Author: Helena

Good piece on Mearsheimer-Walt

There’s an excellent piece over at The Nation about the Mearsheimer-Walt article. It’s by Philip Weiss.
Weiss gives some significant background to the writing of the piece, which was originally commissioned– from Mearsheimer alone– by The Atlantic Monthly back in 2002. Mearsheimer brought in Walt, well understanding the kind of reaction he could expect to any objective treatment of the topic:

    “No way I would have done it alone,” Mearsheimer says. “You needed two people of significant stature to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication of the piece.”
    … “We understood there would be a significant price to pay,” Mearsheimer says. “We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged.” They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. “[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote,” managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic’s policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.
    “I believe they got cold feet,” Mearsheimer says. “They said they thought the piece was a terrible–they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened.” The writing as such can’t have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.

Weiss writes that, “in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha’aretz saying it was a ‘wake-up call’ to Americans about the relationship.” (I guess that would be this piece by Daniel Levy.)
In the US, by contrast, as Weiss notes…

    Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says the issue of Jewish influence is “so incendiary and so complicated that I don’t know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know that’s a problem. But there’s not enough space in any article you write to do this in a way that doesn’t cause more rancor. And so much of this paper was glib and poorly researched.”

(Of course, Fleshler doesn’t actually give any instances of this… )
Weiss writes,

    The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have peeled away from addressing the neocons’ Israel-centered view of foreign relations. “It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby,” Mary-Kay Wilmers, LRB‘s (Jewish) editor [who was of course the person who did decide to publish a shortened version of the piece], says with dismay. Certainly the old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns about Israel’s security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean was forced to correct himself after–horrors–calling for a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker’s courageous opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby’s powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive, mistrustful of Americans’ ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast Israel aside.
    Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. [New America Foundation scholar and writer Anatol] Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. “If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue–my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government–has so much difficulty publishing, it’s a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country.”

Anyway, as someone whose work and personal integrity have both been viciously attacked, and whose career and earning power have been harshly damaged over many years by various strands of the pro-Israel lobby, I can tell you that’s a good piece of writing– including both good reporting and solid argumentation– from Weiss there. Go on over and enjoy it. (And of course you can come back and discuss it here.)

Sistani returns to Iraqi politics

Many journos in the mainstream media had noted that Iraqi PM-designate Nouri al-Maliki went to Najaf Thursday to meet with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and that Sistani’s office afterwards issued a statement calling for the dismantling of the country’s powerful militias. (E.g., here.). But it has taken long-time Sistani-watcher Reidar Visser to– once again– help us put that visit into a broader and more informative context.
Having studied Sistani’s latest statement (bayan) carefully, Visser writes in this helpful piece of analysis on his website that,

    The breaking news from Najaf is … [that] Sistani indicates that he could once more become more involved in Iraqi politics: the religious leadership will “watch”, “keep an eye on” or “monitor” (the Arabic verb raqaba in form III) governmental performance in the future. This is quite unprecedented in Sistani’s scholarship. Sistani has earlier signalled attachment to ideas similar to those of the Persian constitutional revolution of the early 1900s, when Shiite clerics fought to acquire a supervisory role which would allow them to scrutinise the Islamic legitimacy of legislation passed by parliament. This, on the other hand, signals a possible extension of jurisdiction, to the point where direct criticism of the executive becomes theoretically possible.

