feeling something (patriotic or perhaps just 'stirred') by the time Congressman John Lewis walked to the podium to read a poem by Walt Whitman, "Dirge for Two Veterans," which was the last program item before the lecture itself.

But -- of course there was a "but" coming, you knew that -- was the military pomp and circumstance appropriate? Although war was the central theme of Faust's lecture, this was not a lecture about military history. Rather, she talked, among other things, about the connections between war and literature and war and memory, about the simultaneous attraction and repulsion that war has exercised over humans for millennia -- all in line with the fact that this was the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, not the Jefferson Lecture in Military Science.

Now, I don't know whether the Marine Band and the Presentation of the Colors are standard fare at the Jefferson Lectures, since, although I was aware of the Lecture's distinguished history, this was the first one I'd attended. (It would be easy enough to find out, no doubt, but bloggers don't do research. P.s. I'm joking.) But standard fare or not, I found it -- the Presentation of the Colors and so on -- a little peculiar in this context. (Be it noted in passing that in introducing Faust, Jim Leach, chairman of the NEH, mentioned the return of ROTC to Harvard.)

Was this feeling of oddness just me, was it just my own -- perhaps irrational -- problem with patriotic display? Perhaps. And yet, I thought I overheard a snatch of conversation a couple of aisles in front of me in which someone seemed to have asked his or her companion what all this was about, and the reply came back, "It's Washington." No, this answer won't do. It doesn't explain it. The Jefferson Lecture I would say hovers somewhere in between 'official Washington' and 'cultural Washington' -- it's a lecture delivered annually by a prominent scholar or person of letters intended for the general public -- and in neither official nor cultural Washington, at least to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, is it mandatory to have the sort of preliminaries that were laid on here. OK, I've babbled on long enough and this post is not going to come to any neat conclusion. Perhaps someone who actually knows something about the Jefferson Lectures will leave a comment explaining that I'm an ignorant fool. But I couldn't resist taking advantage of the serendipitous confluence of the debate over the reaction to OBL's demise and my attendance at this event to indulge in the grand blogospheric tradition of dubious navel-gazing.

Fatah-Hamas rapprochement

In a post of a month ago (April 3, to be precise), I speculated about whether the prospect of a UN vote on Palestinian membership might lead to a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. It appears that such a reconciliation has now occurred, but more as a result of Egypt's having taken a new, more active role as broker or mediator between the two. This is one result of Mubarak's departure. Israel is making all kinds of noises, trying to get Mahmoud Abbas to back out of the Fatah-Hamas deal. He isn't going to, obviously, and anyway it's not at all clear that he should. Instead, perhaps Netanyahu should try silence for a while, rather than bluster. You never know what that might lead to.
Update: The deal has now been signed.

The OBL news

I've now read some of the NYT coverage. Interesting that it took U.S. intelligence, after determining the real name of Bin Laden's courier, two years to determine the general region in which he was working. I am rather amazed that OBL was living, with some of his family, in a big compound 35 miles from Islamabad (with no phone or Internet connection -- surely they should have put in a phone line to avoid suspicion), rather than in a remote hideout in the border regions. I guess this was on the maxim of 'hide in plain sight'. It seems reasonable to assume that someone(s) in the Pakistani military and/or government apparatus knew he was there, but for the moment this must remain an assumption.

P.s. Will this event change or further complicate the already somewhat strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan? K. Winecoff thinks not and I agree with that, for reasons I will have to put off explaining till later.

Update (added 5/7): There has been much discussion over the last few days about the fact that OBL did not have his AK-47 and pistol in his hands when he was shot; according to the NYT the weapons were "in arm's reach" but not in his hands. So he was unarmed. Perhaps he was expecting to be taken alive; it's hard to come up with another explanation. Some think this makes the action an extrajudicial execution and that he should have been captured and put on trial. I can see arguments on both sides but cannot get too exercised about this particular action in this particular case. (I do deprecate the celebratory reaction of some, which I think was unseemly and does nothing to enhance the U.S. image in the world.) Militating against capture-and-trial in this case was, among other things, the difficulty the U.S. has had in determining how and where to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad; the problems involved in trying OBL would have been even stickier. However, I think this should be treated as a special case; in general I'm not in favor of the killing of unarmed individuals, no matter what their crimes. More to say, but I'm tired and will leave it at that for now.

The dignity of labor

The 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, which occurred last month, has occasioned much reflection about the war’s legacy. While many of the specific antebellum debates about slavery may seem somewhat remote, the persistence of race and racial inequality as issues in American life means that the collective ear is still primed, from time to time, to pick up certain echoes of those debates. Many other echoes, however, have grown very faint; for instance, few non-historians today recall the antebellum controversy over ‘free labor’ versus slavery.

Some southern apologists for slavery argued, among other things, that free labor in the North amounted to ‘wage slavery’ and that northern factory workers and hired hands were actually worse off than African-American slaves in the South. In this respect these defenders of slavery, notably George Fitzhugh, "seemed to speak in Marxist accents," as Dennis Wrong notes.[1] But other defenders of slavery evinced a very un-Marxist contempt for manual labor in general. James McPherson draws attention to some revealing quotations (italics in original):

"The great evil of Northern free society," insisted a South Carolina journal, "is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens." A Georgia newspaper was even more emphatic in its distaste. "Free Society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists?... The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant." [2]

Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party of the time responded with a vigorous defense of free labor. However, as Eric Foner observes, Lincoln saw wage labor as a stepping stone that young men would take en route to becoming independent artisans, shopkeepers or entrepreneurs, rather than as a permanent feature of the American economy, though it was already becoming that in many cities in the mid-19th century, a process that would intensify after the Civil War.[3] The notion that work has an inherent dignity and overarching societal purpose–that, as William Seward said, "the free-labor system…brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral and social energies of the whole State"[4] – fit most comfortably with the world of Lincoln’s youth and young adulthood. It was more difficult to reconcile that notion with the working conditions and standardized production methods of mass manufacturing.

What of the dignity-of-labor ideal in ‘post-industrial’ societies? In an economy dominated by services in which a relatively small proportion of the population is engaged in direct production of tangible goods, it is still possible to speak of people taking pride in their work, irrespective of its nature, even irrespective of whether it is remunerated. But the ideal of the dignity of labor has slipped out of public discussion. Competitiveness is the lodestar of contemporary political-economic discussion in the U.S., along with debt and deficits. Attention is paid to the high unemployment rate, but as much for electoral considerations as any others. An attack by a right-wing governor on the right to collective bargaining sent thousands of people into the streets in Wisconsin, but that action was framed (quite understandably) as a defense of rights rather than primarily as a defense of the dignity of labor. And all sides use the discourse of rights. Thus laws restricting the prerogatives of unions are called right-to-work laws, and states where they are in force are known as right-to-work states -- as if the primary motive of such laws were to guarantee rights rather than to weaken unions. Ultimately, the meaning of 'rights' is determined by political struggles. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis put it: "Elements of a political lexicon – such as the discourse of rights – do not…have essential meanings…. Making history is often a matter of making language. But discourses are more often borrowed or stolen than created de novo. Faced with a restricted political vocabulary, political actors appropriate and transform tools that even hostile forces have labored to develop." [5]

Once slavery ceased to exist in the U.S., free labor had no polar antithesis to give it luster by comparison, and it tended to become, at best, just a fact rather than something to be widely celebrated. Critics of wage labor as exploitation could pursue their critique, secure in the knowledge that the surface similarities of their position to that of a George Fitzhugh probably would no longer be flung in their faces. This liberation, so to speak, of the critics of industrial capitalism arguably counts as one of the Civil War’s less-noticed consequences.

