Category: Global affairs

Failed States Index & “Failing the Faithful”

The July-August issue of Foreign Policy magazine features the 3rd installment of the annual “Failed States Index,” (FSI) a tool intended to identify the world’s “weakest links.” A project of “The Fund for Peace” and Foreign Policy (via its parent, the Carnegie Council for International “Peace”), this year’s top five “winners” are:

Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Chad, and Zimbabwe.

This year’s FSI report covers 177 states, considerably more than the first two studies. Africa is well “represented” among “top” failed states, as are those in the Middle East and West Asia. Among the latter:

Afghanisan #8,
Pakistan #12,
Uzbekistan #22,
Yemen #24,
Lebanon #28,
Egypt #36,
Turkmenistan # 43

Iran, compared to its neighbors, comes in “relatively” well, with an FSI rank at #57. Israel comes in at 67, though no explanatory notes are provided to explain if “Israel” includes the occupied territories or not. “Palestine” is not covered. Conveniently, the study only provides country notes for the first 60 states.
With considerable hesitation, I concede that such reports may be useful in trimming away ideological biases while equipping citizens and policymakers alike to discern what areas of the world may be suffering from, or sliding toward, critical instability. Not just dangers to themselves, states on the verge of implosion “threaten the progress and stability of countries half a world away.” (Or so we say. But do we really believe it? That’s another subject.)
Yet this study’s utility, at least to me, slips when it starts with an “elastic” multi-functional definition of a “failed state.”

“A state that is failing has several attributes. One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community. The 12 indicators cover a wide range of elements of the risk of state failure, such as extensive corruption and criminal behavior, inability to collect taxes or otherwise draw on citizen support, large-scale involuntary dislocation of the population, sharp economic decline, group-based inequality, institutionalized persecution or discrimination, severe demographic pressures, brain drain, and environmental decay. States can fail at varying rates through explosion, implosion, erosion, or invasion over different time periods.”

To clarify a bit more, the “Failed States Index” is derived from an aggregation of 12 indicators of state performance:

1. Demographic pressures (e.g. too many people, compared to resources);
2. Refugees (desperate people on the move);
3. Group grievances (people hating each other);
4. Human Flight (brain drain);
5. Uneven development (too many poor);
6. Sudden economic collapse;
7. Deligitimization of the State;
8. Public Services Deterioration;
9. Rule of Law (lack thereof) and Human Rights Violations;
10. Security Confusion (states w/n states?);
11 Factionalism of elites;
12 External Penetration (foreign meddling)

One could get an honest “headache” deconstructing the definitions of each of these FSI indicators and numerous internal contradictions therein. I’ll spare readers, save for the worst.

Continue reading “Failed States Index & “Failing the Faithful””

The US, the UN, and the world: The De Soto report

The London Guardian yesterday published the 52-page “End of Mission Report” written by the UN’s recently retired envoy to the Middle East peace talks, Alvaro De Soto.
De Soto reportedly confirmed the authenticity of the text, but said it had been intended only for inside-the-UN consumption. It contains his scathing criticism of the way that, in regard to Israeli-Arab diplomacy, the UN has subordinated its unique global legitimacy and position to the diktats of the US and Israel.
In para 132, he writes:

    Unfortunately, the international community [i.e., in this context, the UN bureaucracy], through a policy hastily laid down, has gone along with Israeli rejectionism, making it very difficult to climb down even if Israel decided to do so.

I haven’t yet had time to read the whole report. Guardian journos who have done so have produced three accounts of its highlights (1, 2, and 3), and the paper’s editors have also penned this editorial on De Soto’s charges and the whole tragic mess into which Israel and the US’s actions have helped to drive the current situation in the OPTs.
Attentive JWN readers are doubtless aware that my own strongly stated position is that, despite its many flaws, the UN must take– and must be allowed and empowered to take– the leading role in conducting the global-scale diplomacy that is now so sorely needed in both the Israeli-Arab sphere and the US-Iraqi sphere. (I laid out these argument most recently in, respectively, this May 10 CSM column, and this column in today’s CSM.)
Of course, there is a major problem in both these projects: that is, that in all matters Middle Eastern the UN bureaucracy– which is answerable in the first instance to the Security Council, and only at a broader level to the annual “General Assembly” of all the world’s nations– has indeed, increasingly throughout the past 15 or 20 years, subordinated itself to the whims and diktats of one nuclear-armed superpower, the US, and that power’s Middle Eastern sidekick, Israel.
For the sake of global stability, and if humanity is to have any chance whatever of building a humane, egalitarian world-political system in which disputes are addressed using means other than brute force, this has to change. In the May column, I argued– re the Israeli-Palestinian arena– that, “Global stability can no longer be held hostage to the claims of the Israeli settlers.”
In today’s column (which was written and edited before the publication of De Soto’s indirectly related text) I wrote,

    Any orderly US withdrawal from Iraq requires a leading role from the United Nations. It also requires a more capable and empowered UN than the one we see today, and this requires that the whole US political system undertake a serious recommitment both to the world body and to the egalitarian global values it embodies.
    These tasks form the main challenge for America in the months ahead. The longer the American public and US leaders postpone dealing with them, the higher will mount the casualty toll in Iraq – among both Iraqis and US troops – along with the risks the Iraqi caldron poses to regional and world stability.

Now, the publication of De Soto’s detailed and very well expressed insider’s account of exactly how the US and Israel have, in their relationship with the UN, subverted the norms and ideals on which the world body has been based since its creation in 1945, allows us to see more clearly than ever before many key dimensions of the challenge we all– both US citizens and citizens of other nations– face as we try to bring the relationship between the US and the rest of the world back into a better and more productive balance.
At this stage in the history of our fragile planet here, I don’t think that this challenge can be avoided very much longer.