This does indeed seem very important– both over the long term and in the more immediate future. I assume, for example, that the religious leadership– i.e., Sistani himself– will be monitoring the performance of the government in the crucial field of negotiating the speedy withdrawal of US and allied troops, among other things? (Sistani has long been on record as favoring a speedy and complete US withdrawal.)
In his latest analysis, Visser refers back to the much longer analysis of Sistani’s role that he published in mid-March. (JWN commentary and discussion on that, here.) In the earlier analysis, Visser had written that whereas between June 2003 and November 2004 Sistani had sustained an active (and extremely influential) behind-the-scenes engagement in Iraqi politics, after November 2004 that engagement seemed to drop off sharply.
In that context, therefore, perhaps we could say today that “The breaking news from Najaf is that there is breaking news from Najaf”?
I went to Sistani’s website and looked, for example, at the portal they have there to Arabic-language press comments about him. There were already four items up there with today’s date– showing that his people are tracking current media coverage of him quite closely. Before that, the earlier items they displayed had these dates: 4 April, 9 March (two items), 2 March, 22 February (two items), 20 February, 11 December (four items), 10 December, 9 December…
Well, there are many possible explanations for their having posted press items there so sporadically between Devember 11 and April 29. (Believe me, as a blogger, I could give you plenty of explanations for sporadicity!) But it is kind of notable how extremely disengaged they seemed to have been in that period surrounding and following the December 15 elections…
In his latest analysis, Visser discussed that period of quietism and Sistani’s apparent decision to end it thus:

    There are several possible reasons for this apparent resurgence of political activity on the part of Sistani. In early 2006, he kept silent during the divisive internal Shiite struggle over who should be the United Iraqi Alliance premier candidate. This seemed to indicate that he considered the matter to be outside his proper sphere of activity; indeed, had he wished to impose a candidate of his own he could easily have done so and the fractious Shiite alliance would have avoided a very public embarrassment and a delay in the political process that played directly into the hands of anti-Shiite forces and terrorists. But now, even though Sistani has increasingly sought to keep a certain distance from the United Iraqi Alliance, matters may have reached a point where he deems the deteriorating security situation to be a direct threat to the reputation of his religious leadership.

I would add to this that perhaps, in addition, Sistani saw the deteriorating security situation as harmful to something else he seems to hold very dear, namely the national unity of Iraq?
Anyway, demobilizing the country’s numerous militias will clearly be a very tough undertaking. In the Shia community there are the Badr Brigades, the Mahdi Army, Fadila, etc… In the Sunni community there are some smaller but often much more lethal armed organizations. And then, up in Kurdistan, there are the pesh merga, whose leaders have shown no readiness whatsoever to have them dissolved… And meantime, the US plan to build up the “national army” under US trainers and US political commissars has been continuing to founder. (In this intriguing piece in today’s WaPo, Jonathan Finer writes that US soldiers in the northern Iraq town of Hawijah “have developed a deep distrust of their Iraqi counterparts following a slew of incidents that suggest the troops they are training are cooperating with their enemies”– and gives many details of such incidents.)
Clearly, then, if there is to be a demobilization of the Iraqi militias– along with, as the best strategy for this, the integration of their operationally capable members into a new, unfied Iraqi security force– then this will have to come about as a result of intra-Iraqi political reconciliation, rather than through any (quite phantasmagorical) concept of “US leadership” of the process.
Can the Iraqis do this, despite all the blood spilled, and the evident depth of the political disagreements and the distrust among them? Yes. As our friends in South Africa and elsewhere have shown us, even opposing political and military forces that have been fighting each other for a long time and with great lethality and the imposition of truly terrible suffering can reach an agreement– provided it is based on a shared concept of national unity, national citizenship, and the broader national good… And yes, they can do this largely by themselves, without requiring the input or the professed “leadership” of meddling outsiders… Especially not, if the outsiders in question have a proven track record of having stirred up internal differences and tensions; and if they still quite fail to disavow having any longterm territorial or political ambitions of their own inside the country in question!
In this very necessary political process of intra-Iraqi reconciliation and the reconstruction of all the organs of Iraqi national power, Ayatollah Sistani’s active involvement can make a big difference for the better. (Especially if he also works hard to reassure the country’s Sunni Muslims about his role.) Given the attachment the Ayatollah has already shown in the past to the ideals of Iraqi national unity and national independence, I for one am delighted that he seems to have decided to re-engage with Iraqi politics.

