Unifying the insurgency
W. James Antle III
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
I opposed the Iraq war, though regrettably I did hedge in the month before the invasion.
2. Have you changed your position?
Yes—even as an opponent of the war, I was too trusting of the hawks' arguments concerning weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's propensity for anti-American terrorism. My basic views on the inadvisability of democratic nation-building, however, remain unchanged.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The only thing unifying the insurgency is the continued American presence. An orderly withdrawal, while no panacea, would cause the insurgency to divide against itself and allow Iraq's ethno-religious factions to chart their own course.
W. James Antle III is a senior writer for The American Conservative.
Scrap the current constitution
Ronald Bailey
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes.
2. Have you changed your position?
Not yet—but the history of the last three years in Iraq has greatly deepened my appreciation of the Federal government's abilty to screw up anything. It might have been different as I outlined in my August 2005 column "Iraq 2007."
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Train sufficient Iraqi forces to secure the country's borders and scrap the current constitution and encourage a transition to a loose confederation of democratically self-governing Sunni, Kurdish and Shi'a regions and then get out. I offered a similar plan in my January 2005 "Free Kurdistan!"
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.
Let the Shiite Crescent bloom
Tim Cavanaugh
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No, which is not the same as saying I don't believe the United States is engaged in a serious, multi-dimensional struggle against radical Islam, and that intelligent use of violence is an important tool in that fight. (I don't know whether we still need to draw this distinction, but I haven't forgotten being called a traitor and fifth columnist for suggesting the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised.)
2. Have you changed your position?
Somewhat, but like Rhett Butler, I won't join a cause until it's truly lost. The occupation has gone better than any prudent person had a right to expect, and the failure of so many hawks to understand this shows how unserious they were all along. What made the invasion a mistake was not any particular fact on the ground in Iraq, but the three-year, day-by-day demonstration it has given our country's enemies (Iran most notably) of the precise limits of American power and resolve. The lessons our real enemies learn from this will come back to haunt us; that's why some guy way back in the 1900s said something about speaking softly and carrying a big stick.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Let the Shiite Crescent bloom: We've already spent thousands of lives and half a trillion dollars inadvertently nurturing it, so we might at least get the incremental benefit of having a deadly rival to the Salafists who are even more determined than the Shiites to destroy our civilization. (Just so, we should have let the Iranians finish kicking Saddam's ass in the 1980s.) That means accepting the current Mullahfied Iraqi government and leaving it to brutalize the Sunnis at will. This might offend our sense of decency, but if we stay in the country, the same historical forces that drove the British, the Turks, and all other visitors to back the Sunnis over the Shiites will drive us down the same road.
Tim Cavanaugh is Reason's web editor.
Declare victory
Brian Doherty
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
With a democratically elected Iraqi government in place and Saddam's (nonexistent) threat of WMDs gone, declare victory and pull out troops with all dispatch.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason magazine and author of This is Burning Man (Little, Brown).
Consider a division
David Friedman
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No. I thought it was probably a mistake, although I did not have enough information to be certain.
2. Have you changed your position?
I am now more confident it was a mistake.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The U.S. should leave, if possible in a way that permits the Iraqis to make arrangements that do not result in large numbers of people being killed. That might involve a de jure, or at least de facto, division of the country.
I am not an expert on Iraq, and it is hard to know for certain whose account of the situation to believe. But those are my best guesses.
David Friedman is a professor of law at Santa Clara University and the author of many books, including The Machinery of Freedom: A guide to radical capitalism and the new novel A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume).
Remember a pressing engagement
Wendy McElroy
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
I opposed the invasion on both principled and practical grounds
2. Have you changed your position?
My opposition has deepened as the war has exceeded my worst fears in duration, blatant economic motives, political incompetence and military brutality.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out right now. Declare victory, declare defeat, remember a pressing engagement back home… it doesn't matter what reason is given. Get out immediately.
Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.net, a weekly columnist for FOX News, and the author of several books on anarchism and on feminism. She maintains a daily blog at www.wendymcelroy.com.
Recruits, inspiration, targets
John Mueller
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
I opposed it, as my 2003 commentary in Reason will indicate. One comment about the link between a war in Iraq and terrorism from that: "it seems likely that an attack will supply them with new recruits, inspire them to even more effort, and provide them with inviting new targets in the foreign military and civilian forces that occupy a defeated, chaotic Iraq."
2. Have you changed your position?
Hardly. The main issue now is whether the war has become the greatest debacle in American foreign policy history or only the second greatest, after Vietnam.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
A considerable number, maybe a vast majority, of the insurgents are fighting because the country has been invaded and occupied. Since the American presence is the cause of their participation in the insurgency, their incentive to fight would accordingly vanish if the United States pulled out. It's an experiment well worth conducting.