Violence begetting violence in the Middle East

One of the truest teachings of the Dalai Lama and of other nonviolence activists throughout history is that the use of violence to attain one’s goals will always cause more violence to cascade down into the future. And one of the most tragic things about gross inter-group power imbalances such as the one the world has known since the dawn of European-origin imperialism is that systems of violence initiated and maintained by the powerful nearly always end up resonating with particular harshness among those groups excluded from exercizing any meaningful power on the world stage…
Hence the fact that during the time of “White” colonization and colonial rule in Africa or the Americas, the vast majority of those killed by direct physical violence or through the imposition of damaging systems of administrative or ‘structural’ violence were the indigenes of the continents being colonized, not the colonizers… Hence, too, the fact that a large proportion of those indigenes killed by physical violence were killed in conflicts with their fellow indigenes— conflicts that were very frequently stirred up by the colonial powers, who would also systematically inject into them significant amounts of high-lethality weaponry.
It is so tragic to see, in these early years of the third millennium of the “common era”– that is, the era that is dated from the presumed year of the birth of the Middle East’s prime teacher of nonviolence, Jesus of Nazareth– the return to the Middle East of those older dynamics of violence begetting violence, and to see once again that the people on the receiving end of the killingwho are quite disproportionately those who were already impoverished and marginalized from power.
It is depressing, too, to see the seeds of further resentment, killing, and hatred being sown on a daily basis among the peoples of Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Iraq by the violence that has settled like a blood-sucking vulture onto their nations, pulling so many people into its fanatical grip.
But what can we expect when the “deciders” in the most powerful nation on the earth have already, for the past five-plus years, turned resolutely away from the use of the many, many nonviolent means that are available to such a powerful nation, and have stuck instead to the employment of extremely lethal means of violence to win their goals?
The violence employed by the US administration in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past five years has not “succeeded” in the goal of winning any increase in the security of the US citizenry. On the contrary, it has created and helped to incubate nihilistic, ‘cosmopolitan’ terrorists in far greater numbers than existed back in August 2001. But what it has “succeeded” in doing is spreading the seeds of violence in a truly viral fashion to so many already poor, hard-pressed, and marginalized places around the world– including Somalia, along with the nations of the Middle East.
All of us in the world need to take responsibility for working together to halt these now-spinning cycles of violence.
As U.S. citizen, I need to play my part to bring my government away from the truly major role it’s been playing in spreading violence around the world. I know that in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and everywhere else where violence currently brews, there are citizens and political leaders who yearn to turn their communities and their countries away from the path of violence… But how much more powerful those nonviolence proponents elsewhere could be if the leaders of the most powerful country in the world would step up and say something simple and profound like, “The military means we turned to after 9/11 have not worked. We deeply regret the damage that we havecaused. And now we invite all the peoples of the world to a new peace conference where we can discuss how humankind can exit this phase of devastating violence and truly strengthen of the world’s mechanisms and capabilities in the field of nonviolent conflict resolution.”
And where are the voices of international conscience, meanwhile? Where is the new U.N. Secretary-General? Where are the leaders of the the world’s other, non-US “big powers”? Why are they not all alike speaking out and saying that the tragedies of violence in the Middle East and elsewhere must be halted, the politics of accusation and counter-accusation laid aside, and a new way sought?

Global security after Iraq, part 2

In part 1
of this series on JWN, and in my contribution to this follow-up
post, I argued:

  1. That the failure of the Bushists’ 2003 project in Iraq will be
    more momentous– both for the security system in the Middle East and,
    crucially, for the broader global security system– than the retreat that Britain undertook
    from a lead “security role” east of Suez, in the
    years after the Suez aggression of 1956.
  2. That even now, 18 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there
    has still not been enough clear thinking about what kind of global
    “security system/structure” should replace the “Cold War system” that
    prevailed for the preceding 40 years; and in the absence of such clear
    thinking the arguments of the “liberal hawks” in Western countries came
    to exercise undue sway.
  3. That the liberal hawks had a notable influence, along with others, in making the Bushists’ 2003 invasion of
    Iraq possible.  And now that the failure of the invasion project has become so
    evident, we should subject the arguments and assumptions of the liberal
    hawks to the same kind of rigorous interrogation which many of us have
    already applied to those whose pro-invasion advocacy
    sprang from less “liberal” motivations. Why did the liberal hawks’
    project in Iraq go so horribly wrong?  Those of us who were
    anti-war from the get-go, and who are also very serious about human
    rights, need to engage in a serious (though still friendly) way
    with the liberal hawks if we are to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy
    of Iraq.
  4. That though we don’t yet know the details, political/strategic
    modalities, or full extent of the diminution, post-Iraq, of the US’s
    ability to pursue the kind of globally aggressive unilateralism
    described in Pres. Bush’s 2002 National
    Security Strategy    , still, the fluidity of the years ahead gives all
    of us who are serious about building a more egalitarian and peaceful
    world a distinctive new opportunity to advocate successfully for our
    ideas– provided we
    can start getting our concepts sketched out and injected into the
    global public discourse pretty soon.

In the present post, I want to look at one very promising proposal for
the kind of changes we “westerners” (“northerners”?) need to make in
the way we think about and “do” global security.  This is the
proposal that Paul Rogers and two of his colleagues at the Oxford
Research Group– Chris Abbott and John Sloboda– have recently
published in the form of a small book titled Beyond Terror:
The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World.   (I wrote
very briefly about Paul, and the main ideas of the “Beyond Terror”
book, here.)