    Once again I want to express appreciation to Reidar Visser for his work on this. Also, since I find the handwriting used in the Arabic text of Sistani’s latest bayan very difficult to read, I’d be extremely grateful if any JWN reader could read that last portion of the bayan, where Visser says he writes about the new “monitoring” role he envisions, and post an English-language translation for us all here. Thanks! Plus if anyone could point me to a crib-sheet for the Islamic dating system used in the bayanat (but not the press postings), that would also make my life easier… ~HC

Religions and genocide prevention: the discussion

I am still  reflecting on the rich experience I had yesterday,
at the lengthy panel discussion on “Religious Contribution to Genocide Prevention”
that my dear friend Andrea Bartoli organized as part of the
International Prayer for Peace.  Andrea, who teaches in the international-relations program at Columbia
University, is also the US representative of the Catholic lay organization
Sant’ Egidio, which organized the whole event.  I came to know Andrea
because of the role that he (and Sant’ Egidio) had played in helping broker
the Mozambique peace accord of 1992.

Highlights of yesterday’s panel, for me, included:

— hearing Qamar-ul Huda, a Muslim staff member of the
US Institute of Peace, talking about the role that Rwanda’s very small population
of Muslims played in helping to save lives during the genocide there in 1994;
hearing him reflect deeply and honestly on the phenomenon of seeing Muslims
kill Muslims in Darfur– and Muslims kill Christians and other non-Muslims,
earlier, in Southern Sudan; and seeing al-Qaeda leaders and others exploiting
Muslim teachings to incite violence and hatred; and listening to him talking
about the continuing need to engage in internal debate within Muslim religious
circles over interpretations of texts and the requirements of “correct” Muslim
practice…

— hearing him talk, to, about a decision he’d learned about that was made
recently by the heads of different religious organizations in the Iraqi city
of Samarra, to jointly rebuild the Askariya Mosque, that was largely
destroyed in the terrible sabotage attack of late February  (why have
I not heard about that elsewhere?)…

— hearing Andrea Bartoli reflect with parallel anguish and honesty
on the pain of having seen Catholics kill Catholics in Rwanda, and on having
come to understand the role the Catholic hierarchy played at a certain time
in buttressing colonial rule and colonial attitudes in Mozambique; and also,
talking about the need for continued efforts to engage in debate and work
inside one’s own religious tradition…

Continue reading “Religions and genocide prevention: the discussion”

Darfur: negotiators close to peace agreement?

African Union mediators who have been convening peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria, between representatives of the Sudanese government and the two main Darfuri opposition groups have put forward a draft peace agreement for consideration by the parties. (Hat-tip to Jonathan Edelstein for that news.)
The foregoing link goes to the Sudan Tribune‘s account of the content of much of the peace deal. That account says that the “Security” portion of it still has to be worked out. VOA’s account of the draft presented by AU chief mediator Salim Ahmed Salim says, however, that the draft contains provisions in all spheres, including security.
Reuters’ Estelle Shirbon writes in this very informative report that the AU-proposed draft includes a requirement that Khartoum disarm the Janjaweed militia.
As the April 30 target date for the final conclusion of the peace agreement approaches, there have been recent reports that both sides have been taking some worryingly escalatory moves.
IRIN reported from Nairobi today that,

    A recent spate of attacks in South Darfur State seems to constitute a new military offensive by the Sudanese government and puts the lives of tens of thousands of people at risk, regional analysts have warned.

And in Friday’s Christian Science Monitor, Katharine Houreld has a very troubling report saying that “various Chadian and Sudanese rebel groups” have been kidnapping men– and even some children– from the refugee camps strung along the Darfur-Chad border, and impressing them into their own forces.
Houreld writes:

    Although the exact number is unknown, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that around 4,700 refugees in Chadian camps were abducted last month. Most were taken in the span of three days in mid-March from the camps of Treguine and Bredjing, when unidentified rebels went from tent to tent looking for potential fighters, according to refugees and the UNHCR. Women who tried to cling to their men were beaten back mercilessly, say witnesses. Some men who resisted were tied up at knifepoint and carried off in vehicles. Many of those taken say they saw people tied up and left in the sun for days, or witnessed beatings. Some were killed.
    Among the dusty tents and straw shacks of the refugee camps, the clumps of frightened people do not even know who attacked them, although most of the refugees who escaped agree their kidnappers spoke with Sudanese accents. At least four rebel groups – some Sudanese, some Chadian – are now active along the chaotic border between the two countries.
    … Although the Darfur conflict has been marked by gross human rights violations and ethnic cleansing, Olivier Bercault of Human Rights Watch says the forced recruitment of fighters, including children, is a new development.
    …”The war is shifting gear and [the various rebel groups] need more people to fight,” said Bercault. “I’m very concerned about child recruitment. When you start with this, it’s like an addiction. It’s difficult to stop.”