John Mueller is a professor of political science at Ohio State University. His most recent book is The Remnants of War. His next, nearing completion, is currently titled, Devils and Duct Tape: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration.
No Monday-morning quarterbacking
Charles Murray
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes.
2. Have you changed your position?
No. I'm as critical a Monday-morning quarterback as anyone else, but I think the administration's rationale for invading Iraq was correct, and an American president who had not invaded, given the information he had for making the decision, would have been irresponsible.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Damned if I know.
Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Six months or sooner
William A. Niskanen
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Announce that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq within six months of a request from the Iraqi government. Leave earlier if necessary to avoid involvement in an Iraqi civil war.
William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute
Fashion a tolerable compromise
Tom G. Palmer
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No, I opposed it. I listened to the case, but I was not convinced by the administration's arguments or evidence.
2. Have you changed your position?
No, I have not, I think it was a mistake. But it is also a mistake that was made and so the question is not only what to have done, but what to do now.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The US government should be clear that the US will withdraw all of its troops after a reasonable period of time to allow the Iraqi government to fashion a tolerable domestic political compromise among those who are willing to tolerate each other and to defeat enough of the terrorists to give the process some chance of success.
Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and a founder of the Lamp of Liberty, an Arabic-language libertarian website.
No, no, go
Charles V. Peña
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Exit promptly; no later than the end of the year.
Charles V. Peña is a senior fellow at the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy and the author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.
Maintain a sustainable troop level
Jonathan Rauch
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
On the fence. Leaned in favor but uneasily.
2. Have you changed your position?
Retrospectively, the invasion was a mistake. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have opposed it. But then, if he knew then what we know now, Bush would not have proposed it.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
I'm with Nick Gillespie. Ebbing public support makes the operation unsustainable at current troop levels; pulling out entirely could cause a (heightened) civil war. Little choice but to reduce forces in a phased withdrawal. I think something like 40,000 or 50,000 troops could be sustained indefinitely (at least if there's apparent political progress in Iraq), which buys some time.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Win
Glenn Reynolds
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes.
2. Have you changed your position?
No. Sanctions were failing and Saddam was a threat, making any other action in the region impossible.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Win.
Glenn Reynolds runs the blog Instapundit and is the author of An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
Fascists and fascism
Louis Rossetto
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes, both the one that didn't happen in 1991 and the one that did in 2003. But Iraq is not the war, it is a battle. The war is The Long War against Islamic fascism.
2. Have you changed your position?
If anything, I believe even more strongly in actively combating Islamic fascism throughout the Global Village. Everyday is Groundhog Day for the anti-war movement, which is stuck re-protesting Vietnam — while we are confronted by a uniquely 21st century challenge: a networked fascist movement of super-empowered individuals trying to undo 50K years of social evolution. Waiting to get hit by an NBC weapon is not an option. Dhimmitude for me or my children is not peace. Righteous forward defense is a necessity.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The US should persevere militarily until we defeat the fascists in Iraq, as we did in Afghanistan, as we must everywhere. The US's biggest failure has not been on the battlefield — where we are relentlessly reducing our enemies — but in waging media war against the Islamists and their fellow travelers on the Left, and in rallying the American people, who are confused, and perhaps angered, that once again we are being called upon to save the world.
Louis Rossetto is the founder of Wired magazine
Three-state solution
Jacob Sullum
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out as quickly as possible without leaving behind utter chaos. The best hope for stability may be to let Iraq split into three countries, or three autonomous sections with a weak central government.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor of Reason and a syndicated columnist.
Retire the Rusmfeld-Cheney gang
Jon Basil Utley
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No, I strongly opposed it. My column "Seven (revised Eight) Lies about Iraq" was a key piece for four years.
2. Have you changed your position?
I did not change. Everything happened as we feared, with all options now being bad.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Retire the Rusmfeld-Cheney Gang and their staffs; those who were wrong mainly now want to justify past mistakes. Use knowledgeable State and Defense Middle East experts to implement a new policy. Work with Europeans for a common front and policy. Renounce permanent military bases in Iraq. Demand dismantlement of settlements on the West Bank and work with peace parties in Israel for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. This would regain for America our lost legitimacy.
Jon Basil Utley, a longtime commentator at Voice of America who writes regularly about foreign policy, is associate publisher of The American Conservative.
A little smugger
Jesse Walker
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No, but I've probably gotten a little smugger about it.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out in the least damaging manner possible. That will probably entail splitting the country in three.
Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).
Don't put me in charge
Matt Welch
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No. Nor did I oppose it.
2. Have you changed your position?
Slightly. What kept me from opposing the war outright was:
1) I thought it very likely the Saddam Hussein regime had WMDs, and that the West would never have a mechanism for real weapons inspections without the credible threat of military intervention;
2) I thought there was far more international/legal justification for bombing Iraq than there ever was for bombing Kosovo (an action which, at the time, I supported);
3) Saddam's totalitarian reign was one whose end I would not weep for.
