Are Uganda’s talented people about to unlock the riddle of “peace versus justice” that has confounded so many other peoples around the world in recent times?
As long-time JWN readers are aware, I have a longstanding interest in the complex intersection between working for peace and working for ‘justice’, however the latter might be defined. (Hint: In my view, it is not co-terminous with “the orderly working of a western-style criminal court,” shocking as that thought might seem to some readers.)
Two years ago, I spent a little time in Uganda, trying to learn about the complex interaction there between the workings of the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), which then had five arrest warrants outstanding against Ugandan citizens who were in the leadership of the long-standing Lord’s Resistance Army movement, and the peace process the Government of Uganda had been pursuing with– yes– exactly that same leadership of the LRA.
The ICC’s actions had caused the peace process to freeze in place, since LRA Joseph Kony and his colleagues feared that if they left “the bush”, that is, the inaccessible areas of northeastern DRC where they and their remaining fighters were hiding out, and came forward to complete the negotiation, then they would be arrested and whisked off to The Hague.
I did some interviews with members of the ethnic group most affected by the continuing insurgency, the Acholi. The vast majority of their numbers had by then been shut by the government into vast sprawling encampments described by the government and the “international community” as “IDP camps”, but which could more accurately be described as strategic hamlets or concentration camps. You can read some of my reporting from that trip, and from the interviews I had done immediately beforehand with ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, here.
Bottom line: The vast majority of the Acholi people seemed clearly to want to have the peace settlement with the LRA concluded, including by getting Kony “out of the bush” and bringing him back to be reintegrated in some way into civilian society.
That was two years ago. Moreno-Ocampo had a number of ways he could have withdrawn or suspended his indictments, but he chose not to pursue those paths. Of course, he was not living in a concentration camp for all that time.
Fast forward to today. Numerous Acholi community leaders have been working hard, along with representatives of both the government of Uganda and the LRA leadership to try to find a way to integrate into the country’s national legal system provisions of the Acholi traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms that would allow the reintegration of the vast majority of LRA people into their home communities in the context of the Final Peace Agreement, the return of the IDP/concentraion camp residents to their ancestral homes and lands, and the submission of Kony and his high-level colleagues to some form of national-level judicial process. This would get Ocampo and the ICC off all their backs, since the ICC is supposed to be subsidiary to national-level justice efforts.
In May, the excellent, Kampala-based Justice and Reconciliation Project held a very important workshop in Kampala, with high-level representatives of both the government and the LRA taking part, at which the questions around how exactly these accountability and reconciliation processes might be designed to work together in the interests of allowing the peace to proceed. The good people at the JRP recently put the Final Report of that workshop up onto their website. I found it a little hard to get the link to the actual report. But if you go to their website’s front-page, you can currently click there on the link that says “On Accountability: Agreement III, Juba Peace Talks,” and that will take you to it.
I regret I don’t have time right now to write out most of the comments I have on the report, which I read about a week ago. Suffice it to say, for now, that I think the JRP did a great job in convening the workshop, which looks as if it resolved numerous really important questions, including about the the relationship between the newly formed “Special Division” of the Ugandan judiciary and the ICC. (There will be none.)
I hope I can write some more about this later. But since the Uganda case is so very important in the whole, rather sad history of the ICC to date, I wanted to make sure this report gets the attention it deserves. Maybe some of you who have more time available than I do, or who have knowledge of the whole issue that’s more up-to-date than mine, can chime in here with some comments and move the discussion along a bit further.
Lest we forget: Hiroshima Day
August 6 is the anniversary of the first ever use of the atomic bomb against “enemy” targets. This action was committed, as we know, by the United States government in 1945, as World War 2 was drawing towards an end. Atomic bombs have only ever been deployed twice against enemy targets. The other time was three days later, when the US dropped a bomb of a different design over Nagasaki.
The Wikipedia entry on the effects of the Hiroshima bomb reads as follows:
- According to most estimates, the immediate effects of the blast of the bombing of Hiroshima killed approximately 70,000 people. Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 from burns, radiation and related disease, the effects of which were aggravated by lack of medical resources, range from 90,000 to 140,000. Some estimates state up to 200,000 had died by 1950, due to cancer and other long-term effects. From 1950 to 1990, roughly 9% of the cancer and leukemia deaths among bomb survivors was due to radiation from the bombs. At least eleven known prisoners of war died from the bombing.
Those were the casualties from just one bomb, which was much smaller than many of the thousands of A-bombs in the arsenals of the world’s eight nuclear powers today.
Among the casualties in Hiroshima there were also large numbers of indentured or virtually enslaved Koreans who had been brought to work in in war industries there by Japan’s military-governmental authorities and many thousands of civilians, including women, children, retirees, and workers in civilian industries.
It is worth remembering the US’s status as the only nation that has ever used an atomic bomb in war— and which did so against two densely populated cities– as we listen to the bellicose rhetoric that has been coming from Washington in response to Iraq’s pursuit of its nuclear technology program (about which no-one has produced evidence on ongoing attempts to weaponize it.)
Last week I was fortunate to have a short conversation with Prof. Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru, a professor of political science at Kansai University, near Osaka, Japan and a native of Hiroshima, who has been here in Washington studying the US government’s decisionmaking system in matters of war-making. She talked quite a bit about the whole system of peace education that grew up in Hiroshima and elsewhere in Japan in response to the events of the 1930s and 1940s, including the US atomic bombings and fire-bombings of many Japanese cities. She reviewed how in Hiroshima, the concern for the victims of the bombing has been broadened over time to include the Korean (and the Japanese “buraku”, or “untouchable”) victims of the bombing, as well as the more powerful “mainstream” (i.e. non-buraku) Japanese victims.
I was familiar with some of those issues from 2000, when I visited Hiroshima. At that point, the local authorities had just moved into the main Peace Park that lies at the heart of the bomb-affected area the memorial to the Korean victims of the bombing, which previously had been kept outside the park.