In the United States, meanwhile, President Bush hurried to add his own, US sanctions to those that the UN imposed on four military leaders involved in the fighting in Darfur… And representatives from numerous US organizations have been preparing for Sunday’s rally to “Save Darfur”, though their “Unity Statement” still doesn’t tell us how they propose doing this …
(Oh, and actor George Clooney has gotten into the action, too. In a newsclip he and his father made that I saw tonight, the dad– described as “a journalist”– got some very basic political facts about the situation wrong, referring to the janjaweed as “insurgents”, which is precisely what they are not… Which doesn’t give me much confidence in the quality of the duo’s analysis.)
I hope the peace talks in Abuja can really succeed, and the rebuilding process that they envision can really take hold. That is far and away the best way to end the commission of atrocities in Darfur and start rebuilding a rule-of-law-based society there.
But what about the reports of the recent escalatory acts? Let’s hope they were just one last push that each side was making, trying to win one last spot of negotiating advantage, before they both sign onto the peace deal…
Another interesting question: Have the UN’s recent imposition of targeted sanctions and other political pressures from outside helped to nudge the government toward accepting the peace agreement? If so, that’s good.
One last point. If the parties do sign onto the peace, then surely the main impetus in the “international community” has to be towards supporting this peace and giving it the very best possible chance to succeed. Including, obviously, by funding it. But also, by agreeing to be led by the AU negotiators regarding questions of how perpetrators of the conflict-era atrocities should be dealt with.
I certainly hope the AU has been making robust plans for the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration back into their home communities (DDR) of the vast bulk of the former fighters on both sides of the conflict… DDR is by far the best way to help rebuild societies torn apart by civil war.

Iraq: Maliki’s first days

Zal Khalilzad, the US viceroy in Baghdad, has been putting his own spin on his failure to break the unity of the UIA bloc by speaking to the WaPo’s David Ignatius and claiming it was a victory for his diplomacy, after all.
Ignatius wrote that Khalilzad told him that “the Iranians ‘pressured everyone for [former UIA candidate Ibrahim] Jafari to stay'”, whereas the reputation of the now-confirmed UIA candidate for PM, Nouri (formerly Jawad) al-Maliki is of “someone who is independent of Iran.”
Yeah, right. Whatever. But by casting matters in that light, Zal is able to keep alive his reputation in Washington as someone who– to quote Ignatius– “has been a match for the Iraqis in his wily political wrangling.” As opposed to, for example, being seen as someone who tried hard but failed to break the basic unity of the UIA bloc.
David does concede, however, that, “Maliki is a tough Arab nationalist who will work with the United States in the short run but will want the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq. His authentic Iraqi credentials could help pull the country together.”
Meanwhile, I see that Maliki has faced one challenge already: He had to turn up at a hastily arranged meeting with Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld who “just happened” to make a swing through Baghdad today.
That report, from AP, notes this:

    Rumsfeld said the United Nations Security Council resolution that forms the legal basis for U.S. operations to stabilize and rebuild Iraq is to expire at the end of the year so there will have to be talks with the Iraqi government on arrangements beyond this year.

Right. Negotiating the terms and timetable of the US withdrawal from their country really is one of the main responsibilities this new Iraqi government will have. The other two are tying down the last unfinished details of the country’s Constitution— and the small matter of governing the country.
First, though, Maliki has to form his government. I imagine that trying to make sure he understands Washington’s views on that topic was the main reason Condi and Rummy rushed over so fast to meet him.

Darfur: peacemaking or partisan finger-pointing?