P.s. I had intended this post to have a broader, less U.S.-centric focus, but that proved beyond my capacities at the moment.

----
Notes

1. Dennis H. Wrong, The Problem of Order (1994), p.32.
2. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), p.197.
3. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial (2010), pp.115-16.
4. Quoted in McPherson, p.198.
5. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (1986), pp.161-62.
----
See also two books by Jonathan A. Glickstein: American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (2002) and Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (1991).

'Arab spring' update

Many critics of U.S. foreign policy have long decried the close ties between the U.S. and the House of Saud. It's no secret that the Saudis have been uneasy about the U.S. role in helping nudge its long-time ally Mubarak offstage, and as David Ignatius mentioned in his Wash. Post column of April 27, Pres. Obama's national security adviser met with Saudi King Abdullah this month and gave the king a reassuring letter from Obama. 

It has been plausibly suggested that the Saudis supported the initial proposal for a no-fly zone in Libya because they thought it would distract attention from what has been happening in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region. If that was their motivation, it doesn't seem to have worked. The Libyan intervention turned into a broader effort to protect civilians (and, in effect, indirectly aid the rebels), but it has not distracted attention from the ongoing violent crackdowns on protesters in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. The simultaneous repressive actions by different governments, and the variation in international response, underscores something that should have been clear all along: humanitarian interventions are always a product of more than one motive and 'consistency' is not necessarily the main criterion by which they should be judged. That said, one hopes that real pressure is being brought to bear on the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, with both of which the U.S. and Europeans have leverage, to modify what they are doing now.

Winning hearts and minds -- or buying them?

Here.

Will drones save the day in Libya?

Hard not to have at least a couple of qualms about this, given their track record in the Pakistani border areas. Admittedly the environment is different.

Desperation in Misurata; residents angry at NATO

Leila Fadel's first-hand report in the Wash. Post portrays a battered city under siege whose residents are angry at NATO for failing to protect them. She writes: "There are few signs in Misurata of NATO's military campaign to protect civilians. The fighting is all urban warfare, making accurate strikes from the air difficult." No doubt; but her report indicates that Gaddafi's snipers are using particular buildings, which NATO could probably target if it wanted -- although to be honest, I really have no idea. (Nor am I going to debate the intricacies of who counts as a civilian.)

On the question Who are the rebels? that has been much asked, again I really don't know. But Fadel's report suggests that at least a few of them are idealistic young men who may or may not have known what they were getting into:

"We tried to blow up the buildings, but we don't know how," said Alaa el Deen Khesham, 30, a rebel fighter who until two months ago worked in public relations for the government. "We threw homemade bombs in there, but it didn't do anything." ...
Khesham was born in Germany and spent part of his childhood in Boise, Idaho. He has two homes in Tripoli and a sports car. But he gave it all up to fight with the rebels in Misurata.

Given what appears to be happening based on this story, I'd say there's a fair chance he'll never see that sports car again.

Update: The city council in Misurata has now formally requested foreign troops on the ground, according to Fadel.

That S&P warning

See here.

[Hat tip: dsquared]

Wilson and Mexico

In the previous post I mentioned Woodrow Wilson's 1914 intervention in Mexico. There is a somewhat different perspective on this episode in John Judis's 2004 book The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Judis writes that after sending troops to occupy Veracruz, which turned out to be a "disaster" which incited "riots and demonstrations all over the country" (pp.91-2), Wilson "learned his lesson" and switched to a non-interventionist stance. When his Secretary of War urged Wilson to send U.S. soldiers to Mexico City, he replied: "We shall have no right at any time to intervene in Mexico to determine the way in which the Mexicans are to settle their own affairs...." (p.92) Judis says that "in his policy toward Mexico, Wilson also broke with a century-old view of the Mexicans as Indians who were incapable of self-government." (p.93)

I know virtually nothing about this episode and perhaps other interpretations of it exist. Just passing this on FWIW.

P.s. H.W. Brands, in his Woodrow Wilson (The American Presidents Series, 2003), p.50, notes that "the lessons Wilson learned in Mexico didn't prevent him from sending troops to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1915 and 1916 respectively, when trouble in those countries threatened American interests and Caribbean stability" -- or, at any rate, what Wilson considered to be American interests and Caribbean stability.

Will R2P become a 'European Monroe Doctrine'?

DPTrombly has a post suggesting that, inasmuch as European states will be willing and able to enforce the Responsibility to Protect only within a defined geographic area, R2P will come to resemble a European Monroe Doctrine, with Europe attempting to ensure certain norms of behavior by states within its sphere of influence, i.e., "Sahara, Sahel, Mediterranean rim, and Balkans."

Does the analogy work? I'm not convinced. The U.S., as DPT indicates, relied on Britain's naval power to enforce the Monroe Doctrine for most of the 19th century. And not too long after the U.S. became capable of using its own navy to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1904 his famous 'corollary' to the Doctrine which "declared that misgovernment (or 'chronic wrongdoing')" by Latin American governments would be grounds for U.S. armed intervention (Penguin Dictionary of International Relations, 1998, p.337). Applying this principle via his paternalistic pronouncement that "we must teach the Latin Americans to select the right man," Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines into Mexico in 1914 (ibid., p.573).

By contrast, R2P is less paternalistic than the Monroe Doctrine as applied by TR and Woodrow Wilson. R2P's application is limited to four circumstances: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (see M.W. Doyle, "International Ethics and the Responsibility to Protect," Int'l Studies Review 13:1, March 2011). It is not a question of teaching the inhabitants of country X "to select the right man [or woman]." A leader can drive his or her country into the ground and can be as corrupt as all get-out, but as long as he or she does not engage (or very credibly, by his or her own pronouncement, appear to be right on the verge of engaging) in genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity -- all of which, with the possible exception of ethnic cleansing, have accepted definitions in international law -- the question of R2P does not even arise.

Of course, application of R2P will be selective and considerations of the sort mentioned by DPT will influence the 'selections'. But that does not mean that R2P will be used to legitimize interventions of the kind that Wilson ordered in Mexico. Thus "European Monroe Doctrine" may not be the right description, inasmuch as it may conjure up a history of paternalistic, imperialistic interventions that I think few have any interest in defending or repeating.

