As an addendum to the post I just put up about Al-Hayat’s writings on climate change and CO2 emissions, here is Nationmaster’s ranking of the world’s countries by per-head CO2 emissions.
It only goes through 2003, though I think the date should be available through 2005 by now. Still, look where Saudi Arabia is: # 19, with CO2 emissions in 2003 of 13.0 metric tons per head.
The US was # 10 there, at 19.8 metric tons/head– but definitely ways ahead of any other major industrialized country.
Look at the fact that other Persian Gulf oil-producing nations occupied four out of the top five slots there. The world-average figure for per-head emissions in 2005 was 4.2 metric tons/head. If the world’s biosphere is to be saved/stabilized, we all need to work extremely hard and creatively to bring the world average down to around 1 metric ton/head.
Al-Hayat’s Morkos on the global economy, inequality, and the environment
I have long thought that al-Hayat’s English-language web presence is one the saddest wasted opportunities in the whole global discourse. However, recently I discovered some very thoughtful writing in an unexpected portion of the site: it is on their business pages.
Going there today, I found two generally very intelligent pieces written by their Business Editor, Michel Morkos: Inequality and Environment Challenge the World Economy, published December 18; and The Price of Environmental Change in the Economic Formula, published December 31.
The first of these pieces identifies a recent significant reduction in the dependence of the world economy on the US economy, and explores the implications of this de-coupling (which Morkos judges, imho correctly, is by no means complete.)
He writes:
- For the first time, the growth of the world economy is allowed to be separated from the US economy. This is considered a good step because it shows that the world is less liable to comply with the US demand and debt. It wasn’t logical, or fair, that most countries, especially underdeveloped countries, should totally yield to the economic fate of the richest economy worldwide and the most spendthrift on the planet.
This separation of the US and world economies will pave the way for the countries of the world to witness a better distribution of the growth returns…
Towards the end of this piece, Morkos moves towards considering equality issues in the global economy, an issue on which he expresses justifiable concern. Then he has a short consideration of the impact of environmentally motivated changes on the prospects for growth, and here he seems to buy into the distinctly questionable argument that environmental constraints will necessarily hamper economic growth.
In the second of these pieces, however, Morkos delves with more intelligence into the economic and other effects of global climate change, and does a much better job of considering its impact. He cites obert Costanza’s 1997 attempt to put a dollar figure on the value of the contribution that the world’s biosphere itself makes to the global economy. He cites the IMF’s and the ICRC’s noticeably differing estimates for the numbers of “environmental refugees” worldwide (25 million, vs. 500 million), but concludes rightly that this is a phenomenon deserving of our great attention… Then he cites what I think was the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 on the accelerating degradation of the biosphere– though the double translation involved has this body referred to there as the “group of intergovernmental experts on climate” rather than the “intergovernmental panel on climate change.” And then he moves on to the Stern Review of late 2006 on the economic consequences of climate change, and Stern’s estimates of the economic costs of either fixing or not fixing the problem.
Still referring to Stern, he concludes his piece thus:
- The planet is facing the risks of a “major disruption to economic and social activity, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.” However, the planet can be saved by reducing gas emissions that cause global warming and seeing the earth avoid even worse consequence; the cost won’t be more than 1% of the annual world GDP.
Can we preserve a clean planet and a good economic environment?
Not a bad place at all to launch his next column from!
In fact, if urgent measures are not taken to preserve the biosphere on which all of humanity depends, the world’s economy, society, and perhaps all of human life itself will anyway be going into a tailspin within the next 100 years, as Stern clearly indicated… And meanwhile, the experiences of farsighted entrepreneurs in many countries, especially Germany, have already shown that a coordinated shift towards the use of ever-greener technology can be good for both the economy and the environment. The idea that this is a zero-sum game and that there always has to be a tradeoff between the two interests is just plain false.
Anyway, I’ve been happy to draw attention to Morkos’s writings on this issue for a couple of reasons. It has been good to find the business editor of a major international daily newspaper starting to grapple seriously– even if, imho, still somewhat imperfectly– with the whole climate change issue.
And then: look at who publishes and reads Al-Hayat! It is published by weighty, ruling-family-related interests in Saudi Arabia, and it is read very widely by well-connected persons in the Kingdom and other Gulf oil-producing states. How excellent to get these circles starting to think seriously about climate change, and by implication about the role their own countries can play in starting to deal with this issue.