Prof. Otsuru talked a little about how the victims and survivors from Nagasaki often get short shrift in remembrances of the bombings. And she talked about the pressures that have been building up in Japanese government circles to move even further away from the strictly “self-defense” aspects of the country’s military forces that are mandated under its post-1945 constitution. These pressures have also, I note, come from the US, which has been eager to have the Japanese “Self-Defense” Forces play a bigger role in supporting the US deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prof. Otsuru also put me in touch with Dr. Hiroko Takahashi, an assistant professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who recently published a book (in Japanese) that charts the way the US occupation authorities in Japan used the population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as, in effect, guinea pigs from which they could learn more about the physiological and biological consequences of detonating the bomb.
(I recall from my own visit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, that they showed that the whole bombing had been planned to be, to some extent, a “human trial” experiment from the get-go, since shortly before they detonated the bomb they dropped a number of passive sensors over the city whose only function was to record the radiological events that would follow.)
Anyway, Dr. Takahashi has kindly allowed me to re-publish here on Just World News a short article she has prepared in English that summarizes the main findings of her book. She writes that most of her book was based on US government documents covering not only the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also subsequent US nuclear activities including “Operation Crossroads”, a series of two atomic-bomb tests conducted on Bikini Atoll in 1946.
Here, with my thanks to her, is her article. (I have very lightly edited it. All the emphases in the text are my own. ~HC.)
- The Reality of Nuclear War Concealed by U.S. and the A-bomb Disease Certification Class-action Lawsuits
(Winner of the 2nd Peace Study Encouragement Award of the Peace Studies Association of Japan)
By Hiroko Takahashi
In February 2008 I published a book entitled Fuin sareta Hiroshima/Nagasaki [Classified Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The U.S. Nuclear Test and Civil Defense Program] (Gaifusha, 2008).
This book reflects the research I have carried out in Hiroshima since my appointment at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, and the doctoral dissertation which was submitted to Doshisha University in 2003. For this book I drew mainly upon U.S. government Documents collected at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland U.S.
Drawing upon Manhattan Project records and contemporary newspaper articles, Chapter 1 examined the activities of the U.S. government and military regarding the collection of medical information in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and public announcements about the impact of the A-bomb during the period of the occupation of Japan.
As part of the Manhattan Project, in 1943 the U.S. government set up the “Radioactive Poisons Subcommittee,” and conducted a study on the military use of radioactive materials. A report of the subcommittee explained “the factors involved in employing radio-active materials effectively” are “Highly persistent and can contaminate an area for many months. Immediate decontamination could take place only at the sacrifice of personnel.”
Following the dropping of the A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government claimed that the A-bomb was a more brutal weapon than poison gas which had been prohibited by international law.
On September 5 1945, following the start of the occupation, Wilfred Burchett’s report published in the British Daily Express stated that, “People are still dying mysteriously and horribly－people who were uninjured in the cataclysm–from an unknown something which I can describe as the atomic plague.” On the other hand, Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy to the Head of Pacific Command Major General L.R. Groves, “denied categorically that it produced a dangerous lingering radioactivity in the ruins of the town or caused a form of poison gas at the moment of explosion.” (New York Times September 13, 1945). That is to say, he denied the existence of residual radiation which occurred one minute after the detonation of the A-bomb.
The purposes of the U.S. government in making such a statement which underestimated the influence of the A-bomb were to reject the Japanese government’s claims that the use of the A-bomb was against international law, and to make practicable the landing of occupation troops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, the U.S. Military Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey collected, brought to the U.S. and classified many Atomic Bomb materials.
Chapter 2 focused on the U.S. government’s declassification policy of the A-bomb issue through the use of documents from the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. Before the commencement of Operation Crossroads, the U.S. nuclear test held in the Pacific in the summer of 1946, Groves recommended the publication of the Manhattan Engineer District Report, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report, and a report written by the British Mission to Japan. However, at the same time he stated that “No authoritative statement on radiation and its effects can be made by anyone until the completion of the analysis of the available data by the Joint Medical Commission.”
After the first two Operation Crossroads tests were conducted, due to the serious contamination caused by the second test, a further test was canceled. It was recommended that “if it was desirable from a Naval standpoint to do so, that all pictures and written material be censored and edited by someone familiar with security and the technical information involved.” U.S. Navy personnel cleaned the contaminated battleships used for the test, but it was nevertheless admitted that “Immediate decontamination could take place only at the sacrifice of personnel.”
Chapter 3 discussed the Civil Defense Program of the early 1950s. The U.S. government explained how people could survive a nuclear attack by means of a “Duck and Cover” approach and ignored the issue of the impact of residual radiation.
Chapter 4 discussed the 1954 Bikini Atoll nuclear test and the subsequent Civil Defense Program, drawing upon documents from the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and Atomic Energy Committee (AEC). Following the exposure of the Lucky Dragon crew members to fallout from a nuclear test, the dangers of fallout began to be widely understood. In 1955 the FCDA and AEC claimed that “You can survive” even the dangers from fallout through inviting civilians to a nuclear test conducted in Nevada. At the time, the AEC was still denying the existence of fallout (residual radiation) in the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to the fact that the detonation of the A-bombs had taken place at high altitude.
Chapters 1 to 4 reveal that the U.S. government consistently underestimated the influence of the radiation caused by the A-bomb and based on such public statements, constructed the Civil Defense Program.
Following the submission of this dissertation in March 2003, newspapers reported about citizens filing A-bomb disease certification class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government. I was very surprised to learn that the so-called “science” which had basically been produced by the U. S. government was still being applied in the Japanese government’s certification of A-bomb disease, which ignores the influence of residual radiation. The standards and logic produced by the “perpetrator” were still being actually applied to the “victims.”