The NYT reported today that the UN Security Council yesterday voted to impose personalized sanctions on four named individuals suspected of involvement in the atrocities in Darfur.
Interestingly, the four persons sanctioned comprise two leaders affiliated with the Khartoum government: “Maj. Gen. Gaffar Mohamed Elhassan, a Sudanese Air Force officer accused of helping the government-backed janjaweed militias commit atrocities; [and] Sheik Musa Hilal, chief of an Arab tribe and a janjaweed leader”– along with two leaders with the anti-government forces: “Adam Yacub Shant, a commander of Sudanese Liberation Army forces that broke a cease-fire to attack government troops; and Gabril Abdul Kareem Badri, the commander of another rebel force, which kidnapped and threatened African Union troops.”
Is the Security Council (and perhaps also the ICC, with which it has been working on the Darfur atrocities) perhaps getting something right this time, in terms of the political “balance” of these sanctions?
The Council’s position stands in notable contrast to that adopted by nearly all the mainstream media and political activists here in the US, who have stayed almost completely silent about the atrocities reportedly committed by the anti-government militias– the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement– while hyping up those committed by pro-government forces.
In a report on BBC t.v. the other day, I saw even the estimable Orla Guerin fall into that trap. She spoke breathlessly about refugees “streaming away” from a government-attacked village– while in the frame behind her all you could see was a bedraggled group of around six people making their way mournfully from one side of the screen to the other. She also stated– incorrectly– that the African Union troops in Darfur “have no mandate to protect civilians”. And at a point when a group of armed anti-government fighters were visible in a Jeep quite close behind her she made no mention of their presence or of the well-documented accusations that the anti-government forces are also accused of atrocities.
I note that many Jewish-American organizations are among those that have joined the (increasingly politicized, anti-Khartoum) US campaign to “Save Darfur” that was launched recently by Elie Wiesel and that is organizing a big march in DC this Sunday. If you go to the campaign’s Unity Statement, you will see descriptions of atrocities committed by government and pro-government forces, but no mention at all of violence by anti-government forces.
Here’s what it says:

    The emergency in Sudan’s western region of Darfur presents the starkest challenge to the world since the Rwanda genocide in 1994. A government-backed Arab militia known as Janjaweed has been engaging in campaigns to displace and wipe out communities of African tribal farmers.
    Villages have been razed, women and girls are systematically raped and branded, men and boys murdered, and food and water supplies targeted and destroyed. Government aerial bombardments support the Janjaweed by hurling explosives as well as barrels of nails, car chassis and old appliances from planes to crush people and property. Tens of thousands have died. Well over a million people have been driven from their homes, and only in the past few weeks have humanitarian agencies gained limited access to some of the affected region…

What a problematic statement. Firstly, it completely ignores the horrendous conflict-related suffering in eastern DRC, where more than four million people have already died in the past eight years, as a result of conflict stirred up largely by the Rwandan (post-genocide) government or by the west’s poster-boy in Uganda, Pres. Museveni.
… And the last sentence I quoted from the statement is now quite out of date and should be updated or dropped.
… Note, too, the way in which the “Unity Statement” tries to make the conflict seem quite simply to be one between “Arabs” and “Africans”, and thereby to whip up the anti-Arab sentiment that lies very close to the surface of much US discourse; whereas, as best I understand it, the Darfur conflict is much, much more complex than that.
… And finally, the statement makes no mention at all of what the signatories believe should be done in response to the violence and suffering in Darfur. This is presumably because the signatory groups failed to agree on this? Some people here in the US have been urging the intervention of NATO forces “to save the Darfuris”– a military campaign on the model of Kosovo, which would similarly weaken the central government involved, i.e., Khartoum. Others urge a more pacific, multilateral approach. But by waving the bloodied garments of the victims of pro-government violence, while making no mention of the victims of anti-government violence, this campaign will surely serve only to whip up anti-Khartoum feeling.
My own prescription for what should be done? Support peace efforts in these three troubled provinces of Sudan to the greatest degree possible.
Atrocities like genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes always (or nearly always) occur in the context of an ongoing armed conflict. The situation in Darfur is certainly no exception to that rule.
I share the angst of all those in the global rights community who are appalled at the grotesque, man-inflicted suffering in Darfur. But the way to bring those atrocities to a lasting end is to bring to a lasting end the conflict that has spawned them. By contrast, engaging in a campaign of one-sided, blame-hurling accusations against only one party to the conflict seems like a sure recipe for keeping the situation inflamed.
That’s why I’m really heartened by the even-handed approach adopted by the Security Council.
By the way, the ICC– to which the Security Council last April made a formal referral of the situation in Darfur– has not yet named its own list of indictees, as you can see if you check the documents available through this ICC web portal on the topic. But I wonder if the prosecutor there consulted with the Security Council members on who should be the targets of these sanctions?