“Beyond Terror” is very clearly argued, readable, and short.  I
urge as many of you as possible to read the authors’ whole text. 
It is written mainly for a UK audience, but that doesn’t impact
materially on any of the points made, except in the section that lists
“Further Resources” for readers who want to engage in advocacy on these
issues.

The nub of the book’s argument is that “Beyond” the threat of
international terrorism that leaders like Bush and Blair have been
focusing on (playing up?) for the past 5.5 years, humankind today faces four other distinct challenges to
its wellbeing, or perhaps even to its survival.

The authors talk about a total of five “threats”.  Personally, I
prefer to refrain from participating in the fearmongering discourse of
“threats” and recast these as “challenges”.  So here is the
authors’ list of the four additional (i.e., not “terrorist”)
challenges, taken in the order of the chapters in which they are
described:

Continue reading “Global security after Iraq, part 2”

Global security after Iraq

Part 1.

When I was in Oxford this past March, my wise friend and colleague Avi
Shlaim reminded me that back in February 2003 he had been one of
several historians who predicted that George Bush’s military adventure
in Iraq would turn out no better than the analogous military adventure
that Britain, France, and Israel all launched against Egypt, in Suez,
in 1956.

It is worth re-reading the whole of
this excellent article that the Guardian’s Ian Kershaw published
in February 2003.  In it, Kershaw compiled the judgments that Avi and eleven
other historians offered on the question of whether what  Bush (and Blair)
were facing in Iraq was another “Munich”-type challenge, or the first
act of a Suez-type debacle. 

Avi was firmly in the “It’s a Suez” camp.  Here’s what he wrote
then about British PM Anthony Eden’s decision-making in 1956:

Eden thought that he was applying the
lessons of the 1930s in
dealing with Gamal Abdel Nasser and the result was a fiasco that
brought his own career crashing down. Eden demonised Nasser,
personalised the issues, and went to the length of colluding with
France and Israel with the aim of knocking Nasser off his perch. The
chiefs of staff had deep misgivings about the war. One senior officer
exclaimed: “The prime minister has gone bananas. He has ordered us to
attack Egypt!” Britain attacked Egypt without the authority of the UN
and it was roundly condemned for its aggression. There is, however, one
important difference between 1956 and the current crisis. Over Suez,
the US upheld the authority of the UN and led the pack against the
law-breakers. Today, the Bush administration is hell-bent on the use of
force to topple Saddam, with or without UN sanction.

He also, quite rightly, noted this:

Continue reading “Global security after Iraq”