It is clear that “data” collected from Hibakusha [the survivors of the two bombings in Japan] were being collected for the purpose of preparing for future nuclear war. On the other hand, these people’s appeals were ignored in the name of “science” which did not recognize the existence of residual radiation. Sixty-three years have already passed since the dropping of the Atomic Bomb. Now it is time to “judge” this event for the sake of human beings and not for militaristic purposes. I hope that this book will contribute towards this “judgment” and eventually assist in the procurement of justice.
- (Thanks for the work you’ve done, Dr. Takahashi. I hope your book gets widely read– and that it quickly gets translated into English! ~ HC)
Never again! Nuclear disarmament now!
Afghanistan: Can NATO succeed?
The more I think about this, the more outrageously– and tragically– improbable this appears.
Let’s review the reasons:
- 1. NATO is a military alliance. What its members have trained extensively to do and are equipped and organized to do is to fight a military enemy, including by the application of overwhelming firepower, and to win actual military wars. Afghanistan’s worsening crisis of governance is not a military problem.
2. NATO is the military club of the “North Atlantic”– that is, West and Central European and non-Hispanic North American– powers that comprise, roughly speaking, the dominant grouping within the construct of “the West”. Afghanistan is far distant from the North Atlantic, geographically, culturally, politically. Just look at the length of the supply lines! Just look at the length of the cultural misinterpration possibilities!
3. NATO’s Afghanistan mandate was only won from the UN as a result of a particular conjunction of circumstances in late 2001. As NATO’s failure to resolve Afghanistan’s escalating crisis of governance becomes ever more evident, the Security Council and whatever legitimacy-seeking portions of Afghanistan’s national government remain will have to look for a new instrument of de-escalation and peacebuilding in Afghanistan. NATO, meanwhile, might lie in ruins. (Remind me, anyway, what exactly is its rationale for still being existence 17 years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact?)
This is my big-picture take on the current situation in Afghanistan, which is one of continuing tragedy for most of the country’s 32 million people. For example, on August 1, a network of NGOs in the country said that “Up to 1,000 civilians are among the 2,500 killed in armed conflict so far in 2008.” Also, “July was reportedly the worst month for Afghan civilians in the past six years, with 260 civilian casualties recorded.”
Those casualties counted there, remember, include only those that (a) were the direct result of the physical violence of armed clashes, and (b) were reported in ways that reached the national news media and/or the NGO networks. So they don’t include either those killed by direct physical violence that was not reported or, even more significantly, those who died because of the indirect results of the conflict that continues in the country, including people who:
- — died from causes that decent basic health care including access to hospitals could have prevented, but where that care and access were blocked by the continuing conflict;
— died from diseases, especially those related to unsafe drinking water, that could easily have been prevented in a time of public security and the provision of basic public health services that were blocked by the continuing conflict;
— died from complications of childbirth that a functioning public health system could have identified and treated;
— etc…
In short, the situation in which many or most Afghan people are living is fraught with uncertainty, fear, and the blighting of human capabilities. Western news reports tend to focus only on “western” casualties in the country.
For example, this recent AFP report led with the news that “Bomb blasts killed five NATO soldiers in Afghanistan on Friday…” But it relegated to the second graf the news that “Five Afghan policemen were also killed in an overnight bomb attack… ” And it left till the fourth paragraph the news that four of the killed NATO soldiers were– oh, by the way– also accompanied by a civilian interpreter who was also killed in the attack…
Why did they not write the lead thus: “Five NATO soldiers, five Afghan policemen, and a civilian interpreter were killed in bomb attacks Friday”? Or better still: “Six Afghans working with the security forces and five NATO soldiers were killed in bomb attacks Friday””? Anyone who is a NATO soldier has, after all, quite voluntarily taken the oath of military service under which he or she recognizes that s/he can indeed be killed in the line of duty (while s/he also has the right, under certain circumstances, to kill others while undertaking those same duties.)
Civilians have never taken such an oath. Their deaths in combat therefore have a far graver ethical weight.
Bigger point: The western media have not been giving anything like adequate coverage to the crisis of governance that’s been escalating in Afghanistan under NATO’s “rule” there, and to the extensive human suffering this has caused.
… Last week, the US Institute of Peace hosted a presentation by Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, an adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai who since 2005 has served as vice chair of Afghanistan’s Demobilization and Reintegration Commission. I was unable to attend that, but frequent JWN commenter Bob Spencer did get there. He filed this short report of the event.
He writes:
- After one and a half hours of listening to highly motivated and deep thinking specialists, it was clear that we, in the West, have only begun to scratch the surface of identifying the “challenges” and dynamics of Afghanistan’s complex politics. On top of that, I began to wonder if the western mind might not ever adapt to, let alone comprehend, Afghanistan’s complex ways…
Ah, but isn’t the model being applied that it’s Afghanistan’s people who should be expected to “adapt to”– and indeed, completely adopt– the ways of the west, which are, after all (in the view of many westerners) what this whole thing called the “international community” is all about?
By the way, Stanekzai published a pretty interesting report on the dysfunctions of the present western effort in Afghanistan, back in June.
And if you want to listen to the MP3 audio of his most recent presentation, you can do so here.
Badger’s sit-rep on the US-Iraq SOFA etc talks
The ever-diligent Badger has been reading Al Sabah, which he describes as “the Green Zone newspaper”, and gives his translation (scroll down) of what today’s edition says about the progress of the negotiations over the terms of a SOFA and MOU, including its assessment that this could be signed “in the coming [unspecified] period of time.”
Badger does great work, digging around in the Arabic-language primary sources for all of our benefits. Just one critique, though, He describes the present Iraqi government as “the Green Zone leadership”. I think this is too reductive a view of what’s been going on in Baghdad. Georgraphically– and yes, also politically– the Maliki government has a non-trivial presence outside the Green Zone, as well as inside it.