In the wake of Boumediene

A piece by Robert Barnes in the Wash. Post makes it sound as if the Supreme Court's June 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which held that Guantanamo Bay detainees could challenge their detentions via writs of habeas corpus in federal court, has not had much of a practical effect. Barnes writes that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which had to work out the details of what rules would apply to detention hearings, has issued "a string of rulings" against the detainees which the Supreme Court has declined to review. "The bottom line," according to Barnes, "is that while Guatanamo's population has declined from around 270 at the time of the decision to 172 today because of decisions of the executive branch, not a single release has come as the direct result of a judicial order."

This statement, if one emphasizes the word "direct," may be technically correct, but it does not capture the story of what happened with the named plaintiffs in Boumediene, a story I found when a search on "Boumediene v. Bush" turned up the site of WilmerHale, the law firm which handled the case for the plaintiffs on a pro bono basis.

WilmerHale's post reminds those who had forgotten the facts (or never been too clear on them, such as myself) that the plaintiffs were six Algerians living in Bosnia who were transported to Gitmo by the U.S. government in 2002 and held there for more than five years before the Supreme Court's 2008 decision. The U.S. claimed among other things that they had been planning to attack the American embassy in Sarajevo. I pick up the story from the law firm's post:

In October 2008, WilmerHale filed the first-ever evidentiary response ("traverse") on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners, refuting the Government's asserted grounds for detention...

As a result of WilmerHale’s challenge, the US Government dropped its most inflammatory claim against the men, namely that they were planning to attack the US Embassy in Sarajevo in 2001. The US Government abandoned this claim even though President Bush had specifically mentioned it in the 2002 State of the Union address.

In November 2008, Judge Richard J. Leon of the US District Court in Washington DC held a seven-day hearing into the Government’s allegations. It was the first merits hearing in a habeas case involving Guantanamo prisoners. The hearing also included another first-time event: testimony by Guantanamo prisoners, live via videolink from Cuba, in support of their own bid for release.

On November 20, 2008, Judge Leon ruled that the Government had failed to show any credible evidence justifying detention of five of the six men. Judge Leon also took the extraordinary step of imploring the Government not to appeal that ruling. Judge Leon ruled against the sixth Petitioner, Belkacem Bensayah.

In December 2008, the Government informed WilmerHale that it would, indeed, forgo any appeal and abide by the ruling as to the five successful Petitioners. On December 16, 2008, three of WilmerHale’s clients—Mustafa Ait Idir, Hadj Boudella, and Mohamed Nechla—arrived safely home in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where they were met by elated family members and friends. This was the first time that the US Government has released Guantanamo prisoners in response to a court order. The remaining two successful petitioners, Lakhdar Boumediene and Saber Lahmar, were released and transferred to France in 2009.

WilmerHale appealed Judge Leon's denial of Belkacem Bensayah's habeas corpus petition to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia... On June 28, 2010, the DC Circuit panel unanimously reversed and remanded Judge Leon's ruling, holding that the government's evidence was insufficient to demonstrate that Mr. Bensayah was detainable. This marks the first (and so far only) case in which the DC Circuit has reversed a district court's denial of habeas corpus to a Guantanamo prisoner.

So although Barnes's article is no doubt correct that the practical impact of the Boumediene decision has been much less than proponents had hoped, at least in the case of the original plaintiffs the decision did make a difference: the five who were released (the three who returned to Bosnia and the two who went to France) were set free in response to a court order, as the law firm's post says.

Why hasn't Boumediene benefited more detainees? The Barnes piece suggests that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has weakened, if not undermined, the decision (he quotes the Center for Constitutional Rights as saying the D.C. Circuit has "openly defied" Boumediene). That is probably part of the reason; another may be that most detainees, unlike the Boumediene plaintiffs, have not been lucky enough to receive the skilled pro bono services of a big, very well-resourced law firm like WilmerHale. (This is not in any way to cast aspersions on the various lawyers who represent detainees, merely to note that resources can make a difference.)

P.s. Looking back at a post I wrote when Boumediene was decided, I see that Roberts in his dissent said the decision would have only a "modest practical impact," whereas Scalia in his dissent said it would have far-reaching and "disastrous" consequences. On this point, score Roberts one, Scalia zero. (But note that two commenters on my June 2008 post thought Scalia and Roberts were talking about different things, not making different predictions about the same thing. Whatever.)

World Bank: aid should emphasize justice systems, police

The World Bank's 2011 World Development Report calls for directing more aid to the reform of justice systems and strengthening of police, especially in countries experiencing conflict, where poverty rates are higher than in other places. The emphasis on police may seem at first glance like a somewhat odd proposal, but it is not new in development circles. The development-conflict connection isn't particularly my field, but I recall hearing John Richardson talk some years ago about his work on Sri Lanka and he emphasized, among other things, strengthening police forces. How strengthening the police in a country that is descending into or emerging from civil war, or caught in a cycle of violence (as opposed to 'ordinary' crime), helps things is a bit mysterious to me, but apparently it does. I note in this connection that training of the Afghan national police has lagged behind training of the Afghan army, or at least that was the case when I last heard something about it. Presumably a well-trained police force is less open to corruption; however, corruption in Afghanistan seems so deeply ingrained (see Dexter Filkins's piece "The Afghan Bank Heist" in the Feb. 14/21 New Yorker), one wonders whether anything would make any difference. (Cf. also the ongoing Mexican drug wars, which I've not blogged about.)

The House Republicans and the last colony

As part of the deal that avoided a government shutdown, House Republicans managed to get in a provision that prohibits the District of Columbia from using its own funds to pay for abortions for low-income women. Even more outrageously, there is a provision, whose fate has yet to be worked out in the appropriations committees, that would prevent D.C. from using its own funds to pay for needle-exchange programs. How anyone could oppose the latter, whose aim is presumably to stop the spread of diseases (including HIV), is beyond me.

The limits of 'home rule' for the last colony in the mainland U.S. have long been apparent, but this brings them into sharp relief: there is nothing to prevent Congress from telling the District of Columbia how to spend its own funds. Suppose, as a hypothetical, that the legislature of Colorado passed a law allocating a certain sum of money, raised entirely from state taxes on Colorado residents, to fund the construction of a series of playgrounds in state parks. Could Congress prohibit that expenditure? Although abortion and needle exchanges are more controversial than playgrounds, the structure of what is going on is the same: Congress is prohibiting a jurisdiction from spending its own money for purposes that are neither unconstitutional nor illegal. Shame.

Sad story from the West Bank

Here.

[hat tip: HC]

Cameron: 'we are responsible'

I haven't looked up the context (and of course context is everything) of Prime Minister Cameron's recent remark in Pakistan about the legacy of British imperialism. But taken out of context at any rate, the remark is, well, sort of remarkable, even in 2011. Or perhaps not? I don't have time right now for a little potted excursion into the history of the Conservative Party and the Empire, but if anyone wants to provide it in comments, feel free.