Highlights (and some low points) of my trip

This was another, most amazing trip. I do truly feel blessed to be able to travel so freely in the world and to have a profession that allows me to meet some really intriguing people from all kinds of walks of life, to have large numbers of really thought-provoking experiences– and to have quite a high degree of freedom in choosing where I go and what I do.
One of the main things I valued, being in the Middle East for five or six weeks, was the ability to be so close to Iraq and to talk at first hand to a number of people who are very directly affected by the situation there. Another was the ability to put my finger on the pulse of other big political developments in the region: to meet some Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt (here and here) and talk to large numbers of other people there; and to talk to policymakers and others in both Syria and Jordan.
Then, when I went to London in March, one thing that struck me almost immediately was how much closer London and the rest of Europe are than the US– both geographically and also in other ways, too– to the political developments in both the Middle East and all of Africa. In London, people I talked to would just casually say something like “I might go down to Southern Sudan next week to do a bit of research, though I haven’t made my mind up yet”, or “Oh, I’m sorry I can’t make it to the meeting tomorrow because I’ll be in Beirut, but how about two days after that?” … Whereas from the US, to go to either of those destinations or any place else in the Middle East or Africa requires not just that much longer of a trip but also much, much more advance planning.
My recollection is that the longer advance planning was also there for trips to those places from Europe, back when I was last living in London in 1981. But air transport and other kinds of links have evidently proliferated… So you just feel a lot closer to those places in Europe than you do in the US; and I think that has an effect. Maybe it means it is that much harder for Europeans to view those parts of the world in the purely instrumental, and often fairly exploitative, way that many Americans do? I don’t know.
Anyway, being in Europe also had its own distinct high points for me. Last week, I had the huge pleasure of visiting– at last– the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bradford University, in Yorkshire. It is the most amazing place, with some 40 fulltime faculty members, and a number of affiliated research centers, including one that deals in detail with issues of peacemaking and peacebuilding in Africa. I spent the best part of the morning on Tuesday with four of the faculty members at the Africa Center– three of them originally African nationals and one originally Portuguese; and all with immense amounts of expertise on the affairs of the continent.
One of the main reasons I’ve been wanting to go to Bradford for so long is because I wanted to meet Paul Rogers, a past Chair of the Department who has thought long, hard, and very creatively about the “big” issues of the structures of global security. Paul writes a weekly assessment of the global security situation for Open Democracy; and he also– in addition to still teaching at Bradford– works with a small conflict-resolution organization called the Oxford Research Group.
He and I spent three hours or so talking in his office there on Wednesday. He has recently published a book (co-authored with two colleagues from ORG) titled Beyond Terror: The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World. We talked quite a lot about some of the big themes from the book. Paul has developed a strong basic analysis of the approach the rich countries of the world have been using until now to try to structure global security. He calls it “the Control Paradigm”. But now, he says, the Control Paradigm is not working; and it needs to be replaced by what he calls the “Sustainable Security Paradigm.”
I think that his critique and prescription are fairly similar to what I have written about here quite a lot, though where he says “Sustainable Security” I have tended to focus more on the need for an approach that actively affirms the core value of human equality… So maybe I would call my approach more one of “Inclusive Security”– hah! there, I just gave it a name, somewhat belatedly…
Anyway, one of the advantages of Paul’s name for his approach, as I see it, is that it creates a strong conceptual link to the idea of sustainable economic development as such…
Regarding development/economic issues, he and his co-authors there place quite a lot of emphasis on rapidly emerging “threat” (if one likes to talk in those terms) posed to all of humanity by large-scale and rapid climate change. And as the global climate does change, it is people in the marginalized, very low-income communities of the world who will suffer the most… Certainly not the world’s “rich ten percent”, who can doubtless find ways to limit the amount they (we) suffer…
But the point is that everyone will be suffering, to some degree or another– whether directly, from the effects of desertification, tidal surges, etc, or indirectly from the mass migrations and other manifestations of mayhem that will soon enough engulf the world… And Paul’s point is that the “rich ten percent” can no longer– even now– address the threats they face purely through application of the old “Control Paradigm.”
On a related note, when I arrived home on Friday, I found on our doormat a copy of this study of the lessons of last summer’s 33-day war against Israel-Lebanon war, produced by Ron Tira for the Israeli institute formerly known as the Jaffee Centre for Security Studies. (What happened regarding the name there, I wonder? Did the Jaffee family suddenly rescind a previous offer of longterm funding? Or maybe, given the often slightly dove-ish nature of the center’s publications, the Jaaffees objected to that instead, and insisted their family’s name be stripped off…)
Anyway, Tira’s work is intriguingly titled The Limitations of Standoff Firepower-Based Operations. But sadly, his main conclusion seems to be a very old-fashioned, “Control Paradigm” one. Namely, that, “At least for the foreseeable future, only the military that plants its flag on the enemy’s hilltop is the victor.”
More on Tira’s work, later. (Perhaps.)
Anyway, I just want to note that the Quaker peace scholar Adam Curle was the main moving force behind creating Bradford’s great Department of Peace Studies, back about 30 years ago. Quakers and Quaker-symps have also established a great Center for Peace and Reconciliation Studies in Coventry, UK, that I was also lucky enough to visit, earlier during my trip.
So anyway, the high points of the trip definitely also included the ability, once again, to experience modern-day societies structured along basically social-democratic lines that work, and work for the most part very well. We spent a day in Lille last weekend with our friend Laurence Mascart, who came over from Belgium to visit us. She has two young children– and from the age of two and a half, there in Belgium, her kids have full-day places in the local, state-funded ecole maternelle (nursery school.) Europeans have nothing of the angst of health-insurance woes that some portions of most US families have. And the motor-car may be popular in many European countries, but it is certainly not “king of the road” in the way that it is in the US. I had the immense pleasure of being a pedestrian in London for five whole weeks, and loved every minute of it. (We only rented a car for Easter weekend, to get down to Dorset with our three fairly cumbersome suitcases.)
And then, there is the support for the arts in all the European countries! In every small town we went to in France there seemed to be a lavish, well-stocked, and entirely state-funded Museum of the Fine Arts. In the UK, even the excellent London Review of Books gets a subsidy from the Arts Council. (H’mm, I see they have another intriguing piece on the Scottish-English Question.)
What a sharp contrast all those aspects of European life pose to life in the highly individualistic, chronically “gummint”-fearing US of A.
But while in Europe I also saw– and chronicled here on JWN, in part– the degree to which the enormous wealth of most West European countries had been built on colonial takings and the unpaid labor of enslaved persons. (Last weekend, in the beautiful “La Piscine” museum in Roubaix, just north of Lille, I was really disturbed to see them openly flaunting one piece in their collection: a large, late 19th-century oil painting of “Slaves for sale”, which portrayed two voluptuous young women, one a nearly completely nude light-skinned person, and the other, more covered, of darker complexion… What are they doing, hanging the piece like that, under that title, with no further commentary, except inviting the viewers to join in the visual rape and objectification of the two women pictured??)
But yes, here’s the bottom line: if the security of the world is to be built on a model that truly values each human person equally, all of us in the rich, control-seeking parts of the world have a lot of changes to make…

Depends what you mean by ‘Honor’…

Blogger Will Bunch had a good post recently analyzing the statement Unca Dick Cheney made recently, namely that,

    “We want to complete the mission [in Iraq], we want to get it done right, and we want to return with honor.”

Bunch quite appropriately recalls the eerily similar use that Richard Nixon made of the same term “honor” in his presidential nomination acceptance speech in August 1968.
Bunch writes,

    For Richard Nixon, “peace with honor” was not synonymous with “peace.”
    It meant “war.” A lot of war.
    Not long after taking office in 1969, Nixon — without authorization from Congress — initiated a secret air campaign against enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia that dropped 2,750,000 short tons of bombs, more than the alllies used during all of World War II. He later undertook a massive bombing campaign of Hanoi and Haiphong, and his efforts didn’t bring much peace on the homefront, culminating in the slaughter of four bystanders during a 1970 protest at Kent State.
    Finally, in January 1973, Nixon declared “peace with honor.”
    There are three things you should know about this.
    1) When Nixon gave that speech at the GOP convention, it had been 1,467 [days] since the alleged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that triggered the American escalation of the war. When he finally achieved his “peace with honor,” it was another 1,633 days later, so more than half the fighting came after the “peace with honor” promise.
    2) More importantly, from the start of 1969 through the end of the war, some 20,604 American soldiers died in pursuit of “peace with honor,” more than one-third of the total (58,202) for the entire war.
    3) In the end, “peace with honor” didn’t look all that different than “peace” — i.e., if Nixon had merely brought the troops home on Jan. 20, 1969. As we all know, Saigon still fell, in May of 1975.