For example, when Maliki and Talabani hosted Pres. Ahmadinejad in Baghdad, this was done not inside the GZ but, as I recall, in the substantial compound that Talabani maintains outside it. In other words, the current Iraqi political leadership is not completely under the thumb of the US military, though it may still depend on it in several important ways.
I see what’s been going on in Iraq in recent months very much as a “struggle for the soul of the Maliki (et al) government”, with the non- and anti-US actors in that struggle having tipped the balance in their favor.
I’ve been reading Tim Weiner’s excellent book “Legacy of Ashes” recently. It’s a very well-sourced and intensely depressing history of the CIA. It reminds us that in earlier decades, in Syria, Iran, South Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere, the US government would frequently overthrow other governments, including those that had been quite duly or even democratically constituted.
In Iraq, thus far, it has not done this to Maliki’s government, even though Maliki has been straying further and further off the US-defined reservation. (Maintaining those lovey-dovey relations with Iran, for example.)
It is worth reflecting a little on this fact and what it says about the US’s currently grossly over-stretched role in the world… Also, what it says about the nature of national power in the present world, and the fact that the “legitimacy” of international actors has become a lot more important in the current century than it was back in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
My piece in the CSM on ending the Iraqi & Afghan wars
Here it is in today’s paper. (It’s also archived here.)
The headline is good (if not terribly snappy… but then, who needs snappy?): The U.N. can end these wars: It alone has enough clout to bring about peace in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the body of the piece I write:
- [V]ictory in Iraq and Afghanistan … will depend on defeating or defanging antigovernment insurgencies and helping midwife a governing system that:
- • Enjoys domestic political “legitimacy,” that is, it has the support of the vast majority of the country’s citizens,
• Is sustainably able to deliver public security and other basic services to citizens throughout the whole country, and
• Has the tools to resolve in nonviolent ways the still-unresolved and yet-to-emerge conflicts among its citizens.
What we don’t want is a replay of what happened in Vietnam, where the US declared “victory” but then withdrew humiliatingly, under fire, leaving the victors free to enact brutal retribution against our former allies.
Only one body can provide the leadership that’s needed to defeat the insurgencies in both Iraq and – over a longer time frame – Afghanistan. That is the United Nations. Though it’s far from a perfect institution, only the UN has the vital quality of worldwide legitimacy that allows it to mobilize global resources and expertise and make the tough decisions required in these two countries.
Regarding Iraq, we need to ask the UN to urgently convene two negotiating forums. One would sort out the thorny political dilemmas that remain inside the country. The other would bring together Iraq, all its neighbors, the US, and perhaps also the Arab League to agree on a plan for the drawdown – or total withdrawal – of US forces in a way that will not result in Iraq’s neighbors moving in to exploit the resulting vacuum.
Americans have a similar need for a greatly increased UN leadership in Afghanistan…
Anyway, go read the whole thing and tell me what you think.
The Gates Doctrine: US as Globo-Cop
Yesterday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a ‘National Defense Strategy’ document (PDF of the text here), that provides what Gates describes as in the Foreword as a “blueprint to succeed in the years to come.”
This blueprint is based very centrally on Donald Rumsfeld’s view of the US being engaged in a “Long War.”
Short version: Rejoice, ye defense contractors far and near! Your gravy train continues!
The nature of the “Long War” as spelled out on pages 7-9 of the 29-page document (pp.12-14 of the PDF). It relies totally on the administration’s currently favored (and operationally and ideologically quite empty) concept that our opponents can be categorized simply as “violent extremists.” Here’s how this “Long War:” section of the document starts:
- For the foreseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremist movements will be the central objective of the U.S. We must defeat violent extremism as a threat to our way of life as a free and open society and foster an environment inhospitable to violent extremists and all those who support them. We face an extended series of campaigns to defeat violent extremist groups, presently led by al-Qaeda and its associates. [But possibly in the future led by others? Make no mistake, this “Long War” can be stretched out forever!] In concert with others, we seek to reduce support for violent extremism and encourage moderate voices, offering a positive alternative to the extremists’ vision for the future. Victory requires us to apply all elements of national power in partnership with old allies and new partners. Iraq and Afghanistan remain the central fronts in the struggle, but we cannot lose sight of the implications of fighting a long-term, episodic, multi-front, and multi-dimensional conflict [boy, with each of those sonorous adjectives I’m seeing dollar signs light up in the defense contractors’ eyes!] more complex and diverse than the Cold War confrontation with communism. Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is crucial to winning this conflict, but it alone will not bring victory. [More $$!] We face a clash of arms, a war of ideas, and an assistance effort that will require patience and innovation. In concert with our partners, we must maintain a long-term commitment to undermining and reducing the sources of support for extremist groups, and to countering the ideological totalitarian messages they build upon.
We face a global struggle…
Well, I wish I had the time to do one of my tabulated annotations on the whole of this text. But alas, I don’t.
Noteworthy in Gates’s description of the LW, however, are the following features:
1. He nowhere claims that this LW is explicitly one to be waged against Islamist extremists. This is excellent. Likewise, though he likens the LW to the US’s earlier global campaigns against fascism and communism and refers to the”totalitarian ideological message of terrorist groups,” nowhere does he use the terrible, hate-propagating term “Islamofascism.” In general, his refusal to name the “violent extremists” as being explicitly “Islamist extremists” is a welcome move… There is, however, a sort of nudge-nudge “we all really know who we’re talking about” aspect to this section. Especially when he says that the VE’s are “presently led by al-Qaeda and its associates.”
But if the term really is a neutral, scientific one– that is, that the members of the VE category includes everyone who is both “violent” and “extremist” (whatever the latter term actually means)– then should we not include in it other, non-Islamist actors like, for example, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka; the Ethiopian government that wilfully and with full US support invaded Somalia in 2006 and has maintained a brutal occupation there ever since; or those ideologically motivated Jewish settlers in the West Bank area who most certainly fit into the category of VEs? From many perspectives, could we not also include in the category the US government itself, which has certainly, over the past seven years, used the greatest amount of violence used by any actor in the international system and has done so in the name of an ideology that the majority of people around the world might well describe as “extremist”?
