Why Not Save the Children?

According to the AP, Save the Children has reported that thousands of children in Myanmar face imminent starvation if food is not distributed quickly. The Myanmar government has permitted relief supplies to enter the country, but will not allow aid workers to distribute them. Although it claims it will distribute them itself, there have been reports that the military is hoarding relief supplies and that deaths from malnourishment and communicable disease among the most vulnerable are rising.

The situation led France to suggest last week that armed intervention might be warranted. This question has been taken up by Peter Howard in a post at Duck of Minerva, titled "Why Not Invade Burma"? Commenters to the post make various arguments against, most on pragmatic grounds.

"'Junta.' Do we have a Junta? Or is it just them?"

"Geography. There are certainly worse places to fight in the world. But not many."

"I think the equally interesting question here is how on earth the French government thought this was even remotely feasible, simply from a logistical and military point of view."

Hank of Eclectic Meanderings asks the important prior question:

"Is it legal? Burma is not developing weapons of mass destruction; it is not attacking a neighbor. It connot even threaten a neighbor. It just wants to mind it's own bussiness without outside intervention. The UN charter guarantees National Sovereignty."

The answer is that sovereignty ain't what it used to be. The concept has been progressively redefined to be contingent on a responsibility to protect one's people. This principle was agreed to by consensus in the 2005 UN Millennium Outcome Document, and while it's not binding one can argue that it enshrines a new understanding of sovereignty that could be invoked in this case.

Also, the UN Security Council can override sovereignty anytime 2/3 of its members can agree without a veto from a Permanent Member. (Though it's likely China would veto in this case.)

The humanitarian case for an intervention here is at least as compelling as Operation Restore Hope in Somalia in 1991. The US government and a few other nations, under the authority of the United Nations Security Council, deployed forces to ensure the distribution of aid to starving famine victims. The operation went sour when the began to fight back; but in the meantime numerous civilian lives were saved.

An invasion of Myanmar would have to be just that, and would involve many of the very logistical and political drawbacks mentioned; but these should not be confused with a moral argument for standing by while children starve to death because a brutal regime is standing by indifferently. There is every ethical rationale for doing something more than continuing to negotiate; there is simply, as Peter explains in his post, no political will.

Child Detainees

According to the Washington Post:

"The United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002, according to a report filed by the Bush administration with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child."

Read all about it here.

The 33 comments, some advocating genocide against those whose children risk their lives to protect kin and country, are here. An interesting and depressing commentary on the state of debate.

Hitler and the US Election

I put this video up yesterday because it made me laugh, but then I poked around on YouTube videos that were linked to it, so I thought I'd expand the post.



Apparently, Hillary just acts like Hitler in parody (that is, no one thinks the video above is anything but a joke, but Obama's polices (like nuclear disarmament and health care)are actually equivalent to Hitler:



Though, since the person who created this video clearly cannot spell, s/he can be excused I suppose for not seeming to understand what Hitler actually did. (What with our President setting such a shoddy example both on grammar and on historical analogies of late, who can blame the average citizen?)

Ann Coulter has made more direct claims in recent weeks. In April, she asserted that Barack Obama is "a racist" based on her reading of his autobiography, "Dreams o My Father," which expresses anger at racism, and which she compares to Mein Kampf.

Then there was the brou-ha in February over Tom Sullivan's remarks in response to a caller to his right-wing radio show, who said that Obama's speaking style seemed reminiscent of Hitler:

"I understand that Hitler is hated by, and should be, by most everybody in civilized society. ... But the point being, you must remember something. Adolf Hitler was able to gather a country of people and get them excited about whatever it was that he was talking to them about. He was a very fiery, enigmatic -- I'm not sure -- I mean, he was -- I mean, he really got the people all thrilled..."

I can see why this rankles, but frankly I was more troubled by Keith Olberman's response - he criticized Sullivan for making even the slightest comparison between Obama and Hitler:



But they are comparable in some ways, aren't they? Both human beings. Both mortal. Both male human beings, or Pete's sake - feminist theorists argue this along can explain a little. Both working their way into political inluence against a background of hardship. And yes, both eloquent public speakers who excite an response from their audience through the use of redundance and emotive cliches. I'm willing to say it, as someone who will be pleased to support Obama in November's election, and I think it's silly for left-wing pundits to be so scared by the comparison on these completely irrelevant criteria. Obama is a gifted orator who makes many people share his vision, and that is not a curse, it is what will enable him to exercise leadership and unite the country in precisely the way he promises. Hitler had the same gift, as have many great leaders.

The crucial difference is the use to which such power is put. The idea that liberals should be frightened of or reactionary toward such comparisons is ludicrous.

Responsibility to Protect

I was recently asked to post a bit of background on the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine (aka R2P).