So I think that a necessary first question should be, what on earth does Cheney mean when he talks about a return with “honor”? Let’s please have no repeat of the same kind of damage, destruction, and dishonor that followed Nixon’s use of that term.
Secondly, long-time JWN readers will be well aware that I’ve always supported the idea that the US troops should be allowed an orderly withdrawal from Iraq– provided a total and speedy withdrawal according to a well-publicized and verifiable timetable is indeed the path ther administration chooses to pursue. To me, it is less important whether the administration chooses to try to describe this withdrawal in some form of slightly sugarcoated terms. (When they withdrew from Beirut in February 1984 they called it a “redeployment offshore.” H’mmm.) The important thing is that it happens, and happens soon.
But please let’s not completely debase (or dishonor) the concept of honor in human affairs by going down the path established in Vietnam by Richard Nixon.
Finally, this time around, given that the Cold War has now completely ended and the world has been moving into a new stage, one of the main things we need to do is ensure that this withdrawal from Iraq is followed by a rational and radical downsizing of the US military and the building of new, much more globally accountable structures of international security in all the various areas of the world through which the Pentagon’s generals still swagger as though they own them.
They don’t.
Any “honor” that I can in US strategic affairs in the coming 20-year period will come from the US realizing it needs to work in good faith with other powers to ensure common security interests around the world, and in working diligently to make that happen.
Otherwise, G-d save us all from the possibility of any further repeat of the crimes of 2003.

More thinking on the coming withdrawal

The generally very wise Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has a must-read article in the online edition of New Perspectives Quarterly. It’s titled ” The Fall: Consequences of US Withdrawal From Iraq” and starts thus:

    Now that the American people have recognized that the war in Iraq is hopeless, what comes next? The answer is, the US is going to cut its losses and withdraw.

Then, with admirable focus, he gets right into the nitty-gritty of what that will entail:

    Withdrawing 140,000 soldiers with all their equipment is a very complex operation. In 1945 and 1973, the US simply evacuated its troops, leaving most of its equipment to its West European and South Vietnamese protégés respectively.
    This time, however, things are different. So precious is modern defense equipment that not even the largest power on earth can afford to abandon large quantities of it; in this respect, the model is the First Gulf War, not Vietnam or World War II.
    Second, whatever equipment is left in Iraq is very likely to fall into the hands of America’s enemies. Thus the Pentagon will have no choice but to evacuate millions of tons of war materiel the way it came—in other words, back at least as far as Kuwait. Doing so will be time-consuming and enormously expensive. Inevitably, it will also involve casualties as the road-bound convoys making their way south are shot up and bombed.

Van C is completely right both in his assessment that the US will have to withdraw from the melee in Iraq, and in his approach of starting from the “ground truth” of the logistics of any matter.
Longtime JWN readers might recall that back in July 2005, when I started thinking seriously about the modalities and logistics of how the US might withdraw from Iraq, I too noted the huge scale of the logistical challenge involved… I wrote here, for example, “Given the need to muster the necessary sealift, airlift, and other logistics, I think that 4-5 months from the date that Washington makes the total-withdrawal decision to the time the last British squadron follows the last US troops out of the door would be about right.”
However, I disagree with Van Creveld’s forecast that “the road-bound convoys making their way south [would be] shot up and bombed.” Why do I disagree there? Primarily because if there is a chance of serious harrassment of the withdrawal convoys as they head for the exits, then no responsible US commander is going to order such a withdrawal. In other words, the US generals themselves– that is, the men who have accepted responsibility for the lives and welfare of the men and women under their command– are honor bound to insist that the political leadership do everything in its power to create conditions on the ground that will permit a withdrawal that is orderly and as safe as possible.
(I probably don’t need to remind most readers of the horrendous scale of the losses the British– and “British” Indian– forces suffered in Iraq in 1916-1917.)
That was why, back in that July 2005 post on JWN and in all my many writings since then on how the US can plan an orderly withdrawal from Iraq– for which, check out the links at the top of the main page sidebar there– I have simply taken it as given that once the Prez has taken the tough decision that he needs to order a full withdrawal, the first order of business will be to conduct whatever contacts are necessary to create the climate in Iraq and the region within which the US commanders can organize their orderly withdrawal with the absolute minimum level of casualties.
And yes, of course that incoludes contacts with an Iran that strategically dominates the exit routes not only within Iraq but also right along the Gulf to the Straits of Hormuz.
In that July 2005 post, I wrote this:

    How can US troops redeploying out of Iraq be assured they won’t be harrassed/attacked along the way?
    This is a concern with some validity. The US authorities could negotiate an agreement on this matter with the Jaafari government. Of course, at present, the Jaafari government is not a body viewed as representative by many Iraqis, especially the more nationalistic ones. But if he could say to his compatriots: “Look, here is the plan for the total withdrawal of US troops so let’s all calm things down,” then he actually might suddenly develop nationwide credibility. And even if he didn’t gain that, simply the fact that the US troops are visibly following a well-publicized and timely withdrawal schedule would certainly mean that many other Iraqi leaders at the local level would come forward and say, “Yes, let’s make sure this goes smoothly.”