“Extremist” is, at the end of the day, essentially either a category chock-full of everybody you happen to disagree with, or an empty and quite meaningless category. One thing’s for certain, it is nearly always a highly subjective category.
Perhaps one possible, non-subjective meaning that could be ascribed to it is that an “extremist” is an actor who refuses to sit down and negotiate his political differences with others, preferring instead to use violence. That is the only even vaguely helpful and objective definition I can think of for this term. (In which case, the qualifier “violent” becomes more or less redundant. Okay, well maybe the VEs are the ones who not only prefer to use violence over negotiation but who also do use it.
So where does that leave the US, an actor that in late 2001 and again in early 2003 wilfully and knowingly turned away from the many nonviolent means of conflict resolution available to it and instead used massive violence against its opponents?
H’mmm.
2. Gates is also, in this document, explicitly asserting the US’s intention to be the world’s completely dominant globo-cop, that is, to roam around the world waging “counter-insurgency” on a truly global scale.
This is how he introduces the concept of the US’s “global responsibilities”, right at the beginning of the document:
- A core responsibility of the U.S. Government is to protect the American people – in the words of the framers of our Constitution, to “provide for the common defense.” For more than 230 years, the U.S. Armed Forces have served as a bulwark of liberty, opportunity, and prosperity at home. Beyond our shores, America shoulders additional responsibilities on behalf of the world…
This is truly mind-boggling. “On behalf of the world”??? When, pray, did “the world” ever ask the US to “shoulder” these responsibilities?
Answer: Never.
Back in January 2007, I wrote a few things on JWN and elsewhere about the conceptual (and also practical) difficulties of the military of a democratic nation mounting counter-insurgency — COIN, in the jargon– campaigns “on behalf of” the governments of other countries elsewhere. You can find some of that writing here and here.
One of the main points I was making there was that, “For a foreign power to use forceful means to affect the political outcome within any given country/society causes a direct clash with the principles of democracy, of sovereignty, and of a respect for basic human rights…”
How much greater is this clash when the intervening country proposes to do its globo-copping on a truly global scale?
After reading Gates’s document I was interested in finding out how “global” the US military has already become. So I looked through my copy of the IISS’s Military Balance 2008 and found out the following:
- a. The US has active military personnel stationed in no fewer than 162 of the world’s countries and territories. Nearly all those in this listing (pp. 38-46 of the MilBal) are nation-states. Some five or six are seas or oceans in which the various US fleets operate, and a few more are non-state territories like Greenland or Ascension Island. But over 150 are nation-states.
b. Just in the A’s, the US has forces in eleven nation-states, from Albania to Azerbaijan.
c. In the Middle East, the US has military personnel in the following countries– in addition to those in Iraq:
- Algeria: 10
Bahrain: 1,319
Djibouti: 2,038
Egypt: 288 just for Egypt and 288 as peacekeepers in Sinai
Israel: 50
Jordan: 19
Lebanon: 3
Morocco: 13
Oman: 37
Qatar: 512
Saudi Arabia: 274
Syria: 8 (?)
Tunisia: 15
UAE: 87
d. In 2008 the US has 1.498 million people in its active-duty military and 1.083 million it its reserves. This gives the the largest standing army in the world in terms of manpower, except for that of China which has 2.105 million people in its standing army (but only 800 million in its reserves.)
e. In 2006, the US’s defense spending was $535.9 billion, easily the largest amount of any country in the world. China, with four times the US’s population, spent “only” $121.9 billion on military spending in 2006 (calculated using PPP$.) Worldwide defense spending was listed as $1,297.8 billion. So our country bore (“shouldered”, as per Gates?) 41.3 percent of global defense expenditures.
Here’s the funny thing. Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US has had neither any sizeable military enemies nor any military competitors.
What is the point of all this wasteful– and quite frequently, also actively counter-productive– defense spending we’re doing?
Now we learn! We’re doing it so we can be Globo-cop!
But guess what? The other six billion of the people never once elected us to this position…
Joost Hiltermann on Iraq’s refugees
Yesterday, I went to a thought-provoking discussion at the Carnegie Endowment in which the International Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann presented and discussed ICG’s recent report on the continuing crisis of Iraq’s refugees and IDPs.
Joost is a serious analyst, with considerable experience of documenting and analyzing developments in Iraq. In the presentation, he described the crisis in stark terms, noting that there are now signs of malnutrition emerging among Iraqi refugees in Syria. “We have also seen the evaporation of the Iraqi middle class,” he said, “especially the civil service.”
I imagine Carnegie will be posting the audio record of the event on their website sometime soon. If so, you’ll be able to find it here. It isn’t there yet.
Hiltermann described the political situation inside Iraq as still “very fragile.” He noted, crucially, that “You cannot have any serious advance at the political level inside the country until there is a serious engagement [by the US] with Iran.” He warned that if the US exits Iraq without getting internal political reconciliation in the country, the result could well be a new wave of refugees out of the country– “But this time those seeking to flee may well be stopped at the borders [by the countries they’re trying to flee to], and you would see big tent encampments emerging there at the borders.”
After he spoke, Michel Gabaudan, who’s the UNHCR’s regional representative for the United States and the Caribbean, made a few remarks. He said that from UNHCR’s perspective the treatment that the Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan have received from those host governments has improved over the past 18 months, with the numbers of detentions and deportations of refugees going down markedly in both places. “Those who should be noted for their deportations should be the European countries,” he said. He added that those deported by EU countries had often been sent back to Iraq, but finding themselves unable to return to their homes they would end up as IDPs elsewhere in the country.