This concept was first articulated by an Independent Commission established by the Government of Canada to attempt to resolve the tension between the norm of state sovereignty, on which the entire UN Charter regime rests, and the protection of civilian populations from grave human rights abuses at the hands of their own governments – a parallel set of principles also espoused by the UN Charter preamble and articulated in two further sets of treaties – human rights law and international humanitarian law.

The tension between these principles had become evident in the 1999 Kosovo crisis, which posed a choice between two competing principles: 1) do something to prevent what many thought to be a looming genocide and 2) do something legally. Under the UN Charter regime, military intervention in a sovereign state is never legal unless authorized by the UN Security Council, which requires a 2/3 vote and no vetoes by those holding Permanent Status on the Council (the US, UK, Russia, China and France). Because the Council is split on the legitimacy of intervention even in cases of genocide, such consensus is rarely forthcoming.

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), peopled by prominent scholars and jurists, produced a landmark report in 2000, redefining sovereignty as responsibility. Previous, sovereignty had been understood as a claim to absolute autonomy within one’s territorial borders. The R2P doctrine places the burden of proof on the state to govern responsibly so as to protect its civilian population. If it fails to do this or directly threatens its citizens’ bodily integrity rights, it sacrifices its claim to sovereignty; at that point, the responsibility to protect is transferred to the international community.

The seemingly brilliant concept has worked well as a rhetorical device. It has been legitimated through adoption in a number of UN documents, including the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in 2004 and the 2005 UN Millennium Conference Outcome Document. However, it does not really provide a road-map to the mechanism for triggering a legitimate intervention. The criteria it gives for an appropriate intervention do not improve on just war theory, which dates back at least to Augustine. Its lofty language of “just cause,” “right intention,” “last resort,” “proporotional means” and “reasonable prospects” already framed the debate on Kosovo. And the section on “what do to when the Security Council will not act” lists primarily the exact same types of non-coercive operations that currently exist as band-aid efforts to mitigate suffering of civilians in armed conflicts.

Since “grave human rights abuses” are in the eye of the beholder, the big question of who should decide when violations of sovereignty are justified remains unanswered and a subject of controversy among governments. This is the context for Nikolas K. Gvosdev’s recent suggestion at the Washington Realist that the norm be revised to apply only to non-democracies. But I think that idea only skirts the same issue: who should decide who counts as a democracy?

Nuggets From the Slop Bucket

Let's see, what happened in the blogosphere while I was away?

Kenneth Anderson reported on robot spiders, soon to be gathering intelligence on the battlefield. Though, his post seems to take for granted BAE Systems' line that they will "save thousands of lives." Gather countless bits of intel, perhaps, but whether lives are saved or lost as a result is in the hands of weapons-bearers and state-makers.

Nicholas Gevosdev at the Washington Realist suggested that R2P doctrine might be applied only to nondemocracies, as a way of gaining support from Southern democracies like South Africa and India. Commenters seem skeptical the idea would sell, but give little consideration to whether it's ethically preferable.

According to Daniel Graeber, the USG has rejected Omar Khadr's defense that he was a child soldier when he tossed a grenade at a US soldier in a firefight. A shame and an outrage, but I wonder if his defense hasn't missed the boat by focusing on Khadr's age. The USG wants to try him for murder, but he was in a firefight. Hello.

And Dan Drezner writes admiringly, and erringly, of Hillary's stick-to-it-ness:

"her performance over the past few months has managed to shift perceptions about her in ways that salvage her reputation as a politician of national standing."

This is nonsense on stilts. Her refusal to drop out of the race has been widely interpreted (falsely in my view) as hurting her party. Her seemingly self-serving intransigence against all reason has recalled the worst of bull-headedness in recent Presidents. That voters now value reason over cowboy antics as a result of the failures of the Bush presidency is the evident in this week's primary results and will become blindingly obvious in November.

Back.

But, too jet-lagged to write much. Instead, I give you this:



For what is it a metaphor? I'm not sure, but I do like it.

Back soon...

Unless my colleague Cleitus pops in with some of his usual incisive remarks, blogging will be slow for the next week as I'm traveling on research. Unfortunately, since I blog pseudononymously, that's all I can tell you lest my students figure out who is really behind these posts.

In the meantime, I leave you with this remarkable footage from President Bush's final White House Correspondence Dinner. Best speech he ever gave IMHO: he didn't fumble a word once. He may have been a terrible President, but the man is brilliant as a stand-up comic. Perhaps, when he leaves office, he can get his own show.



TTFN.

Change I Can Believe In

One of the reasons that Barack Obama is well-situated to kick John McCain's ass this Fall is that he has the most comprehensive vision for combatting climate change - truly the issue today that has the potential to unite the right, left and independents.