From Wealth to Power reconsidered

A brief exchange in comments with someone elsewhere in the blogosphere (specifically, at Slouching Towards Columbia) about Fareed Zakaria's 1998 book From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role prompted me to take another look at the book last night. (It was his dissertation and presumably is the only 'academic' book he will ever publish.)

From Wealth to Power argues that states are not simply security-seekers that expand in response to actual or perceived threats; rather, states expand when they see opportunities to extend their influence and when they have sufficiently strong central governments to translate desire into action. In the conclusion, Zakaria writes (p.185):

A scholar looking at great-power behavior over time -- even in a secure, relatively benign nation like the United States -- must conclude that states seek more than mere security: they seek influence over the international environment. And the more powerful they become, the more influence they seek.

Let's put aside the valid point that the U.S. was not "relatively benign" in the eyes of the native Americans or Filipinos whom it conquered, and focus on the main assertion: that states seek "influence over the international environment." This raises the question: why? What does it "do" for states, how does it benefit them, to have such "influence"? In the case of the U.S., one answer might be that "influence" resulted in overseas markets for capitalists. This is the answer given by the Wisconsin School (William Appleman Williams, et al.). But Zakaria, though he acknowledges a debt to certain writings of this school (p.51), clearly does not go in that direction.

Does he answer the question at all? Not as I recall, though I did not re-read the whole book. But if he were to have answered it, it seems to me he would have had a couple of options. He could have gone with Mearsheimer and said that expansion is the surest way to ensure security in an 'anarchic' world. Or he could have gone with Schumpeter and said that expansion is an atavistic impulse, an 'objectless disposition'. Neither of these is very satisfactory. A third possible answer, at least in the case of the U.S., would focus on culture and ideology (Social Darwinism, white man's burden, and all that), and Zakaria does mention this in passing (pp.135-36). Finally, one could look at the role of domestic pressure groups and parties. But as it is, the question why states seek "influence" rather than "mere security" is left hanging.

It may be worth noting that the very end of the book is guardedly optimistic. Zakaria does not talk of the obsolescence of great-power war, but he does note its "long absence." These are the concluding sentences (p.192):

The long absence of great-power war and the growth of the global economy have weakened the state and intertwined it in structures that will make the once-straightforward rise and fall of great powers a complex, friction-filled process. These complications may create greater uncertainty for scholars, but they could help blunt the otherwise aggressive temperament of great powers and tame the fierce nature of international life.

Context is everything

It must be difficult to be an op-ed columnist. You have to come up with a certain number of words twice a week or so, and the words have to make enough sense to an editor to avoid provoking a "what are you talking about?" reaction. Sometimes one wonders how a particular column has managed to clear this hurdle. Take Maureen Dowd's "Fight of the Valkyries". As L. Sjoberg pointed out at Duck of Minerva, Dowd misunderstands feminist IR theory. But toward the end of the column, there is also this:

As compelling as the gender split is, it’s even more interesting to look at the parallels between Obama and W. Candidate Obama said about a possible strike on Iran, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Obama's quoted statement referred to a possible decision to launch a unilateral U.S. strike on Iran, and the considerations in such a case are different from those involved in a multilateral, UN-authorized intervention. Still, it's possible that Obama meant that a president needs congressional approval for any use of U.S. forces that does not respond to "an actual or imminent threat" (or, like the 'Afghan surge,' relate directly to an ongoing conflict). If so, he would not be the first president to have said one thing about the scope of presidential power during a campaign and then to have discovered, once in the Oval Office, that he found a somewhat more expansive notion of executive power to be congenial.

Presidential systems, as opposed to parliamentary ones, seem designed to encourage a certain amount of gridlock stemming from the almost constant tug-of-war between president and legislature, especially in periods of divided or semi-divided party control (as is the case now, with the Republicans in control of the House). And congressional action can frustrate what should be properly be executive branch decisions, as in the case of where to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators on trial.

But to come back to the quote on Iran, I'm inclined to think that Obama said it in the context of that particular issue and probably meant it to be less sweeping than the actual words themselves would suggest.

Poem of the Arab spring

Via Scott Horton: here.

A UN vote to admit Palestine?

Today's front-page NYT story by E. Bronner (the opening graphs of which I just read in the print edition) says that there may be a UN vote in September to admit Palestine as a full-fledged member state. In addition to putting Israel in a difficult position, this might be the catalyst that pushes Hamas and Fatah to resolve their hitherto apparently irreconcilable differences (which may be a point the article goes on to make, I don't know). Will be interesting to watch.

Quotes of the day

I'm finally getting to the end of Mantel's Wolf Hall. Occasionally a sentence will leap out from the rest. Referring to Henry VIII's need to discover the value of the Church's properties: "The king -- lord of generalities -- must now learn to labor over detail, led on by intelligent greed." (p. 566; paperback ed.)

Mantel is good at drawing not only Cromwell and Henry and Anne Boleyn and Charles V's ambassador Chapuys and other wielders or agents of power, but also younger women and men (girls and boys, really). Here's the Duke of Richmond, Henry's thirteen-year-old illegitimate son, in conversation with Cromwell (p.369):

"Master Cromwell," he says, "I have not seen you since the cardinal [Wolsey] came down." A moment's awkwardness. "I am glad you prosper. Because it is said in the book called The Courtier that in men of base degree we often see high gifts of nature."

"You read Italian, sir?"

"No, but parts of that book have been put into English for me. It is a very good book for me to read."

This seems to catch how a young prince, "endowed with a proper sense of himself and his own dignity," might speak to his father's powerful (but non-noble) counselor. Whether people actually spoke this way or not, it reveals character and thus works as dialogue. Her ability to do this is one reason I've persevered, despite not having found it a page-turner.

Orford on Libya

Anne Orford of Univ. of Melbourne, author of a recent book on R2P, had a post at the London Review of Books blog (link to it here); see my brief (and admittedly rather too flippant) comment on it here.

Cultural diplomacy and 'smART Power'

The U.S. State Department has long sent "cultural ambassadors" abroad, but in recent years, as this New York Times article from last October points out, those envoys have been mostly performing artists (dancers, actors). Last fall the Obama administration decided to start sending visual artists abroad too, under a $1 million program called smART Power to be administered by the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

It's tempting to make fun of this, but I'm not really in the mood for that today. I'll content myself with noting that the State Dept., according to the article, is spending more on cultural diplomacy now than it has in quite a long time: in 2010 the budget for this was $11.75 million, no doubt a small fraction of State's total budget, but not nothing. At a time when budget pressures are acute and may lead to cuts in U.S. government programs aimed at alleviating extreme poverty and fighting disease in poor countries, one does wonder whether sending a sculptor to, say, Islamabad or Lahore to create a public artwork is a wise use of funds or, to be blunt, just ******* crazy (yes, Pakistan is on the list of places for smART Power; so is Egypt; so is a Somali refugee camp in Kenya -- this last might make more sense). However, I'll leave this question for readers to ponder. (Note: I don't know what the current budget imbroglio has done, or is doing, to smART Power's appropriation -- if anything -- or to the broader cultural diplomacy appropriation.)
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Hat tip for the article to HC. It only took me five months to get around to reading it.