In the first of his december articles, Morkos writes,
- Only Saudi Arabia launched a fund at the beginning of this month to protect the environment and impede the dissemination of gazes that cause heating. But the conflict is ongoing about the methods…
I don’t actually think that statement as written (which may have been a mis-translation from the Arabic original?) is correct. Many other countries and intergovernmental bodies have launched funds aimed at helping to support pro-green economic transformations. Though of course, all these efforts are still horrendously under-funded; and the World Bank and many other major development-funding bodies continue to pour huge amounts of money into building infrastructure systems around the world that are heavily gasoline-dependent.
And Saudi Arabia’s own rate of per-capita greenhouse gas emissions is horrendously high, and definitely needs to be considerably reduced. Al-Hayat’s business editor should turn his attention to that huge challenge, too.
But all in all, I was pleased to find those two pieces on the English-language Hayat website. The site’s Business section also carries some interesting writings by the veteran oil-affairs expert Walid Khadduri.
But in general, Hayat’s English-language website still remains a wasteland of missed (or shirked) opportunity. It carries very little material at all; and the choice of which of the paper’s Arabic-language articles do get translated and published on it seems almost completely random. There is no RSS feed or use of hyperlinks. Its Search function has never worked for me. The organization of the site, such as it is, is abysmal.
My article on the post-9/11 world in ‘Friends Journal’
Earlier this year I had a strong leading, as we Quakers say, to do more writing for a specifically Quaker audience. This is a part, really, of the personal/spiritual journey that I’m on right now. It is not that I want to abandon the broader public sphere in which I’ve participated pretty vocally for, oh, more than 30 years now. It’s more that I want to try to bring things together: what I do in my fabulous spiritual home in Charlottesville Friends Meeting (i.e., my home Quaker congregation) and in other Quaker forums, and what I do in “the world”, as well.
So one thing I decided to do was write this article for Friends Journal, which is the monthly magazine published by Friends General Conference, the principle network for (mainly) liberal Quaker congregations across North America. You can find out more about FGC here.
The article is a little bit personal, and it also draws on a lot of what I’ve been writing about here over the years. In it, I try to make the point that the peace testimony that has been a cornerstone of Quakers’ witness ever since the Religious Society of Friends was founded in 1652 has more relevance today than ever. And certainly, my own professional assessment of the outcomes of recent “foreign wars”– Israel’s in Lebanon, and the US’s in both Iraq and Afghanistan– has also come ever more strongly to the conclusion that mere military superiority on its own cannot bring (and may well actually impede) the achievement of strategic goals of lasting value.
I guess for me, one part of the challenge is to try, when necessary, to keep my Quaker convictions separate from my professional assessments. But when they come together, as they do so strongly on this question of the utility or disutility of war, then I want to be able to claim that, too. I really do feel that a commitment to nonviolence and the nonviolent de-escalation and resolution of existing conflicts is more than ever, nowadays, a supremely pragmatic approach to the world.
Anyway, do read the article if you feel so led. I see there’s some provision for commenting over there. But I’m not sure quite how that “registration” thing works. You know you can always comment here…
Michael Massing, on Iraq
Michael Massing of Columbia Journalism Review has two excellent pieces in the current and upcoming issues of the New York Review of Books; and luckily for us they both available in fulltext, online.
The first is this one, which is a review of two fascinating– though admittedly not new– books that look at the original US invasion of Iraq from the “grunt” Marine’s point of view. One of these books is by Nathaniel Fick, who was a lieutenant in the Marines in first, Afghanistan, and then the original invasion of Iraq. The other is by Evan Wright, who was a writer for Rolling Stone who was embedded with the military in Kuwait, as the count-down to the invasion continued. Then, after meeting Fick, Wright decided to abandon the cushy officers’ digs where most of the embeds hung out and go along on the invasion itself with Fick and his 23 grunts, instead.