Of course, the political situation in Iraq has changed (deteriorated) a huge amount since the days of the Jaafari “government”. In the “Three-step program” for a US withdrawal that I laid out just one month ago, I updated that portion of the plan. The first of the three steps I describe there is that the president should make a public announcement of “His firm intention to pull all US troops out of Iraq by a date certain, perhaps 4-6 months ahead.”
Then my description of the second step starts like this:

    (2) The clock starts ticking on the timetable announced by the President. That fact and the other new diplomatic realities created by his announcement all act together to start transforming the political dynamics within Iraq, the region, and indeed the US, as well. The Iraqi parties and movements all have a powerful incentive to work with each other and the UN for the speedy success of the negotiation over the post-occupation political order…

Btw, the third step is: “(3) On the date certain the last US troops leave Iraq and there is a handing-over ceremony.”
Anyway, that is one criticism– albeit, one with very significant political/strategic implications– of what Van Creveld wrote in NPQ. I also have some disagreements with his forecast of the kind of political order that will exist inside Iraq after the US withdrawal.
Regarding regional balances after the US withdrawal, he writes that Iran’s regional position has already been significantly strengthened by the US’s actions in Iraq. Then, this:

    To make sure some future American president does not get it into his or her head to attack Iran as Iraq was attacked (essentially, for no reason at all), the Iranians are going to press ahead as fast as they can in building nuclear weapons.
    A powerful Iran presents a threat to the world’s oil supplies and should therefore worry Washington. To deter Iran, US forces will have to stay in the region for the indefinite future; most probably they will be divided between Kuwait, much of which has already been turned into a vast US base; Oman; and some other Gulf states. One can only hope that the forces in question, and the political will behind them, will be strong enough to deter Iran from engaging in adventures. If not, then God help us all.
    Some countries in the Middle East ought to be even more worried about Iran than the US. While turning to the latter for protection, several of them will almost certainly take a second look into the possibility of starting their own nuclear programs. Each time a country proliferates, its neighbors will ask whether they, too, need to do the same. In time, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Syria may all end up with nuclear arsenals. How this will affect the regional balance of power is impossible to say…

For my part, I’m not so sure about this. In the context of a serious retrenchment of US power in the Gulf region, should we not all be redoubling our efforts to negotiate the transformation of the entire Middle East into a zone verifiedly free of all weapons of mass destruction? Surely, for all persons anywhere who are concerned about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, this turning-point in the Gulf towards which we are now approaching should surely give us all new impetus, as well as a new opportunity to work urgently to negotiate an agreement to this end.
Van Creveld seems to be a nuclear-proliferation fatalist. I note, in addition, that he makes no mention of the one indigenous power within the Middle East that already has a robust nuclear arsenal– Israel. And nor does he mention the fact that US Navy ships in the fleets now assembling in the Gulf are also nuclear-armed….
He ends by essaying a look into the global strategic implications of the coming US withdrawal from Iraq:

    Before 2003, many people looked at the US as a colossus that was bestriding the earth. Whatever else, the war has left the US with its international position weakened; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may bark, but she can hardly bite. So shattered and demoralized are the armed forces that they can only fill their ranks by taking in 41-year-old grandmothers. Hence, the first task confronting Robert Gates, nominated to be the new secretary of defense, and his eventual successors must be to rebuild them to the point where they may again be used if necessary.
    Above all, the US must take a hard look at its foreign policy. What role should the strongest power on earth play in the international arena, and just what are the limits of that role? How can American power be matched with its finite economic possibilities—the US balance of payment gap and deficit are now huge—and under what circumstances should it be used? If American power is used, what should its objectives be?

He is asking some very important questions here. But I believe that he is far too cautious and indeed, from his perspective, “optimistic” in his assessment of the global strategic effects of the whole US military debacle inside Iraq. He seems to assume that it would easily be possible for the US to effect a complete restoration of the kind of military-based US hegemony over the world that existed prior to 2003. I believe that is unlikely to happen, for a number of reasons. And from my perspective as someone committed to building relations of equality and mutual respect among all the people of the world regardless of citizenship, and who hates all the effects of violence, I truly do not seek the restoration of that hegemony.
Look what that situation of unfettered hegemony allowed the US government to do back in 2003…
Yes, we might now have a Congress in Washington that is more “conservative” than Mr. Bush regarding the idea of launching optional military aggressions overseas… But still, our country needs to use the imminent prospect of retrenchment in Iraq to re-think the entirety of its stance vis-a-vis the other peoples of the world. And I will certainly be making the case that this should be a relationship of equality and non-militarism.
(This discussion about the extent of the US’s retrenchment in world affairs is broadly similar to the one undertaken in Britain after the debacle of the Suez affair in 1956… Too bad that Tony Blair never really learned the lesson of that debacle or shared it with his good friend in the White House, eh?)
—————-
… In the context of this discussion of the prospects regarding a US withdrawal from Iraq, I just want to note, even if somewhat belatedly, the testimony that Zbigniew Brzezinksi gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1. (PDF original here.)
That was an important statement, from a man who was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor back in the day and who has certainly retained and honed his powers of analysis and understanding in the decades since then.
Here’s some of what he said:

    It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

      1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.
      2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