Yemen explosion

An explosion at an ammunition factory in southern Yemen has killed at least 150 people. The authorities blame al-Qaeda, but local residents accuse the government of setting the explosion itself. If the latter turns out to be true, that alone should be enough to remove whatever remaining legitimacy Saleh has.

R2P and Libya: application or misapplication?

This post at the blog connected with the journal The American Interest [hat tip: DPT] argues that 'the responsibility to protect' (R2P) is a "nebulous norm". One way norms get less nebulous, however, is by being invoked and debated, as Badescu and Weiss suggest in a piece in last November's International Studies Perspectives (abstract here).

According to them, R2P should not be seen as synonymous with humanitarian intervention by military means (too narrow), nor as synonymous with human security generally (too broad). Rather, R2P is "about taking timely preventive action, about identifying situations that are capable of deteriorating into mass atrocities and bringing to bear diplomatic, legal, economic, and military pressure" (p. 367). Given the speed with which the Libyan situation unfolded, an argument can be made that there was not time to do these things in sequence -- i.e., first the diplomatic and economic, then the military measures -- but that, rather, an effective response required a deployment of these different means pretty much all at once. That, at any rate, seems to me to be the most plausible argument that the military intervention and accompanying actions (e.g., freezing of assets) do represent a legitimate application of R2P rather than a misapplication. It will be interesting to see how Pres. Obama frames the issue in his address tonight.

P.s. After listening to the speech, I realized that my reference (above) to the measures being taken "pretty much all at once" is a bit of an overstatement; the asset freeze etc. did precede the military action -- but not by a prolonged period. As Obama noted, the entire sequence of events from the start of the Libyan protests to the intervention took only 31 days.

The day the New Deal began

March 25th was the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York, in which 146 young, mostly female garment workers were killed in an unsafe building that was a firetrap (and some of the exits had been locked). The March 19th Economist carries a short, remarkably sympathetic (given the venue) piece about it (at p.39 of the hard-copy edition). A commission set up to investigate the fire proposed broad reforms not only of safety laws, but also in the areas of child labor, wages and hours, etc. Many of these were adopted by New York city and state. The Economist recalls that Frances Perkins, FDR's secretary of labor, had seen the fire and "she later called March 25th 1911 the day the New Deal began." The article continues:

Lee Adler, who teaches collective bargaining at Cornell University, sees parallels between the way the sweatshop owners treated their workers and how a few governors in the Midwest are treating civil servants these days. The comparison is perhaps farfetched [not really - LFC]. But the anniversary does remind America why unions were needed.

Were needed -- and still are.
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P.s. The factory's owners were tried for manslaughter but acquitted. Details about the trial and a lot else can be found at the Wikipedia entry on the fire.
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P.p.s. Krugman on the need to restore labor's bargaining power. [H/t: T. Burke]

When you cite a social-scientific study, it usually helps if the study is relevant to the issue at hand

...which is a long-winded way of saying that Stephen Walt seems to be a bit offbase here. He cites an unpublished working paper by Alexander Downes which concludes that "foreign-imposed regime change" tends to "ignite" civil wars. That may well be, but it's of limited relevance to Libya because in Libya there already is a civil war. Kindred Winecoff beat me to this point, but I figure it's worth repeating.

Galston on Libya

Here.

Remembering the end of the Sri Lankan civil war

Conor Foley, in a post that I have previously linked to, mentions the situation in Sri Lanka toward the end of the government's war with the Tamil Tigers (LTTE).

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were blockaded into an area the size of New York Central Park, where at least 20,000 were killed over a three month period. The area was shelled incessantly and hospitals and food-distribution points appear to have been deliberately targeted. Many more died from starvation and disease because the government blocked humanitarian access. Others were summarily executed during the final assault.... There was never even the remotest prospect of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Sri Lanka and I only include it in the discussion to show that the option of doing nothing also has moral consequences.

What happened in Sri Lanka at the end of its war is certainly worth recalling. Nothing on anything approaching a similar scale has occurred in Libya. The intervention there may be said to have relied on a reasoned prediction ("reasoned" of course not meaning "infallible") about what might occur in the absence of intervention. Seen in this light, the intervention is defensible, though the continuing debate about it is probably a good thing. Interventions of this sort are necessarily controversial and an absence of debate would be surprising.

Brief thoughts on 'The King's Speech'

I saw the movie last night. The climactic scene, for those few who may not have seen the movie or read about it, is the radio address George VI gave on Sept. 3, 1939. Colin Firth turns in an excellent performance, though he makes the address sound perhaps a bit less labored than it actually was in George VI's delivery: you can listen to the original here. Perhaps the most interesting clause in the speech is the remark or warning at the end that "war can no longer be confined to the battlefield," which of course turned out to be entirely and tragically accurate.

Meanwhile...

...somewhat disturbing things are happening in Ivory Coast, which in other circumstances probably would be getting more attention.

Kuperman on Libya

In a USAToday column (h/t T. Wilkinson), Alan Kuperman argues that the Libyan rebels started the uprising knowing they could not win on their own and hoping to provoke civilian casualties that would draw in outside intervention. This seems to be based on an analogy with what Kuperman argued happened in Kosovo, where for instance a KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) official admitted that the more civilians killed, the more likely the prospects for outside intervention. But on a quick reading of the USAToday column, I see no direct evidence presented for his assertion that the Libyan rebels were following the same modus operandi. Moreover, didn't the anti-Gaddafi movement start out as peaceful protests and then become an armed uprising once the protesters were violently attacked? Or am I just imagining that?
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Kuperman's 'moral hazard' theory of intervention (i.e., that the possibility of outside intervention gives rebels an incentive to provoke atrocities in order to bring on an intervention) has generated academic debate. See e.g. A. Grigoryan, "Third-Party Intervention and the Escalation of State-Minority Conflicts," Int'l Studies Quarterly 54:4 (December 2010). Abstract.
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P.s. For discussion and other links, follow the Wilkinson link (above) to the CT post and comment thread.
Also - Marc Lynch on Fresh Air this afternoon.

After Gaddafi

On the admittedly optimistic assumption that Gaddafi's days are numbered, despite his vow of a "long war," it may not be too soon to think about what happens (or should happen) after. With the caveat that I know basically nothing about Libya, I suspect that holding elections is probably not one of the first things that should happen. There is ample evidence, as discussed for instance by Roland Paris in a several-years-old article* I was glancing at yesterday, that holding elections first thing in a polity emerging from a civil war, and therefore having weak or damaged institutions, is probably not a great idea.
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*R. Paris, "Bringing the Leviathan Back In: Classical Versus Contemporary Studies of the Liberal Peace," International Studies Review 8:3 (Sept. 2006), pp.425-440. See also his At War's End (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).