McCain would refuse to join a global climate change regime without India and China. Clinton talks vaguely about leading such a regime, but with her hawkish foreign policy would likely bankrupt the US in a war with Iran before she's invest seriously in climate change. Obama would put the money McCain wants to use for Mars exploration toward investment in green technology. As he puts it, "If we can go to the moon, we can replace the internal combustion engine. If we can go to the moon, we can build windmills and solar panels."

Even if this is idealistic rhetoric, it is rhetoric that will resonate with vast bipartisan swaths of the electorate this Fall - more than a Mars mission, and certainly more than obliterating innocent civilians in Iranian cities.

To compare the candidates on international law issues, click here.

At Last, Some Perspective

I was heartened to see this story from Reuters today, titled "FactBox: Military and Civilian Deaths in Iraq." It's a nice counterpoint to the constant news ticker with the number of US military deaths, creeping upward by a few bodies per day and now in the low 4,000s... if you add in deaths of coalition forces from other countries, the number jumps by a paltry few hundred.

Hard to swallow of course, if like me you're in a military family, but on the other hand those in uniform sign up for the posssibility of being killed, get paid for it, are legitimate targets, and are dying at lower rates than most wars in US history.

If you bar-graph this against the average of conservative estimates of civilian deaths so far (that is, deaths of innocent individuals who shouldn't be hit and didn't sign up for the risk), it looks something like this.


I'd really, really like to see more coverage of this discrepancy in the US media. Not sob stories of Iraqi families, but the sheer numbers, a regular day-by-day ticker. Could provide some ongoing perspective.

"Captain Kidd, Human Rights Victim?"

Abu Muqawama seconds John Burnett, ripping on Britain in today's NY Times about its lax security policy toward piracy on the high seas:

"The British government... to the incredulity of many in the maritime industry, has taken a curiously pathetic approach to piracy. While the French were flying six of the captured pirates to Paris to face trial, the British Foreign Office issued a directive to the once vaunted Royal Navy not to detain any pirates, because doing so could violate their human rights... The British attitude has come a long way since the days when pirates were chained to pilings at Wapping and left there until the tidal water of the Thames ebbed and flowed over the bodies three times. So much for Britannia ruling the waves."

It's a well-written editorial, and Burnett's book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the resurgence of maritime piracy. However, the critique of Britain here is off the mark. Of course pirates have human rights - do we really wish to return to the days of gibbeting? And Captain Kidd was a human rights victim by today's standards - the conditions of his imprisonment before his execution included a year of solitary confinement and were said to have driven him partially insane.

What Britain should be scolded for is not pointing out that pirates have rights (as do all criminals, however heinous their behavior), but letting them go to avoid responsibility for protecting their rights. Britain fears not that detaining them would violate their rights - of course criminals can be detained, tried and punished, as France is correctly doing - but that if it keeps them in custody it will be responsible for a costly trial and detention. Much better to turn them loose now to countries like Somalia, where they will face torture and grisly death at the hands of the Islamic justice system.

Britain's behavior is Machiavellan, not pathetic, and certainly not an example of a soft, lilly-livered country upholding the rights of the accused.

GAO: US Unprepared for Al-Qaeda Attack

From Democracy Arsenal:

"Here is the title of a report from the Government Accountability Office on combating terrorism released today: The United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

That is not some line buried in the report. That is the title. Wow.

This GAO report may be the most damning condemnation of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts. The report goes on to say that the Bush administration has failed to develop any plan to address the Al Qaeda threat. Worse, the report finds that Al Qaeda is now able to attack the United States and represents the "most serious" threat to this country."

(Sigh.)

Are We Bitter? Yes We Are.

At 8:54 pm ABCNews put the URL for its website on the TV screen for the Philadelphia Democratic Debate, and by 8:57 there were 2152 comments. Most of them looked something like this:

"Stop asking #### stupid questions. We are not morons out here. could we please discuss REAL ISSUES. This debate is ridiculous, the next thing they will ask is why Obama used a bad word when he was in third grade. this is why I hate network news, the talking heads believe we are all as stupid as the flag pin lady.

"Like many others, I want to express my outrage at the ridiculous questions being posed. I can't believe George asked Barack if he thinks his pastor loves this country as much as he does. We might as well get Rush Limbaugh to be moderator."

"WAKE UP...TALK ABOUT ISSUES, NOT THE STUFF THAT THE MEDIA HAS DISCUSSED FOR WEEKS....WE ARE SMARTER THAN THAT!!!"

Are any of these media gurus aware that the country is actually at war? Our media is shamelessly out of touch. The ENTIRE WORLD IS WATCHING US EMBARRASS OURSELVES.