    … The quest for a political solution for the growing chaos in Iraq should involve four steps:
    1. The United States should reaffirm explicitly and unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time.
    Ambiguity regarding the duration of the occupation in fact encourages unwillingness to compromise and intensifies the on-going civil strife. Moreover, such a public declaration is needed to allay fears in the Middle East of a new and enduring American imperial hegemony. Right or wrong, many view the establishment of such a hegemony as the primary reason for the American intervention in a region only recently free of colonial domination. That perception should be discredited from the highest U.S. level. Perhaps the U.S. Congress could do so by a joint resolution.
    2. The United States should announce that it is undertaking talks with the Iraqi leaders to jointly set with them a date by which U.S. military disengagement should be completed, and the resulting setting of such a date should be announced as a joint decision. In the meantime, the U.S. should avoid military escalation.
    It is necessary to engage all Iraqi leaders — including those who do not reside within “the Green Zone” — in a serious discussion regarding the proposed and jointly defined date for U.S. military disengagement because the very dialogue itself will help identify the authentic Iraqi leaders with the self-confidence and capacity to stand on their own legs without U.S. military protection…
    3. The United States should issue jointly with appropriate Iraqi leaders, or perhaps let the Iraqi leaders issue, an invitation to all neighbors of Iraq (and perhaps some other Muslim countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Pakistan) to engage in a dialogue regarding how best to enhance stability in Iraq in conjunction with U.S. military disengagement and to participate eventually in a conference regarding regional stability.
    The United States and the Iraqi leadership need to engage Iraq’s neighbors in serious discussion regarding the region’s security problems, but such discussions cannot be undertaken while the U.S. is perceived as an occupier for an indefinite duration. Iran and Syria have no reason to help the United States consolidate a permanent regional hegemony. It is ironic, however, that both Iran and Syria have lately called for a regional dialogue, exploiting thereby the self-defeating character of the largely passive — and mainly sloganeering — U.S. diplomacy.
    A serious regional dialogue, promoted directly or indirectly by the U.S., could be buttressed at some point by a wider circle of consultations involving other powers with a stake in the region’s stability, such as the EU, China, Japan, India, and Russia. Members of this Committee might consider exploring informally with the states mentioned their potential interest in such a wider dialogue.
    4. Concurrently, the United States should activate a credible and energetic effort to finally reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace, making it clear in the process as to what the basic parameters of such a final accommodation ought to involve.
    The United States needs to convince the region that the U.S. is committed both to Israel’s enduring security and to fairness for the Palestinians who have waited for more than forty years now for their own separate state. Only an external and activist intervention can promote the long-delayed settlement for the record shows that the Israelis and the Palestinians will never do so on their own. Without such a settlement, both nationalist and fundamentalist passions in the region will in the longer run doom any Arab regime which is perceived as supportive of U.S. regional hegemony.

There’s a tremendous amount of good sense there. Let’s hope that all the Senators paid good heed.

Macacas, mirror neurons, and reviving Samuel Pufendorf

Back in late summer our outgoing senator, George Allen, used the term “macaca” as a demeaning racial epithet. However, few of those who read of that event with horror and disgust seemed aware of the honorable role that the eponymous “macaque” monkey has played in the recent study of– yes– the psychology of empathy. For in 1991, it was while studying the neural responses of a group of macaque monkeys that Vittorio Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma, Italy, first discovered the functioning of an important, perhaps seminal, kind of brain cells called “mirror neurons.”
These neurons, which were subsequently discovered to exist and to function in a similar way in humans, as well, fire when their host body performs a given task– but they also, often quite unbeknownst to the host, fire when the host observes another person performing that same task. These taks can be simple motor tasks, such as picking up a mug of tea; or, they can be emotional tasks, like crying for grief, or showing the signs of bliss, or irritation.
The existence and functioning of mirror neurons can therefore be seen as essential to the functioning of human empathy, and indeed to the inter-human connectedness that is a central feature of the entire human condition.
(My daughter, Lorna Quandt, has been studying mirror neurons a lot recently; and most of the neuro-science in this post is derived from her work. I will admit that back in 1970 I did pretty well in my Prelims exams at Oxford in Philosophy, Psychology, and Physiology– before I moved on to the mundane world of the school of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Anyway, it’s good to see all these disciplines coming back together again in this way at this point…)
V.S. Ramachandran, a distinguished neuroscientist at the Univ. of California, San Diego, has predicted that,

    mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.

I would say that the discovery of mirror neurons, and the increased understanding of the workings of mirror neurons, might well change a lot more than just the study of psychology. For western political and social thought, and western ontology as a whole, have since the days of the “Enlightenment” been based on an understanding of the nature of the human person as, essentially, a free-standing and quite self-sufficient monad: “Looking at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other,” as Hobbes described humankind…
And then, he and most of other Enlightenment philosophers who followed him– especially within the Anglo-Saxon branch of philosophy– built upon that ontology entire edifices of political philosophy and social science.
I note, that the vast majority of those early English philosophers were the kinds of ordained Protestant ministers who were not allowed to marry; therefore, their conjectures about the nature of human relationships and obligations had a certain air of– let us say– abstraction to them. (And then there was John Locke, who not only helped draft the Constitution of the slaveholding state of South Carolina but was also a shareholder in a slavetrading company called the Royal African Corporation. Ah, those fine advocates of human freedom!)
But back to mirror neurons. What I like about their discovery is that it kind of situates, in a very physical way, things that I had long ago intuited– and even, yes, experienced, in a very direct way– about the human condition. Namely, that we humans are all connected to each other– and most likely, also capable of even greater levels of interconnectedness… And this, even if we are not even aware that these interconnections exist.
This strikes me as being much closer to the Buddhist view of the human condition: the view, that is, that denies the existence of any finitely bounded “self” and that bases its very advanced practical psychology on the need to cultivate ever greater levels of compassion. This, in clear contradistinction to the concept of the ever-solipsistic, ever self-aggrandizing “homo economicus” that has come to dominate the western understanding not just of economics but of many other branches of social science, as well… Including international relations.
So I was thinking about all this, this afternoon, and pulled out my old copy of Samuel Pufendorf’s “On the duty of man and citizen“. This work of early-modern political philosophy was published (in Latin) in 1673– 25 years after the Treaty of Westphalia, 22 years after Hobbes’s “Leviathan”, and 15 years before Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government”. Pufendorf wrote a lot about politics and international relations in the new, post-Westphalian order he was living through. His work was notable in many respects. But for me, it was most notable for his insistence that socialitas (translated variously as “sociability”, or “sociality”) is a fundamental characteristic of the human condition.