The streets of Belfast

An excerpt from Sean Kay's post on Ireland:

Northern Ireland was very successful at "peacemaking" -- building a new system of governance. But the process of peace-building -- confidence building and integration at the ground level -- remains only in its nascent stage. Key areas of Northern Ireland, especially in parts of Belfast, remain in what is often characterized as a "benign Apartheid". "Peace walls" continue to divide street-by-street Catholic and Protestant communities. Education and public housing remain segregated. The irony is that peace-building in Northern Ireland requires breaking down those walls. But in so doing, also risks sparking street-to-street conflict once again. In effect, Northern Ireland shows that the real hard work to build peace takes generations....

Have the drones met their Waterloo?

The botched drone strike on the North Waziristan-Afghanistan border which killed 40 people, apparently mostly tribal elders and police, may be the last straw. The Pakistan army chief of staff called it "intolerable," which is about as strong as this kind of official reaction gets. The strike came not that long after another Pakistani general made a somewhat bizarre statement praising the drones. Chances are the subtext of that statement was "we don't have to take military action in N. Waziristan because the drones are doing it all." Well, they're doing it all right; there's just one little problem: they don't always kill the "right" people.

Stuff I'd be blogging about if I had time

(with apologies to H. Farrell, from whom I've stolen this general rubric)

- V. Weaver and A. Lerman's article "Political Consequences of the Carceral State" in the Nov. 2010 American Political Science Review (hope to do a post about this in future)

- R. Danin's article "A Third Way to Palestine" in the Jan./Feb. 2011 Foreign Affairs

- B. Rathbun's article questioning the conventional wisdom about the bipartisan consensus on multilateralism in post-WW2 U.S. foreign policy, in Int'l Studies Quarterly, March 2011

...among other things

Kristol & co. send a letter

Via Tom Ricks, I see that a letter has been sent to Pres. Obama urging intervention in Libya and signed by a gaggle of neocons and some others. As Ricks says, the signers alone are enough to ensure that the letter will probably have the opposite of its intended effect. A letter on foreign policy signed by Bill Kristol, Martin Peretz, and Joshua Muravchik, among others, carries a huge warning sign on it before the contents are even examined.

In this case such unavoidable prejudice-before-reading might be too bad, since it looks as if Gaddafi's forces are readying an assault on Benghazi and as Dirk Vandewalle said on the NewsHour tonight, the ragtag rebel forces are not going to be a match for Gaddafi's mercenaries and armor. He suggested that what's needed now is a 'no-drive zone'; the point is past at which a no-fly zone could have helped. Depressing, especially when coupled with the horrible events in Japan.

Update: Text of the letter here. A more skeptical view, e.g., here.

Bad verdict

I can see no compelling justification for putting five Somalis, who attacked a U.S. navy ship that for some reason they thought was a merchant vessel, in prison for life. This sentence, apparently mandatory in a piracy conviction (of which these are the first in a U.S. court since the early 19th century), seems excessive. It will simply add to the already absurdly large U.S. prison population.

Walzer on Libya

Michael Walzer suggests that if and/or when an intervention is deemed "necessary," perhaps before a Gaddafi victory that would result in very large-scale retributive killing of the regime's opponents, the intervention should be done by neighbors, i.e., the Egyptian and Tunisian armies. I don't think that will happen, although I do follow his logic. (And it's not that I have any better ideas -- I don't.) Also here.

[the break will now resume]

Research on 'unarmed insurrections'

A recently published article looks at non-violent insurrections in non-democratic regimes. Not relevant to Libya, obviously, but perhaps germane to Tunisia and Egypt. Abstract here (I have not read the article, just the abstract).

[Spring break will now resume]

Brief interruption of spring break

The billionaire philanthropist George Soros apparently has now set himself up as a social scientist, pronouncing on what has caused the revolutions in the Mideast. No one could disagree with his calls for more transparency and accountability and greater sharing of oil wealth with the populations, but the fact is that we don't know exactly what caused these revolutions. Social scientists and historians are still arguing over the causes of the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution of 1917, just to take two examples, and it is absurd for Mr. Soros to suppose that he has divined "the cause" of these revolutions. There is comparable oil wealth and corruption in Nigeria but there has been no comparable society-wide revolution there -- what about that, Mr. Soros? I guess if you're a billionaire philanthropist and everyone hangs on your every word, you consider yourself entitled to pronounce on anything.

[The spring break will now resume]

Spring break

There will be little posting here in March and April -- probably none, in fact -- as I have some other things to attend to. I plan to return in May.

Mass incarceration in the U.S.

Two-and-a-half million people are in prison in the U.S. This post includes a powerful interview with a civil rights lawyer who has a new book about the American prison system.

Tactical vs. strategic thinking

Those interested in military issues may find this piece by Peter Mansoor (in the Jan./Feb. Foreign Affairs) worth reading.

Not directly related but of possible interest: Gates's speech to West Point cadets; link here.

Gaddafi's sons in state of denial

Here. Related: here.

Postscript on Moynihan

Further to my post of last Wednesday: The Jan.-Feb. issue of Harvard Magazine, in its "Off the Shelf" column, notes the following volume (with a somewhat adulatory subtitle):
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, ed. Steven R. Weisman (PublicAffairs, $35). Brief description here.

The curse of oil

A piece in this past week's Wash. Post about why the countries in the Mideast now undergoing political turmoil are also in need of economic renovation had a few too many quotes from IMF people for my taste, but it did include an interesting chart (via the IMF) showing that even Saudi Arabia's GDP per capita has declined, albeit slightly, over the 1980-2010 period (measured in inflation-adjusted dollars). The article did not use the term 'resource curse' but its main point is that oil revenue (in the case of Egypt, revenue from tourism and the Suez Canal) has helped these regimes to avoid the kinds of economic measures less well-endowed countries have taken. Even an opponent of neoliberalism, which I am, would probably have to admit that the state's domination of the economy in many of these societies has not served them well.

(Note: The GDP chart is in the hard-copy version but apparently not in the online version of the article.)

Apocalypse then? Moynihan, Kissinger, and the Third World

A recent post by Vikash Yadav about waves of 'apocalyptic thinking' in International Relations has stirred up a debate. Nick L wrote the following comment on V. Yadav's post:

...I think that there was a distinct wave of apocalyptic thinking in the 1970s. I'm researching North-South relations during this period, and it is clear that many in the North including policy-makers such as Moynihan and Kissinger saw the era in apocalyptic terms: the oil crisis, the defeat of South Vietnam, the 'Zionism is racism' resolution at the UN, the fear that the then 3rd World had been 'lost' all played into this. There seems to have been a real sense that Western civilisation was under peril: neo-Malthusian concerns and old civilisational/race war ideas intersecting with the emergence of the fears of imminent loss of US hegemony that would last until the end of the Cold War. Around this point the idea of the global South as a cauldron of chaos seems to take shape, reappearing in the 1990s in the work of people like Robert Kaplan's 'The Coming Anarchy'.