Massing’s description of these two books definitely makes me want to read them… The war they describe is one that already, even as the invasion column was snaking its way up towards Baghdad, was committing some extremely inhumane (an defiling) acts. Massing is quite right to note that soon afterwards, the collective memory of many Americans tended to forget that. The collapse of the Saddam regime happened relatively quickly and decisively; and afterwards, Americans’ attention very rapidly shifted to the very evident shortcomings in the US forces’ planning for the post-combat phase, so no-one spent much time recalling what had happened during the invasion itself.
Massing is also quite right to contrast the gritty, inhumane view of the invasion phase that emerges from both these books with the uber-sanitized rendering of exactly the same events that emerged from the more august pens of the “big-time” MSM reporters like the NYT’s Michael Gordon.
Massing also provides some excerpts from this 2005 interview with Evan Wright by Angelo Matera, in which Wright said,
- we’ve been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom Brokaw’s book about the men who fought World War II, and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They’ve forgotten that war is about killing. I really think it’s important as a society to be reminded of this, because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn’t serve in Viet Nam. Many of them protested it. But now they’re grown up, and as they’ve gotten older I think many of them have grown tired of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they’ve started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war.
I never read Tom Brokaw’s book, but if you go back and look at the actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut—who wrote Slaughterhouse Five—and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about it, there’s no romance at all. In fact, a lot of their work is very anti-war.
This interested me, because I made something like the very same argument about the rose-colored view of WW2 in an article I had in the December issue of Friends Journal… (I’m going to write a separate post about that article, very shortly.)
Anyway, the second Massing NYRB article of note is this one, that’s in the upcoming (January 17, 2008) issue of the mag. It is a very well-written appreciation of the “Inside Iraq” blog, which as alert JWN readers may be aware is one of my favorites.
When writing his article, Massing phoned one of the blog;’s contributors, Sahar, at the McClatchy Newspapers office in Baghdad, and he recounts a few things she told him:
- “People in America look at pictures of Afghanistan and think Iraq is the same,” she said. “They think Iraqis are people who are uneducated, who are Bedouins living in tents, tending camels and sheep.” Until the plague of wars began devouring the country, she went on, Iraq was the leading nation in the region, with a highly educated people boasting the best doctors, teachers, and engineers. Americans, Sahar sighed, “don’t know this. And when you don’t know a person, you can’t feel for them, can you?”
She continued: “How many have been killed in Iraq? Bordering on a million. If you realize that these are real people with real feelings who are being killed—that they are fathers and husbands, teachers and doctors—if these facts could be made known, would people be so brutalized? It’s our job as Iraqi journalists to show that Iraqis are real people. This is what we try to advance through the blog.”
In October, Sahar, along with five other Iraqi women who have worked for Knight Ridder/McClatchy, traveled to New York and Los Angeles to receive the annual Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. Today, she is the only one of the six who remains with the bureau. The rest have all fled Iraq—because of death threats, because of the violence raging in their neighborhoods, because of (in one case) the murder of a husband, daughter, and mother-in-law by other Iraqis. In thus leaving, these women joined the huge exodus out of Iraq, a stampede that has deprived the country of many of its most competent citizens. Sahar, who herself has lost a son to the violence, is determined to stay. “This is my home,” she told me. “This is where I want to be.”
Anyway, it’s great that Massing is able to shine his own, very strong spotlight on the excellent work of the Inside Iraq bloggers. As, too, that he brought those two intriguing books to my notice…
INSS studies on 33-day war, and the next one?
The Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University has just sent me the latest edition of their “Strategic Assessment” quarterly. It contains the usual mix of good-sense realism with ideologized chauvinism that most SA editions have: maybe the mix here is about 75:25.
I was particularly interested in the two pieces on the 33-day war of 2006 (which the Israelis call “the Second Lebanon War”, conveniently forgetting the two significant engagements of 1993 and 1996 in their numbering system there.) I was reading these as a follow-up to the INSS’s book on the Second Lebanon War, which I referred to a little here, a couple of weeks ago.
The first of these pieces is by Daniel Sobelman, whom I’ve generally considered to be a fairly sober analyst. He’s looking primarily at the changes that the 33-day war (33-DW) brought about in Hizbullah’s political status within Lebanon. A crucial topic.
He starts off by, in my judgment, mis-stating something rather serious. He writes,
- Several events converged to bring twenty-nine years of Syrian hegemony in Lebanon to a finale: the string of political assassinations, the withdrawal of the Syrian military from Lebanese soil, and of course the Second Lebanon War.