Gabaudan also, later, noted that some western countries– and he singled out Germany– had been discriminating against the Muslims among the refugees and giving preferential treatment to the Christians. He described that as a very worrying practice that could further stoke sectarian sensitivities and tensions among Iraqis.
Earlier, Joost Hiltermann had spelled out the fact that in Syria, there was a noticeable lack of sectarian tensions and sensitivities among the Iraqi refugees, though they include Iraqis from all the country’s different religious groups. (In Jordan, the government has worked very hard to keep out Iraqi Shiites, though a number of them have managed to take up residence there.)
Actually, as the report itself spells out, calculating the true numbers of refugees in the countries of refuge– especially Jordan– has proven frustratingly difficult.
Here’s what the report says about the size and duration of the problem (pp.3, 4):
- Syria is said to have welcomed around 1.5 million although some Western observers believe the number to be much lower. Similar discrepancies exist concerning Jordan, where the government uses a much higher figure for planning and operational purposes than an independent research institute arrived at [later stated as being government:450,000-500,000 versus Norwegian research institute:161,000.] According to UNHCR, between 20,000 and 50,000 Iraqis live in Lebanon; Lebanese authorities claim there are 60,000 to 100,000. Some 70,000 Iraqis reportedly live in Egypt and roughly 57,000 in Iran…
Statistical variations and uncertainties aside, the number clearly is huge and represents one of the world’s largest conflict-induced displacements of people. The most significant outflow occurred after the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, which plunged Iraq further into a bloody blend of sectarian conflict, insurgency warfare and criminality. From then on, the number of Iraqis fleeing insecurity, violence and persecution skyrocketed. As of November 2007, over 70 per cent of the Iraqis in Syria had been there for less than a year; in Jordan, 77 per cent of Iraqis arrived between 2003 and 2007, with most coming after 2006.
In the report, Joost and his ICG colleagues have done a generally good job of sifting through the statistics and assessing a number of policy options regarding the refugees. However, after reading the report carefully, I come away with a frustrating feeling that though it is titled Failed Responsibility: Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, still, nowhere in it did they assess the question of responsibility for this problem in anything like a rigorous enough way.
That is, nowhere do they actually spell out the specific responsibility under international law of the occupying and/or UN mandatory power in Iraq for assuring conditions of public security throughout the whole country, a responsibility that the US– which is indeed the power in question– has quite notably and thoroughly failed to live up to. Instead, the report treats the US as, more or less, just another member of “the international community.” Washington’s record on dealing with the refugee crisis (though notably not its record on having caused or occasioned it) is dealt with in Chapter VII of the report, at which point the report implicitly contrasts the relative “generosity” of the US financial contribution to refugee aid with the relative parsimony of the EU and Arab countries.
The report does state, very blandly (p.32) that “Most donor countries believe the U.S. should shoulder the lion’s share of the financial burden.” But it does not give the reasons that other governments adduce for this judgment– and far less does it align the ICG in any way with that judgment.
But if US policy failings have indeed been responsible, in one way or another, for the collapse of public security in Iraq that has motivated the flight of so many millions of Iraqis from their home communities, then how can the displacement crisis be addressed unless US policies– and indeed, the whole US role– inside Iraq are radically changed?
Why does the ICG report say nothing about this question? Why do they spend just about all of their pages criticizing the governments of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and the US-installed “government” of Iraq, without anywhere addressing the responsibility of the occupying/mandatory power?
In introducing Hiltermann, Carnegie President Jessica Mathews described the report as an exemplary piece of analysis of the complex intersection of humanitarian and political concerns. Actually, I don’t think it addressed the crucial political dimension of the crisis nearly sufficiently.
Toward the end of the Q&A portion of yesterday’s discussion, Joost voiced the decidedly depressing expectation that “We probably won’t see any significant returns of the refugees to their homeplaces within the next ten years.”
Afterwards, I went up and chatted with him a bit, and got him to confirm that that meant he did not see any significant breakthrough in the intra-Iraqi peacemaking within that time period.
I was horrified. “But Joost!” I protested, “of course there are ways to get a good, durable settlement inside Iraq in a much shorter amount of time than ten years! Look at all the work all of us have been doing providing guidelines for how that could be done. Yes, I realize it would also require a fair peacemaking process in which all of Iraq’s neighbors could be involved, including Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, but that is possible too.”
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we could see how it could be done. But I don’t see the political will to do it.”
Well, maybe it’s true that we don’t yet have the political will– primarily, here in the US, but also elsewhere– to do what needs to be done to allow for real reconciliation and conflict termination within and around Iraq. But I think we should still all work really hard for that outcome. Political currents can change, and can change fairly rapidly in the present era.
Maybe I’m just an optimist by nature. But I do strongly sense that the tide here in the US has been turning pretty rapidly toward significantly decreasing the amount of control our country seeks to hang onto in Iraq. This is a great shift in the right direction. So let’s try to push it as far and as fast as it will go. Ten more years of chaos and fratricidal conflict inside Iraq, and ten more years of the massive displacement of so many millions of Iraqis from their homes, is a situation quite too horrible to contemplate.
Defining ‘winning’
I’ve been writing quite a bit recently about war and its unwinnability. I’ve been thinking a lot more about this, and I want to clarify that in those writings I was referring primarily to wars being won or not won in the traditional military sense of “winning”– that is, that the victorious country is able to either destroy or defeat (that is an important distinction, right there) the armed forces of the opposing side and thereby to impose its own political will on the defeated country.
It is that “thereby” that seems increasingly– or perhaps in some cases, completely– unattainable these days.
Destruction– yes, that has certainly occurred. In Iraq in 2003, the Saddam-era armed forces were first defeated and then completely disbanded. In Lebanon in 2006, the Israelis were never able to destroy Hizbullah– but they were able to sow massive amounts of destruction on the country’s vital infrastructure, including on an entire, quite sizeable chunk of the South Beirut Dahiya.