I was interested in this comment because I did some work on North-South relations of the 1970s ... while an undergrad in the '70s. (I know, I should have been reading the complete canon and instead I was reading about the New International Economic Order. I never read Xenophon or The Fairie Queene and now it's too late.) One can quibble I suppose about whether "apocalyptic" is the right word, but I think Nick L may be onto something, at least as far as Daniel Patrick Moynihan is concerned. As U.S. ambassador to the UN, Moynihan heaped rhetorical scorn on the Third World, depicting it as a group of largely undemocratic jumped-up countries barely out of their figurative swaddling clothes making unwarranted charges of exploitation, unfairness, structural economic discrimination, racism, and whatnot against the West as a way of deflecting responsibility for their own shortcomings and failures vis-a-vis their own populations. (India of course was not undemocratic, but Moynihan thought its elites had gone wrong by embracing a brand of Fabian socialism that they had imbibed as students in London or Oxford or ... ; see Moynihan's March 1975 Commentary article "The U.S. in Opposition".)

Kissinger on North-South relations was a bit of a different story, though, since he eventually came around to offering a package of concessions in response to the Third World's economic demands (for more stable commodity prices, more loans and development aid, and a lot of other things) which didn't satisfy the demands but was an attempt at accommodation; so at least in terms of appearances he was different on these issues from Moynihan. Stanley Hoffmann wrote that Moynihan laid down the tough talk while Kissinger took softer action.

Moynihan's vision of the U.S. and 'the West' standing up against an allegedly ungrateful, somewhat thuggish Third World does fit into a good-vs-evil, quasi apocalyptic, I guess, frame. But I'm not sure whether the "idea of the global South as a cauldron of chaos" goes back to this period. I suppose the neo-Malthusian concerns about resource shortages, population growth, and so on, could be linked to the chaos theme, but my recollection, perhaps wrong, is that Moynihan himself did not emphasize this aspect. (And note too that not all the concerns about resources, population, etc. could be dismissed as neo-Malthusian.) Anyway, Nick L's comment brought a lot of things back...

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Coda: The 'North-South dialogue', the main vehicle through which the Third World pressed its demands, sputtered on until around 1981, when it was finished off by the triple whammy of global recession, looming debt crisis and, above all, the advent of the Reagan administration.

Hitchens is wrong -- so what else is new?

Writing in Slate, in a Jan. 31 column which, amazingly enough, actually says one or two sensible things, Hitchens spoils it at the end by suggesting that "the regime-change school in America can claim a degree of vindication." Translation: the revolts sweeping the Arab world are due to the neocons and the Project for a New American Century. So that's why the crowds in Tahrir Square were carrying pictures of Bill Kristol. Thanks for clearing up the mystery, Hitch.

Labor coverage

If interested in this, see here.

Critique of drone strikes: W. Post

Here.

Chomsky on Reagan

Noam Chomsky is interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez about various things (including the Wisconsin protests) here. I don't have the time (or patience at the moment, quite frankly) to read the thing word for word, but I scrolled down through it and slowed down when I got to what Chomsky calls the "deification" of Ronald Reagan. Here's Chomsky on Reagan's actions abroad:

I won’t even talk about his international behavior. I mean, it was just abominable. I mean, if we gained our optimism by killing hundreds of thousands of people in Central America and destroying any hope for democracy and freedom and supporting South Africa while it killed about a million-and-a-half people in neighboring countries, and on and on, if that’s the way we get back our optimism, we’re in bad trouble.

This is dramatically put, but it's not wrong. Reagan did support the apartheid regime in South Africa. See here.

Of course, before some readers take severe umbrage let me acknowledge that there were other aspects to the Reagan foreign policy that Chomsky does not mention here. Reagan did reach agreement with Gorbachev in 1987 to remove intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. Reagan did give his so-called "Ivan and Anya speech" (Google it) in 1984 in which he talked about the danger of nuclear war, and he did take certain steps on arms control. (Don't forget the Stars Wars boondoggle, however.) But on balance, Reagan's foreign policy was not something to cheer about, and that's putting it mildly. (His other policies were bad, too.)

A fourth wave? - and some other things

I think it's probably too early to say that developments in the Arab world represent a "fourth wave" of democratization, but Richard Wolin's Feb. 8 column, which I've just read quickly, is interesting. I'm not sure I'd have gone with the reference to Hegel (at the end of the column).

Wolin wrote before the protests and subsequent brutal crackdown in Bahrain. I knew nothing about Bahrain until a few days ago, and now I know a few facts thanks to the news coverage, including that Bahrain is host to the h.q. of the U.S. 5th Fleet. This prompts one to consider (again) why the U.S. has naval and military bases all over the world, not just in 'crucial' regions like the Mideast but in a great many other places as well. A book I was looking at yesterday, John Kane's Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma in U.S. Foreign Policy, contains a sentence to the effect that the decision to establish a global network of U.S. bases stems from the human and other costs of fighting the Japanese in the 'island-hopping' campaign of WW2. This may well be standard wisdom among historians. And yet -- why should the war in the Pacific have convinced policy-makers that they needed a global network of bases to prevent another such war? Why wasn't it enough to occupy Japan and reconstruct it under a new, non-militarist constitution? Perhaps it made sense to add a few permanent bases in the Pacific for insurance, so to speak, but the global U.S. base network as stemming from a purely preventive, defensive motive doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The global base network and the network of security treaties and status-of-forces agreements that accompany it have never made much sense from the standpoint of a reasonable grand strategy, and they have made less and less sense as the years have gone by. Whether one favors 'offshore balancing' or some other approach, the presence of U.S. military forces all over the world, 65 years after the end of WW2 and 20 years after the end of the Cold War, is wasteful and counterproductive. There may be a case to be made for some overseas bases, but not for the hundreds that presently exist.

Should they have known?

In a piece that can be found here, Michael Schwartz, a sociologist, argues that the Obama administration should have known that the Egyptian protests were likely to succeed in toppling Mubarak because they had the effect of a general strike that crippled the crucial tourism industry and then the rest of the economy, causing the Egyptian capitalist class to turn against the regime. Schwartz writes that Obama's handling of the crisis was incoherent and incompetent.

Schwartz's explanation of why the protests succeeded may be correct, but the criticism of Obama I think is unfair. It is very hard to predict the course of popular uprisings, even in a country whose economy is heavily dependent on one vulnerable industry. I think Marc Lynch's evaluation of the Obama administration's performance, which I quoted several days ago, is more accurate than Schwartz's. Among other things, Schwartz doesn't seem to realize that U.S. foreign policy is the product of a large bureaucratic apparatus and that it cannot be shifted easily; you can't easily change thirty years of foreign policy in 24 hours. Given that reality, the administration did just about as well as one might have expected (there were a couple of missteps and false notes, such as Biden's statement on the NewsHour that Mubarak isn't a dictator, but a few missteps in a situation of this complexity are to be expected). Schwartz's view that the Obama administration's performance in this period was abysmally bad is really rather bizarre.