Death of world’s foremost nuclear proliferator

Yuval Ne’eman, the nuclear physicist who was the theoretical father of the Israel nuclear weapons program, died in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, aged 81.
(Its political father was none other than Mr. Nobel Peace Laureate Shimon Peres, author of the Qana massacre which occurred almost exactly ten years ago now, in April 1996.)
Ne’eman was also the founder of the viciously territorial maximalist Israeli party Tehiya. He served three terms in Israel’s Knesset for Tehiya, during which time he was a member of three governments, usually having the “Science” portfolio.
And just to demonstrate the connivance with which the US authorities viewed the Israeli nuclear program we can see that in the mid-1970s, Ne’eman was a professor at the University of Texas, which still proudly claims him as an emeritus.
My gosh! Do I smell double standards?

The International Prayer for Peace, 2006

Wednesday and Thursday this week, the Community of Sant’ Egidio, an international Catholic lay organization, will be bringing a wonderful pro-peace event to Washington DC: the International Prayer for Peace: “Religions and Cultures: the Courage of Dialogue”.
I am honored to have been invited by my friend Andrea Bartoli, a Sant’ Egidio representative in New York, to take part in a discussion he’s organizing Thursday morning as part of this, titled “Religious Contribution to Genocide Prevention.”
It should be a weighty discussion. There will be an Armenian bishop, someone from Great Rabbinate of Israel, a Methodist priest from Nigeria, a Muslim representative, and someone from the Swedish Foreign Ministry who works on genocide prevention full-time.
I am excited at the thought of there being a large, Catholic-led peace event right there in Washington DC. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, I sorely missed the strength, wisdom, and political muscle that US Catholics could and should have brought to antiwar movement… They were consumed at that time with the challenge of dealing with the painful legacies of their years of institutionalized child abuse….
But now, maybe we can see them come more strongly into the field of pro-peace activism, led by the wonderful people of Sant’ Egidio. I was glad to see that the Archbishop of Washington DC will be opening the event. Excellent.

Governance crisis early-warning tools compared

The latest (May/June 2006) issue of Foreign Policy mag– right, the one with the letters and discussion about my recent war-crimes courts article– landed on our front stoop last week. It has a seductively graphicized nine-page layout presenting the results of the 2nd annual “Failed States Index” that FP has produced in cooperation with the (also DC-based) Fund for Peace.
Two of these pages carry a large world map, with “Critical” (i.e., crisis-ridden) states in burgundy; “In danger” states in orange; “Borderline” states in yellow, etc. Well, that’s most of the states in the world they have colored there. “Stable” and “Most stable” states are in shades of grey.
What does it mean, I wonder, to say that (for example) Mexico is a “borderline” state?
Actually, one aspect of this color-coding system really aroused my distrust. There are exactly 20 countries in each color zone… Either this is an amazing coincidence, or the colors are assigned according to purely “batch-processing” (i.e. on-a-curve) criteria, rather than representing some objective judgment made about their degree of criticality.
… So then, you turn the page and discover the impressive array of numbers on which these rankings are based. Here, all 60 states in the “colored” categories are assessed according to 12 “Indicators of instability”. Judged most “unstable” are Sudan (total score for instability = 112.3 out of a possible 120), DRC (110.1), Ivory Coast (109.2), and then Iraq (109.0).
On this scoreboard, US-“liberated” Iraq romps home ahead of (i.e., more unstable than) Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia, Haiti, etc.
Interesting.
I, however, am equally interested in the methodology used here. At the end of the piece, they say you can find out more about the methodology if you go either to FP’s website, or to that of the Fund for Peace. I totally couldn’t find anything related to the topic at the FP site. (Though they do have a jaunty and engaging new blog over there, written by staffers. Also, now, a clean online version of my recent piece on war-crimes courts.)
But info on the methodology of the “Failed States Index”? Nope.
I went to the FFP site, and found this page, which is apparently about the 2005 Failed States Index… So through that one, you can arrive at this page, which provides a portal to definitions of each of the 12 “indicators of instability” and shows how you aggregate the scores, derive trend-lines over time, etc.
The “next step” after that one is interesting. It declares quite straightforwardly that,