But despite* that level of destruction, Israel was unable to defeat Hizbullah– which it had sought to achieve by imposing its will on the government of Lebanon, and forcing Beirut to crack down on Hizbullah.
And in Iraq in and since 2003, even though the US was able to defeat and enitrely disband the Saddam-era armies it has still been incapable of imposing its will on the Baghdad government.
So traditional, military kinds of victory have not been attainable in these two cases.
That’s why I want to shift the policy discussion to a different, much richer and more human-centered definition of “victory”. This is one that would flow quite naturally from the principles of human security, which include, crucially, the two principles that:
- 1. True security in the modern age is people-centered, rather than addressing the needs/desires of nation states to defend their territory against aggression from outside (or from competing national claims to the same terrain,) and
2. The human security of all the peoples of the world is interdependent: increasing the human security of any one group of people increases the human security of all others; and decreasing the human security of any one group decreases the security of all others. That is, unlike in the traditional, “nation-state” model of security, human security is a matter of win-win synergies, rather than a zero-sum game.
Therefore, to “win” in human-security terms in Iraq or Afghanistan would involve looking primarily at the human security situation of the Iraqi and Afghan peoples, and certainly not at the narrow national interests of any outsiders. And if the human security situation of the peoples of those two countries can be significantly and durably improved, then that helps increase the true security of everyone else, from close neighbors to people in distant countries like Europe or the United States.
- (By the way, I wanted to provide a link here to the 2003 final report of the UN’s “Commission on Human Security.” But it looks as though someone forgot to renew the Commission’s domain name, http://www.humansecurity-chs.org/, so you can’t find it there any more. Can anyone tell me where else this report might be lodged and thus available to the web-prowling public?… Update August 1: Thanks to commenter Charles Cameron who told us that the text has been archived here. It’s a pretty large PDF file. Ch. 1 strikes me as particularly crucial, since it lays out the theoretical approach of HS.)
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* Although I wrote “despite” that level of destruction, it also seems clear to me that, in the case of Lebanon 2006, it was precisely because of the level of destruction that the IDF sowed throughout Lebanon that Israel was unable to impose its political goals on Beirut. In other words, the “Shock and Awe” aspects of Israel’s attack proved actively counter-productive…
Bolani on the fulcrum of the US-Iraqi balance
It was an interesting performance this morning, to see Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad Bolani do some deft diplomatic footwork– while visiting Washington– to stay atop the fulcrum of the Washington-Baghdad political balance that, as I noted here recently, has tipped significantly in Baghdad’s favor in recent weeks.
Bolani was giving a presentation at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He had been sent (brought?) to Washington primarily to work at nailing down the details of the Iraq-US SOFA and MOU, and he entered the conference room at USIP with his Pentagon handlers colleagues clearly in evidence.
He had a soft-spoken, fairly engaging affect. You could see why, back in June 2006, he was chosen– by some combination of the US occupation authorities and the elected-majority Iraqi UIA coalition– to take over the ultra-sensitive job of Minister of the Interior, that is, to be in charge of all the Iraqi internal police, security, and intelligence forces that are not explicitly under the Defense Ministry. His main personal qualification seemed at the time to be his skill as an emollient diplomat– chosen as he was after his predecessor gained renown for having heavily politicized the Iraqi Police and stuffed it full of still-intact units of the Kurdish and Shiite (especially SCIRI) militias.
It is clear from all the reports I’ve read and heard that that situation is far from ended. But Bolani has been able– thus far– to put a good emollient face on the matter.
At USIP this morning, his skills as a diplomat were on full display. Notably, he filled up most of the time allotted to him with fairly meaningless managerial mumbo-jumbo, made repeated mention of a number of “loved in the US” buzzwords like “rule of law”, “specialized training opportunities”, etc, etc– and he completely avoided giving a clear answer to any of the key questions that were asked him.
All in all, an adroit performance. Next stop for this practised contortionist: Cirque Du Soleil?
It was fascinating to watch him pirouetting with such finesse atop the fulcrum of the Baghdad-Washington balance. We all recall that just ten days ago, as Barack Obama was about to reach Baghdad, Bolani’s boss, PM Maliki, gave him a great political gift by saying he thought that Obama’s timeline for a withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq was about right. But Barack Obama is not the US President yet, and may never be it. The present President is someone who’s still adamantly opposed to any fixed (as opposed to “horizon-related”) timetable for any portion of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Bolani and his boss need to keep some kind of a working relationship– for now– with the guy who is currently Commander in Chief of those 147,000 US troops in Iraq, completely dominating the country’s broad-brush security environment and its financial (and financial payoffs) system.
So, given how much raw military power the US exercises over Iraq, it was quite notable the degree to which Bolani demurred from saying anything that could be understood as expressing support for Bush’s or the GOP’s position in the GOP-Democratic dispute over Iraq.
He didn’t express clearcut support for Obama’s position, either. (Hey, the guy’s not stupid; and he’s in Washington.)
That’s the point. He didn’t say anything clear-cut on matters of importance, at all.
I see that Marc Lynch has blogged the event as, essentially, lacking any newsworthiness. But in the circumstances, I think it was the lack of a ‘story’, in conventional news terms, that was itself, precisely the story.
Here’s how Bolani danced on some of the pinheads that were presented him.
Michael Gordon of the NYT asked him explicitly, “What would the effects be if all the US combat brigades left within 21 months?”
In answering, Bolani said something like:
- Today we are looking at the transitional phase… The phase that will enable our police force to do its job and confront the challenges of the earlier era… The measures that have been taken in coordination with the coalition have been important in strengthening the capabilities of our state.
Well, it sounded like a clear, if slightly veiled, “buzz off” to me. A ‘buzz off” couched in a few emollient phrases about how it has been the coalition’s efforts that have gotten Iraqis to the point where they can stand on their own two feet.