The pleasures of the higher journalism include citing oneself

"I celebrate myself and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume."
-- Walt Whitman

In the Feb. 14 issue of Time, Fareed Zakaria is careful to avoid predictions about the future of Egypt, but he suggests that one worrisome possibility is "illiberal democracy," i.e., a freely elected regime that restricts individual rights. The author of a book called The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2003; rev. pbk. ed., 2007) happens to be none other than ... Fareed Zakaria.

Packing for the theater (of war, that is)

At least one regular reader of this blog will probably like this.

It's no accident, or is it? Parenting, U.S. decline, and the Chinese stealth fighter plane

Until a week or two ago, when I picked up the hard-copy issue of Time magazine with the cover story about the 'Chinese tiger mom,' I had no idea that Amy Chua had written a controversial article, and now book, about her approach to parenting. I knew of Chua as a law professor and author of serious books about globalization (World on Fire), empire, etc. But since her Wall St. Journal piece appeared, her controversial parenting style has been the talk of the 'commentary space,' for lack of a better phrase to refer to blogosphere and print-sphere. Item: a Jan. 24 post by Alex Barder, which draws connections between U.S. decline vis-a-vis China (and other emerging powers) and the fuss about Chua. I'm inclined to think these supposed connections are mostly coincidence. Yes, Obama's State of the Union spoke of the U.S. falling behind in education, innovation, and competitiveness; yes, China is now the world's second largest economy; and I suppose some of the attention Chua garnered could be explained by the attendant anxieties. But I think her statements were eye-catching enough to have sparked a controversy on their own, without any help from the imperial decline theme.

Barder disagrees. He says this, among other things:

It is not by chance that Chua’s article comes on the heels of proliferating news stories about China’s greater than expected military capabilities. A few months ago, for example, James Krask published an essay entitled “How the United States Lost the Naval War in 2015” in which he posits a scenario where the US navy no longer has supremacy of the East China Sea. Recent information on a new Chinese stealth fighter highlights China’s technological military prowess that potentially rivals the US air supremacy.

Plus, he adds, a focus on parenting and culture diverts attention from the bad effects of neoliberalism.

"It is not by chance that Chua’s article comes on the heels of proliferating news stories about China’s greater than expected military capabilities." On the contrary, I think it's entirely by chance. Indeed, if I went looking for an example of chance, I'm not sure I could find a better one than this.

Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Henry VIII, accidents of fate, etcetera

The Economist has a new blog called Clausewitz which will cover 'defence, security, and diplomacy,' ranging from "the technical details of new weapons to spy spats and diplomatic negotiations." According to the inaugural post, various names for the blog were considered; Dreadnought was rejected as "too British" and Machiavelli as "not military enough."

Fair enough, I suppose; but Machiavelli did write The Art of War (which I haven't read), and in chapter 14 of The Prince he says that a prince "should always be out hunting," toughening up his body and learning "how mountains rise, how valleys open up, how plains lie," and so forth (The Prince, H. Mansfield trans., 2nd ed., U. of Chicago Pr., p.59). In her novel Wolf Hall, which I've been slowly working my way through and haven't quite finished, Hilary Mantel puts similar words into the mouth of Henry VIII, who tells Thomas Cromwell "we usually say, we gentlemen, that the chase prepares us for war" (pbk. ed., p.167).

It would have been something of a drag to have been born in the sixteenth century. None of the available life courses, with the possible exception of humanist scholar (open only to men of a certain class and temperament, of course), would have been particularly appealing.

Afterthought: It would have been a drag to have been born in many parts of the world in any century, including the twenty-first. People born in relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful societies benefit from an accident of fate, and those born in poorer, more troubled societies suffer from an equally accidental occurrence. See here.

Marc Lynch: Obama's strategy is vindicated

A paragraph from his post at FP:

The Obama administration also deserves a great deal of credit, which it probably won't receive. It understood immediately and intuitively that it should not attempt to lead a protest movement which had mobilized itself without American guidance, and consistently deferred to the Egyptian people. Despite the avalanche of criticism from protestors and pundits, in fact Obama and his key aides -- including Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power and many others -- backed the Egyptian protest movement far more quickly than anyone should have expected. Their steadily mounting pressure on the Mubarak regime took time to succeed, causing enormous heartburn along the way, but now can claim vindication. By working carefully and closely with the Egyptian military, it helped restrain the worst violence and prevent Tiananmen on the Tahrir -- which, it is easy to forget today, could very easily have happened. No bombs, no shock and awe, no soaring declarations of American exceptionalism, and no taking credit for a tidal wave which was entirely of the making of the Egyptian people -- just the steadily mounting public and private pressure on the top of the regime which was necessary for the protestors to succeed.

'A new social contract for the Arab world'

Ariel Ahram has some notes on how to move toward it: here.

Perils of punditry

Last night on the PBS NewsHour, Z. Brzezinski observed that Mubarak is a former fighter pilot whose personality is such that he is not likely to resign under pressure, domestic or external. About 15 minutes ago I saw the headline that Mubarak has resigned.

Junk the theories, keep the history

Ok, ok, I'm not really in favor of junking theories. But this post by PM about the syllabus for an introductory International Relations course does prompt me to say that without knowing some history it's impossible to understand "the contemporary condition" (to steal the title of another blog). There is a passage at the beginning of Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes (which I have quoted previously on this blog) in which he notes the date on which François Mitterand chose to visit Sarajevo when it was under siege during the Balkan wars of the 1990s: June 28, 1992. (Google "Mitterand visit to Sarajevo" and you can find the New York Times article by John Burns, published the following day, which indicates that Mitterand's visit to a city under continuous artillery and mortar fire, as Sarajevo then was, entailed some personal risk; he flew 100 miles in a helicopter over mountainous terrain from the Croatian port of Split.)

But to the point: Why did Mitterand choose to deliver his "message of hope" to the inhabitants of Sarajevo on June 28? Because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. However, as Hobsbawm points out, virtually no one caught the reference, apart from professional historians and some elderly people (probably mostly Europeans) with long memories. So here's a proposal for the nonce: no student should leave an introductory International Relations course without knowing a little about WWI, including the date on which Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Ideally, they should learn a few other dates too, such as, for example, the date WW2 in Europe started (Sept. 1, 1939), the date it ended (May 8, 1945), and the date on which the Cold War officially ended with the Charter of Paris (gulp, without looking it up I don't know that precise date myself). And I'm sure one could suggest a number of other dates, but I won't drag this out. Isn't this hopelessly old-fashioned, having students learn dates? Of course, but old-fashioned isn't always bad. I'd much rather that a 19-year-old be able to tell me when Franz Ferdinand was killed and why it mattered than that he or she be able to give a little disquisition on the different versions of realism, liberalism, and constructivism. There's nothing wrong with the "isms" but you have to be able to connect them to something (how else can I say this?) real.