I would say, instead, that the 33-DW helped to shore up a level of Syrian influence within Lebanon that prior to July 12 was at a much lower ebb than it was after August 14, 2006. And that, overwhelmingly because of the humiliation that Siniora and the rest of the determinedly anti-Syrian “March 14 forces” experienced within Lebanon during the war.
Though a serious misjudgment, that line of argument did not turn out to be the central thrust of the piece, which was more on Hizbullah’s political fortunes within Lebanon, rather than Syria’s. (And the two notably do not track exactly with each other other, though they do influence each other.)
Sobelman starts off with an interesting argument, noting that the (staunchly anti-Hizbullah) Lebanese daily An-Nahar now publishes a number of news reports that Hizbullah “undoubtedly views as sensitive from a security perspective”, and that this “reflects the profound change that has altered the country’s political climate and the rules of the game within Lebanon to the disadvantage of Hizbollah.” This is an interesting use of evidence, though it’s quite possible it doesn’t tell the whole story.
He notes, in my view correctly, that,
- public opinion in Israel seems focused on the military aspects of the Israeli campaign against Hizbollah… But today the outcome of the war must be measured not simply by the number of rockets that Hizbollah succeeded in firing into Israel for thirty-three days, or the organization’s success in rehabilitating its military capacity…
He then continues to make clear that it is the political outcome, as measured primarily by Hizbullah’s status within Lebanon’s society and polity, that is the crucial metric.
The goal of Olmert and Halutz when they launched the 33-DW was, we can recall, to destroy Hizbullah both militarily and also, if possible, politically, within Lebanon. As Sobelman readily concedes, they did not succeed in the military part of this. But I think he over-states the degree to which they succeeded in the political part.
Sobelman writes:
- In interviews granted after the two previous campaigns against Israel – “Operation Accountability” in July 1993 and “Operation Grapes of Wrath” in April 1996 – Hassan Nasrallah indicated that he measured success primarily according to Hizbollah’s ability to continue firing rockets into Israel until the end of the campaign; the success, as he saw it, in dictating the rules of the confrontation to the IDF; and the success in preventing Israel from driving a wedge between Hizbollah and the Lebanese public. From Hizbollah’s perspective and according to these parameters, the organization defeated Israel. However, in contrast to 1993 and 1996, the ceasefire of August 14, 2006 left Hizbollah much less protected than in the past. Neither Operation Accountability nor Operation Grapes of Wrath unleashed internal processes in Lebanon…
This is correct. The crucial difference was, of course, that by 2006 the Syrians had been out of Lebanon for a year already. (Which is why Sobelman was so wrong in saying in the lede graf that it was the 33-DW itself that diminished the Syrian position in Lebanon.)
So then, in December of 2006, Hizbullah and its allies from the Free Patriotic Movement launched their big street sit-in action against the Siniora government in the heart of downtown. That did not succeed, but neither was it rebuffed. Instead, it led to the political impasse in which the country has been locked ever since (and which I am about to go and experience firsthand.)
Given that the Syrians have not been militarily present in Lebanon at all since July 2005, I think the failure of the March 14 forces to impose the rest of their agenda on Lebanon– that is, its Hizbullah-disarmament part– indicates that Hizbullah did not “lose” the 33-DW at the political level in anything like as clearcut a way as Sobelman suggests.
In many other respects, though, Sobelman presents what seems like a fair and sober assessment of the balance inside Lebanon. He notes,
- While declaring that Hizbollah possesses weapons that could decide the outcome of the next war, Nasrallah made sure to point out that his statement was actually intended to prevent war. Hizbollah, which needs significant additional time to recover from the last war and rebuild the homes of its constituencies, has reached the conclusion that it should lower its profile with regard to the armed struggle against Israel.
Much depends on regional developments. [Under-statement of the year, that! ~HC] … In any case, in recent years Hizbollah has proven that it can adapt to changing conditions, even when this has meant somewhat tempering its ideology. Today Hizbollah is again checking its limits and, as always, remaking itself. The results of this process will be determined to a great extent by the solution to the current crisis in Lebanon.