M. Gordon pressed the question again. Bolani then– quite understandably– asked where the heck the “21 months” timeframe had come from anyway; and Gordon gave a response that pointed strongly to 23 months, to me. (I.e., supposing an Obama victory in November, then 16 months from January.)
Bolani then once again deflected the question, saying that “The objective is to strengthen the rule of law and this will enable us to confront all challenges, blah-blah-blah… ”
Asked about the current MOU/SOFA negotiations, he said,
- We have teams working hard on this, to foster and enhance what’s already been achieved. The environment is moving in the right direction to fulfill the needs of both sides.
He was asked whether, in light of the continuing incidents in which US forces have been killing Iraqi civilians, he thinks the US troops should have immunity under the final MOU/SOFA agreements. He said,
- We do have now have a growing experience of discussing such matters, with the aim of reaching the needed balance between the needs of our citizens and the need to have good cooperation between the Iraqi and coalition forces. We have a team working on this issue right now.
In all cases: no “story.”
But altogether: yes, the story.
Americans and distress abroad: The vital “Who” question?
One thing I’ve noticed again and again and again is the– in many ways admirable– instinct of many Americans to think that they (we) and/or the US government has to “do” something about every reported incident of distress or dysfunction overseas.
In Iraq, this morphs easily into the so-called “Pottery Barn” rule… That our government broke it so therefore our government should fix it.
(Hey guys, ever stop to think that precisely because our government’s track record in Iraq is so abysmal, that probably makes our government uniquely unqualified to take any kind of a lead role in the fixing that very evidently needs to be done in Iraq? Pay reparations to Iraqis to let them fix it themselves– yes… But that’s a different manner.)
Or take Afghanistan: The whole official discussion in Washington DC right now is over how many additional US troops are needed to “fix” Afghanistan. This is a specific, and specifically militarized, version of the “Who” question.
Rejoinder #1 to this: Military force is centrally not what’s needed in order to “fix”/heal Afghanistan’s chronically traumatized society and governance system. Any country’s troops operating in a military way inside Afghanistan are most likely only to make things worse.
Rejoinder #2: America’s means of “intervention” are overwhlemingly the tools of military intervention. (See point 1 above.) But even when Washington deploys “reconstruction teams” or whatever, why would anyone assume that they have anything special to contribute to the complex tasks of social and political rebuilding in Afghanistan? The idea that “the west” can build or rebuild societies in distinctly non-western environments is incredibly 19th century. But hullo! That’s two centuries back from today.
Or take Zimbabwe, just for another recent example. In the aftermath of the recent fiasco of the Mugabe-stolen election, many American commentators earnestly asked “What should Washington do about Mugabe?”
Why should anyone think that Washington, as such, should do anything in particular to help “save” Zimbabwe’s people? Why not leave it to those of his neighbors who have a very much greater stake in trying to restore stability to the country… and who seem to be doing a not bad job of crafting a political path forward among Zimbabweans?
… As I’ve written a little in my Re-engage book, many Americans have this great urge to rush around the world trying to “help” or “save” people in distress elsewhere. But they seldom take the time that is required to look coolly at the effects of our own country’s policies on vulnerable societies elsewhere, to look at the sheer harm our country inflicts on those societies, and to engage in the campaigns that are needed here at home to change those policies and thus end the harm that our government’s policies inflict.
This is so much less “romantic” than traveling overseas as saviors to try to “save” or “help” people in distressed countries… But it is a whole lot more necessary.
Two harm-inflicting policies we need to change, for starters:
- 1. Our country’s maintenance of, and use of, an enormously bloated military capability that’s deployed all around the world; and
2. The subsidies we continue to shovel into the pockets of US farmers, and disproportionately into the pockets of rich US farmers– subsidies that have (a) wrecked the livelihoods of millions of small farmers in low-income countries overseas, and (b) more recently, wrecked the “Doha round” of trade talks.
As you can see, working on issues like these is not only not romantic– it’s also incredibly difficult! So many hundreds of thousands of our own fellow-citizens here in the US have done very nicely indeed by feeding off either the taxpayer-funded military-industrial complex or the taxpayer-funded agricultural-subsidy complex… So persuading them that our country needs to change its ways is a real– though necessary– challenge.
I guess there are two parts to this short argument I’m making here::
- 1. Americans (and Europeans) need to become a lot more aware of the harms inflicted by some of our own governments’ longstanding policies, and focus primarily on ending those harms rather than trying to think how to apply band-aids of often temporary “help” to the affected communities overseas; and
2. We should not imagine, in the often self-referential way we have imagined until now, that every single distressed community overseas needs “help” that is uniquely or even mainly American in order to heal. Often, indeed, the injection of Americans into complex situations overseas can complicate rather than aiding the reconciliation and reconstruction that need to occur.
This latter one is the vital “Who” question. Yes, Iraqis and Afghans may well need some external help to resolve their current crises of governance. But why on earth would we imagine that it’s a specifically American, or US-dominated, helping mechanism that’s needed?
As I’ve written earlier here on the blog, in the present world information environment, the question of the legitimacy of any particular actor in the international field has acquired considerable new sensitivity.
Washington doesn’t have much legitimacy as a military-intervening actor these days. Certainly not in Iraq (where, in the view of most people and governments around the world, the original invasion of 2003 never had any legitimacy.) And US/NATO “legitimacy” in Afghanistan– among Afghans– is probably decreasing very rapidly, especially after the militarized over-“kill” that the US troops there have been engaging in there in recent months.
USIP recently reported that the US/NATO forces there increased their use of airborne munitions against ground targets in Afghanistan from “5, 000 pounds of munitions per month in 2005 to an average of 80,000 pounds per month since June 2006, peaking at 168,000 pounds in December 2007. The response of most voices in the political elite– except that of Zbig Brzezinski— has been to argue for considerably beefed-up US and NATO ground forces. But why would anyone imagine that the “solution” in distant Afghanistan is primarily a military one at all– let-alone a made-by-NATO military one?