    For sustainable security, a state should have the following Core Five:
    * A competent domestic police force and corrections system
    * An efficient and functioning civil service or professional bureaucracy
    * An independent judicial system that works under the rule of law
    * A professional and disciplined military accountable to a legitimate civilian government
    * A strong executive/legislative leadership capable of national governance

That’s where you can see how present-day Iraq performs so abysmally. I mean, you can have all the elections and referenda and coalitional horsetrading that you want in a country– but if the “government” thus formed is not linked to any actually functioning institutions of governance, then it doesn’t mean very much, does it?
So the FFP’s “methodology” is called “CAST”, for Conflict Assessment System Tool. Over the past few years, I have made quite a lot of use of a “rival” governance-crisis assessment tool– the one that Swisspeace pioneered, which is called “FAST”.
FAST uses a slightly different approach. Swisspeace uses it for only a limited number of countries. But for those, they have tried (not always successfully) to produce a quarterly rating. What they count are just a few broad categories of things, falling into these categories:

    — Conflictive and Cooperative Domestic Events
    — Conflictive Domestic Non-government and Government Events
    –Country Stability and Cooperative International Events

They provide graphs of the trends for these over time. Equally importantly, they also provide a narrative explanation of what we see on the graph, with a quick interpretation of the main trends in state of the country’s governance. I find this very useful– though I realize that any user is very dependent on the experience, integrity, and analytical skill of the expert who provides the narrative each quarter.
As I remarked here on JWN a while back, the whole current wave of enthusiasm for “political early warning” tools of these kinds dates back to the Rwanda crisis of 1994. The other main one that I know of is the International Crisis Group’s “CrisisWatch“, which is produced monthly. From my perspective, I find that the least useful of the three.
In general, it’s excellent that all that work is being done. We can now know to within a whisker that North Korea is 0.6 degrees more unstable than Burundi… But still, I wonder: once we know all these things, what can we do about them? That is surely the problem! Are we going, for example, to stop exporting arms to these countries? Are we going to invest huge amounts in building in such states decent education and health-care systems? Are we going to change the terms of trade so that farmers and other producers in low-income countries have free and fair access to EU and US markets? Are we going to beat our own swords into plowshares and demonstrate to people that we know that there are better ways to resolve problems than through militarism and violence?
Well, are we?
If we don’t take those further, quite necessary steps, then it strikes me there is a degree almost of self-aggrandizing voyeurism involved if all we are prepared to do is to sit here in the safe, secure west daintily charting how dysfunctional all “those peoples”‘ countries have become…

Reidar Visser’s book on failed south-Iraqi separatism

I wanted to wait till I’d read Reidar Visser’s book on the pursuit and failure of a project for south-Iraqi separatism in the early 1920s, before I posted a short review here of it.
But here I am, stuck in Philadelphia airport in a rainstorm, forced to wait for a flight home tomorrow, work schedule unavoidably postponed… So I thought I’d post the links to the book for y’all here, at least. And then later, after I get reunited with the copy of the book that he sent me, and that’s sitting at my home back in Virginia, and get back into reading it– then, I can write something substantive here about it.
What’s most interesting about the book, from a current-affairs perspective, is that what Reidar’s writing about is an earlier attempt to form a separate, Shiite-dominated, south-Iraqi state– and about its failure.
I am eager to get to the point in his narrative where he describes the denouement there: Why did the attempt fail? But sadly, here I am, stuck in a rainbound airport and separated from the book.
So anyway, go buy your own copy! Here, depending where you live, is how:
— American Amazon
— British Amazon
— German publisher (English-language text)