“On the duty of man and citizen” is a very readable single volume which is a digest or compendium of the main ideas in an eight-volume work, “On the law of nature and nations”, that Pufendorf had published one year earlier. Today, I found this online portal to a fulltext version of the book. The translation doesn’t look as fluid or clear as in my Cambridge U.P. paperback; but at least I can do some cut-n-pasting from the online version.
I love the way he builds up to his definition of “the natural law” in Book I, Chap. 3 :

    6. Finally, we must also consider in mankind such a remarkable variety of gifts as is not observed in single species of animals, which, in fact, generally have like inclinations, and are led by the same passion and desire. But among men there are as many emotions as there are heads, and each has his own idea of the attractive. Nor are all stirred by a single and uniform desire, but by one that is manifold and variously intermixed. Even one and the same man often appears unlike himself, and if he has eagerly sought a thing at one time, at another he is very averse to it. And there is no less variety in the tastes and habits, the inclinations to exert mental powers, — a variety which we see now in the almost countless modes of life. That men may not thus be brought into collision, there is need of careful regulation and control.
    7. Thus then man is indeed an animal most bent upon self-preservation, helpless in himself, unable to save himself without the aid of his fellows, highly adapted to promote mutual interests; but on the other hand no less malicious, insolent, and easily provoked, also as able as he is prone to inflict injury upon another. Whence it follows that, in order to be safe, he must be sociable, that is, must be united with men like himself, and so conduct himself toward them that they may have no good cause to injure him, but rather may be ready to maintain and promote his interests.
    8. The laws then of this sociability, or those which teach how a man should conduct himself, to become a good member of human society, are called natural laws.
    9. So much settled, it is clear that the fundamental natural law is this: that every man must cherish and maintain sociability, so far as in him lies. From this it follows that, as he who wishes an end, wishes also the means, without which the end cannot be obtained, all things which necessarily and universally make for that sociability are understood to be ordained by natural law, and all that confuse or destroy it forbidden. The remaining precepts are mere corollaries, so to speak, under this general law, and the natural light given to mankind declares that they are evident.

Well, I don’t have the time or the energy to write as much I wanted to about Pufendorf. Just pulling it off the shelf and looking at the portions I marked up a few years ago feels pretty exciting.
On a related note, the January-February issue of Foreign Policy mag has an article called “Why Hawks Win”, in which the authors, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon pull together some fairly basic insights from social psychology to demonstrate why there’s a fairly strong tendency for “hawks” to win internal arguments on war-and-peace issues. (It’s not available online yet.)
They recall that people tend to judge their own motivations as benign and those of their opponents as malevolent; and they make various other observations about the tendencies of military leaders to over-estimate their own capabilities, of political leaders to be reluctant to admit to mistakes, etc., etc. Nothing terrifically groundbreaking; but still, it’s useful to have it all pulled together like that… and especially in the present circumstances.
Bottom line: people who are decisionmakers in extremely important fields like national security affairs should constantly be reminded of the propensity of all humans– including themselves– to make such errors of judgment, and of the need to strive constantly and intentionally to “correct” for them.
And finally, back to Pufendorf, Book II, Chapter 16, “On war and peace.” I note that he is not a pacifist. But for someone arguing within the strictures of the “just war” paradigm, he does so in a clear and fairly “conservative” way:

    1. It accords most closely with the natural law, if men are at peace with one another, voluntarily performing their obligations; in fact peace itself is a state peculiar to man, as distinguished from the brutes. Yet at times, even for man himself, war is permitted, and sometimes necessary; when, namely, owing to another’s malice, we are unable to preserve our possessions, or gain our rights, without employing force. Even in this case. however, prudence and humanity persuade us not to resort to arms, if more harm than good will result for us and ours from the avenging of our wrongs.
    2. The just causes for which war can be undertaken reduce themselves to these: that we may preserve and protect ourselves and our belongings against the unjust invasion of others; or that we may assert our claim to what is owed us by others who refuse to pay; or to obtain reparations for an injury already inflicted, or a guarantee for the future. A war waged for the first cause is called defensive, if for the other causes, offensive.
    3. And yet when one thinks he has been injured, there must be no instant recourse to arms, especially when there is still some doubt about the right or the fact. But we must try to see whether the matter can be settled in a friendly way, for example, by arranging a conference of the parties, by appealing to arbitrators, or intrusting the case to the decision of the lot…

This, from a man still remembering the horrors of the Thirty Years War that had ravaged Europe prior to the Treaty of Westphalia… From a man who served as an adviser to no fewer than three different rulers… And a man who had some really important ideas about how to build an international order (in Europe only, at the time) that allowed for states of deeply different types to co-exist in peace.
Time for everyone to pull Pufendorf off the shelf again, I think.

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…