The second article in SA on Lebanon is by Amir Kulick, an analyst I haven’t encountered before. His piece is titaled The Next War with Hizbullah. I find that an intriguing subject, because I am always interested in how military planners, and strategic analysts outside of the military, learn from their experiences during war. And Kulick gives us an example of such learning which, if it is broadly replicated within the relevant government circles in Israel, foretells a much more aggressive and destructive Israeli campaign next time.
First, then, we have his assessment of Hizbullah’s military performance during the war:
- It is clear that Hizbollah’s balance statement at the end of the fighting was mixed. Politically, despite its efforts to portray the campaign as a “divine victory,” the organization incurred severe criticism at home. Furthermore, much of its military infrastructure was damaged….
On the other hand, the organization can claim success for its operational doctrine. Its forces inflicted many losses on the IDF in local combat, and above all, Hizbollah never ceased its bombardment of the Israeli home front, even in the face of massive air activity. The organization’s logistical forecasts also proved correct, given its success in preserving a large inventory of ammunition, thereby enabling Hizbollah soldiers to hit Israel with large numbers of rockets during every stage of the fighting (an average of 150-200 rockets per day were fired). From the organization’s perspective, these actions both brought about an end to the fighting and severely shook the “Zionist entity.” From this vantage, the operational balance was positive.
At the same time, a number of weak points in Hizbollah’s operational preparations surfaced…
Kulick then looks at the changes that he believes Hizbullah’s military has made in order to (a) correct deficiencies it identified during the 33-DW, and (b) deal with the new constraints placed on its freedom of action by UNIFIL’s broader deployment within Lebanon and other present realities– though his judgment is that “the deployment of Lebanese and UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon has had relatively little effect on Hizbollah’s military deployment and recovery of its military capabilities.”
Kulick does, certainly, give Hizbullah the credit of being a smart, learning organization. (As does Sobelman.) He also concedes that it, “in effect represents most Shiites in Lebanon” and that this “gives it a reliable political and social base, beyond the purely military sphere.”
He predicts that Israel’s
- next campaign with Hizbollah is expected to resemble the previous one to some degree: missile bombardment of the Israeli home front, a heavy Israeli air response, and possibly a more extensive [Israeli] ground operation than in the past.
Personally, I am not so sure of that. In my estimation, Hizbullah’s leaders are inventive and their organization strong and disciplined. They might do something very different indeed– including, refusing to play to Israel’s military strengths by refusing to fight militarily at all… Who knows?
Anyway, Kulick evidently has high hopes in the IDF being a learning organization, too; and he lays out how he believes the IDF can innovate in all the key dimensions of warfare, in the “next” war against Hizbullah. This is where his article becomes very scary indeed….
Okay, I just made and uploaded a table in which I compiled the operational prescriptions Kulick listed at the end of his article, and my comments on those prescriptions. So you’ll need to go and read them there.
I confess, that before I examined them closely, I found these prescriptions to be– as I noted above– “scary.” But on closer examination they look highly unrealistic. They suffer from these key shortcomings:
- 1. Above all, Kulick fails to define the political-strategic end-state that the war he describes– which in his view, should include the insertion of sizeable ground forces into Lebanon, as well as stand-off actions– should aim at. But surely, what the past five years have shown us is that, if countries do indeed intend to use forces overseas, then the key stricture of the Powell Doctrine regarding the necessity of having an Exit Strategy is more important than ever. Kulick says nothing about this! All he seems intent on is suppressing or destroying Hizbullah’s military capacity completely. Okay… but then what??
2. Also, as subsidiary point to this, if the IDF has been successful in– as Kulick urges– identifying and “neutralizing” (i.e., in IDF parlance, killing and destroying) Hizbullah’s command and control structures, then how does the termination of the conflict get negotiated? An even worse form of quagmire looms herein.
3. Finally, Kulick’s plan requires the IDF to raise and maintain sizeable and very capable ground forces as well as, presumably, doing everything else it has been doing in past years: maintaining up-to-the minute air superiority, building a nuclear-armed navy, spending millions of person-hours running the movement control system in the West Bank, terrorizing Gaza, etc etc. Where will it find the recruits/reservists willing to sustain this kind of commitment? There was a reason the ground forces performed so poorly in the 33-DW. Mainly, it was because they hadn’t done any serious operational training for many years. Kulisk’s plan would require Israel to revert once again to being a highly militarized helot state carrying a huge manpower burden in its military. Do Israelis want that? How many years (or decades) would this have to continue? And why should Israelis even consider doing this, if the outcome is– wait for it!– yet another lengthy and debilitating quagmire in Lebanon like the one that followed the 1982 invasion??
Well, I hope I’ve made my point there…
My larger point is that my reading of all these recent INSS materials has confirmed and strengthened my judgment that the 2006 chapter of the IDF’s decades-long saga of experience in Lebanon has now proved that, in that theater, military force alone is less capable than ever of bringing about politico-strategic achievements of any lasting value.
There has to be a better way in which Israel can deal with the threats its people face from across their northern border. And guess what, there is! It is called “a comprehensive negotiated resolution of all the remaining strands of Israel’s longstanding conflict with its Arab neighbors.” (As I urged most recently, in this CSM contribution.)
And yes, that certainly includes a final peace agreement with both Syria and Lebanon, as well as the Palestinians.
The Syrians are certainly eager to resume the negotiations for such an agreement; and I am just about certain that once Syria is engaged in this way, all the Lebanese parties– including Hizbullah— will follow along in its slipstream.
The Syrians went to Annapolis in November 2007. Before that, they engaged in serious and ultimately very constructive negotiations with Israel in 1991-96, which came close to reaching a final agreement in January 1996.
So why doesn’t Olmert seize the opportunity to re-engage with them now? And why do Israelis in general still engage in the delusion that there must somewhere be a “military quick fix” to all their problems with their neighbors? And why does the US government just let Israel maintain this belligerent and anti-humane position towards its neighbors, while the US continues to shovel money and political support into Israel?
I don’t really know the answer to those rhetorical questions. What I do know is that the lessons of the 33-DW– as of the US’s strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanisation– are all well worth studying.
UN officials stoking US belligerence toward Syria?
I’ve been reading quite a lot about Lebanon (and Syria) recently, because that’s where I’m headed, for a short-ish trip, later this week.
This piece in today’s HaAretz caught my eye. It’s a report by Barak Ravid on the ongoing work of the NATO-dominated UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon. It includes this:
- Israeli military officials express great satisfaction with UNIFIL’s activities. A senior Jerusalem official singled out the European units of UNIFIL, particularly the Italian, French and Spanish contingents, for their professional manner of conduct. “They do their job and cause significant discomfort to Hezbollah,” he said. “They have had quite a few successes.”
Oh, what fun it must be for the militaries of these three formerly colonial European nations to be able to strut their stuff once again in the hills and valleys of formerly colonized (by France) Lebanon.
But the anonymous Israeli official quoted by Ravid expresses concern that the continuation of the political crisis may lead to increasing Hizbullah’s room for maneuver. And then we have this:
- UN officials point an accusatory finger regarding Lebanon’s political crisis toward Syria, claiming that “Syria defeats every attempt at an agreement and pushes Hezbollah and its other allies in Lebanon to increase their demands all the time.” They say that Syria’s President Bashar Assad wants to demonstrate at any price that “nothing moves in Lebanon without him” and predict that as a result the crisis in Lebanon will continue for months to come.
The main problem, as the UN officials see it, is that not enough pressure is being placed on Assad. “He will only move if he senses a threat to the stability of his regime,” they said. “If the Americans were, for example, to send ships close to Lebanon’s beaches, that would send a clear message to Assad, but they’re not doing that.”
Okay, let’s stop right there. What we have in the above paragraphs are direct quotes attributed to a collectivity of un-named UN officials. Tell me, how does that work? Was there a chorus of two or more of these UN officials speaking in complete unison there?
So, some extremely sloppy and mendacious journalism is one thing we have.
But what we also have is the report of these same un-named “UN officials”– perhaps, more realistically, actually one UN official– apparently inciting the US to adopt a more belligerent stance toward Syria.
Is this part of UNIFIL’s mandate, I wonder? I sure don’t see it there…
2008: The year of ‘Human Security’?
Happy New Year, readers one and all!
My chief hope for 2008 is that we can persuade a decisive proportion of people around the world– but especially here in the United States– that looking at security as something that militaries can bring about is to fundamentally misunderstand the age we live in.
If the experiences of the US’s technologically bloated military in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 4-6 years, and the experience of Israel’s military in Lebanon in 2006 can teach us anything it is that military superiority and prowess is no longer on its own a guarantor that a state can win and significant strategic gains in other countries. There are a number of reasons why this is so; we can discuss them all at some point. But one of the main reasons why military power does not suffice is that it neglects– and indeed, it also directly undercuts– the main component of security in the 21st century, that is, the security of actual human persons.
Back in the 1990s many theorists around the world ( though sadly few in the United States) started to sketch out a whole new theory of security that went by the name of “human security”. At that point, the US military was still training and planning according to a slightly updated variant of the doctrine it had followed for the 45 years of the Cold War, and indeed for many decades prior to that, too. Rumsfeld tried to “reform” or even “revolutionize” that doctrine– and according to all the accounts he was eager to use the invasion of Iraq to “prove” the effectiveness of the relatively light and mobile hi-tech forces he favored.
But he was still operating according to the idea that guns and steel were what would be decisive– either directly or through the completely debilitating “shock and awe” they were able to induce in the targeted populations. That was Dan Halutz’s idea in Lebanon in 2006, too.
It didn’t work, for any of them. (And nor, in Lebanon, had that approach worked for the Israelis when they tried earlier variants of it in 1982, 1993, or 1996, either.)
So in 2008, let’s all of us come back to this powerful idea of human security. It is the idea that my country will be more secure if the citizens of other countries near and far also feel secure– secure, that is, in what counts to us all, as humans. And conversely, that if citizens of other countries feel insecure, that will make my country more insecure, too.
Here, from the UNDP’s Human Development Report of 1994 is a pretty good introduction to the idea of human security:
- The idea of human security, though simple, is likely to revolutionize society in the 21st century. A consideration of the basic concept of human security must focus on four of its essential characteristics:
• Human security is a universal concern. It is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations and poor…
• The components of human security are interdependent. When the security of people is endangered anywhere in the world, all nations are likely to get involved…
• Human security is easier to ensure through early prevention than later intervention. It is less costly to meet these needs upstream rather than downstream…
• Human security is people-centred. It is concerned with how people live and breathe in a society, how freely they exercise their many choices, how much access they have to market and social opportunities—and whether they live in conflict or in peace…
I could write quite a lot about why I judge that being attentive to, for example, the human security and wellbeing of the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan would do more to contain and finally incapacitate the threat from Al-Qaeda than the present, highly militarized US policies in those two countries… Or why, for Israelis, being attentive to the human security and wellbeing of all of their neighbors would do more to build the real security of Israelis inside Israel than the present policies of quite inhumane collective punishment, oppression, and territorial aggrandizement… Or why, for Americans, pulling our troops out of Iraq and being attentive to the human security and wellbeing of Iraq’s sorely war-shattered citizens is the best way to serve everyone’s longterm security interests… In fact, I am sure that over the year ahead I will (continue to) make all these arguments!
But for now, since it is almost midnight here in Virginia, I shall simply leave you all with the idea that human security is a concept whose power and relevance are surely evident to more people today than ever before.
So Happy New Year! May 2008 be a year in which all human communities can become more secure– and also one in which more of us than ever before can come to understand that human interdependence really is at the foundation of everyone’s security.
My op-ed: Global warming as “the nuclear issue of our age”
My latest op-ed is in today’s Christian Science Monitor. (Here and here.) I think it has a suitably year’s-end feel to it. The title is America: Step up on climate change; Global warming is the nuclear issue of our age.
Okay, I realize that climate change is not exactly like nuclear weapons. But here is how I end the piece:
- Climate change now looks set to be the same kind of touchstone issue in global politics that nuclear weapons has been since 1945. As with nuclear weapons, the threats posed by climate change know no national boundaries. They could, in some circumstances, threaten all of human life. As with nuclear weapons, good-faith international cooperation is a must if the climate problem is to be brought under control.
The people of the rest of today’s richly interconnected world will be monitoring Washington’s performance carefully. How will Americans and our leaders respond?
The rest of it is a longer explanation of why the US– government and people– have to engage in good faith in the two years of global negotiations on environmental issues that will be flowing from the recent Bali conference.
In better faith, that is, than at the time of the 1999 Kyoto agreement… Back then, the Clinton administration fought tooth-and-nail for terms in the agreement that were extremely favorable to the US– and then returned back to Washington and made zero effort to get the agreement ratified by the US Senate. And the chief US negotiator at the time was…. Al Gore. And the person who was Chairman Pro-tem of the Senate at the time was…. Al Gore.
And now, Al Gore is the darling of the environmental community and has gotten (half of) a Nobel Peace Prize as a great environmentalist. So the world turns, eh?
Anyway, read the whole piece and tell me what you think.
Bhutto, Saddam, Hariri: The travails of international criminal “justice”
I want to second the judgment that Pat Lang expressed over at his blog today, to the effect that there is no prospect of any independent international investigation into Benazir’s killing.
Hillary Clinton– you remember her, she’s the one who keeps touting her claimed “experience” in governance, including foreign affairs– has been making a big deal on the campaign path of issuing strident calls for just such an investigation. The potent sub-text there being that no-one can believe the credibility of any investigation organized solely by the Pakistani authorities.
Well, yes and no– though the speed and vigor with which Hillary launched her call for an international investigation looked, in itself, highly politicized and confrontational.
But Lang is quite right to say that no such investigation will be convened. Who would do it? The only possible authorizing body with any legitimacy would be the Security Council, and there are four governments with veto power there– perhaps even five– that would almost certainly block any attempt to embarrass Pres. Musharraf at this time.
Which is of course very different from Lebanon, 2005, where Pres. Lahoud had no staunch, veto-wielding supporters to cover his back on the SC.
Lang was quite correct to write,
- Bottom Line: Crimes like these are really matters of international politics, and the large countries’ interests still govern. All else is just illusion. International law? A pretty conceit. The strong still are strong.
There will be no effective international investigation into Bhutto’s death.
And while we’re on the subject of internationally launched criminal investigations and other criminal proceedings, let’s: (a) remember that today is the first anniversary of the ghastly travesty of the execution of Saddam Hussein, conducted by a kangaroo court that was convened under the eager and highly politicized auspices of the US military occupation; (b) look at how incredibly divisive, inconclusive, and partisan the SC’s Hariri investigation has turned out to be; and (c) review the record of all the other criminal proceedings the international “community” has launched over the past 14 years…
It is very hard indeed to conclude that these proceedings have had a constructive record, on balance, either in deterring the future commission of atrocities– sometimes in the very same countries where the indicted/convicted miscreants operated– or in institutionalizing norms of accountability and good governance in the countries targeted by them.
All the people in the international community who continue to root for “international” or internationally-launched criminal proceedings that turn out not to be responsible to anything resembling a democratic polity, and not to bring about the promised policy outcomes (as listed above), should reflect carefully on– and seek to learn from– the disastrous record of the Saddam trial.
Especially every year on December 30.
Oh, those feudal “socialists”…
Juan Cole is reporting that the leaders of the Bhutto-ist “Pakistan People’s Party” have anointed Benazir’s 19-year-old son Bilawal to be the party’s next leader, with a feudal lord of some slightly lesser order to be the party’s candidate in the elections that are still scheduled to go ahead January 8. I guess Bilawal’s daddy, Asif Zardari either could not run or would not have made a credible candidate in the elections because of his past convictions for serious corruption. Benazir herself had won an agreement from Musharraf that the indictments outstanding against herself on similar charges would not be pressed on her recent return from exile. But I guess the deal did not extend to wiping Zardari’s slate clean as well.
The crowning of the youthful Bilawal as the leader of this avowedly populist or even perhaps “socialist” party reminds me of leadership norms within Lebanon’s main “socialist” party, the Progressive Socialist party (PSP). It was founded by Druze feudal overlord Kamal Jumblatt and was headed by him until he was killed (by the Syrians) in 1977, at which time the leadership passed immediately to Kamal’s youthful son Walid, who has headed it ever since.
In the case of the PSP, almost no-one in Lebanon takes seriously its claim to be a “socialist” party in any meaningful sense. The only people who apparently do are the leaders of the “Socialist International” who still list the PSP as a “Full member party”. On the other hand, that web-page there, which is on the SI’s official website, also lists Fatah as a “consultative party”, which I find equally hilarious.