In short, I supported the bluff (though not, of course, the exact way it was made), and then hoped we wouldn't call it. Which isn't very intellectually defensible, but there you go.
What has changed about my position (as opposed to the changes in presumed facts) is that I'm even more worried than I was in spring 2003 (which was a lot) that cranky interventionism (or Jacksonian Wilsonianism, as I don't like to call it), is a terrible approach to foreign policy, because it extends our resources, enlarges the target on our back, feeds into the anti-American pathology that comes when we and only we flex the only Power that matters, and leads to the corruption that inevitably accompanies an expansion of power. Which is to say, the stuff I thought might go bad has gone far worse than I feared.
All that said, I have reserved space in my brain for the possibility that in the long view, this will have turned out to be a daring and revolutionarily pro-demcratic (if hugely flawed) act.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
I have no earthly idea. Maybe the most sensible thing to do is the most radical — separate the warring parties both physically and geographically. That is to say, stop trying to prop up the arguably untenable fiction that a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, post-colonial, mid-FUBAR country can become the 21st century Switzerland, and instead hasten the business of dividing the pie up into three (or whatever) countries. This would probably set a terrible precedent, but it's hard to see how it can be much worse than the one we've established now.
Matt Welch, a former assistant editor of Reason, is assistant editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, and propietor of mattwelch.com.
Non-invasive individuals
Robert Anton Wilson
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No. I loathe invasions and occupations and all violence against non-invasive individuals.
2. Have you changed your position?
Yes. I oppose the invasion even more vehemently, since Bush has used it as an excuse to destroy the last few tattered remnants of the Bill of Rights.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Stop killing people, bring the troops home, and rebuild Katrina damage. (But they never listen to me.)
Robert Anton Wilson is the coauthor of Illuminatus!. His latest book is Email To the Universe.
Buttress, counterbalance, prevent
Michael Young
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes, I did. Saddam's fall was too appealing a prospect not to.
2. Have you changed your position?
No. I regret that the U.S. mismanaged the aftermath, breaking the momentum to turn Iraq into a stable, acceptably pluralist system. This will have negative repercussions for democracy in the region. But I find that an American withdrawal today would be disastrous for the Iraqis.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
It should maintain its military presence, even if that means modifying it in such a way as to avoid the semblance of military occupation. It should plan to stick around for the long term, regardless of domestic pressures. And it should oversee a genuine, consensual process of national dialogue and stabilization in Iraq, not a self-defeating handing over of power to security forces that are, in reality, cover for sectarian militias. This continued American presence is essential—to buttress democratic forces elsewhere in the region, to counterbalance Iran's growing power, and to prevent the outbeak of civil war in Iraq.
Reason contributing editor Michael Young edits the opinion page of the Beirut Daily Star
The post Iraq Progress Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "These kinds of security measures are necessary." But any security measure must pass two litmus tests. First, it must be proven to be effective. Second, it must not violate constitutional rights. Mayor Bloomberg's "necessary" security falls down on both counts.
The odds of catching a would-be subway bomber are not very good. New York's subways carry about 4.5 million passengers on the average weekday, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. If on any given day there were a single terrorist riding the subway, and half the passengers were carrying some sort of bag, the probability of finding him or her during any particular search using a truly random search pattern would be about one in 2.25 million or about four ten-millionths of one percent. Such odds are only slightly better than winning New York's Mega Millions lottery (about one in 175 million). Even multiplied by thousands of intrusive searches that's a poor bet—and that assumes terrorists are too dim to adapt by, say, strapping bombs to their bodies.
Random searches on the subway are as useless as random searches of airline passengers at the gate—a practice that fortunately has been eliminated by the Transportation Security Agency after TSA administrator James M. Loy decided it was a "stupid rule." The spectacle of security personnel patting down grandmothers and toddlers deserved the ample ridicule it generated. Furthermore, the procedure netted exactly zero terrorists. It is also rather telling that British authorities are not instituting random searches on the London tube system—a testament to the fact that doing so would be ineffective and cripple a transportation system that moves seven million people daily.
Aside from the futility of random searches, Bloomberg's panacea ought to be rejected because the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of the people to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures." Without probable cause—such as someone fitting the physical description of a suspected terrorist—a random search of subway passengers is the antithesis of the Fourth Amendment.
That amendment is already in the intensive care unit thanks to the numerous exceptions made in the name of the war on drugs, as well as some of the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. If Mayor Bloomberg's measures are adopted nationwide, the prohibition against unreasonable searches will be in danger of expiring entirely.
According to New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, passengers are free to "turn around and leave" to avoid being searched and having their rights violated. But this is hardly providing the protection of the Fourth Amendment. To begin, it is an impractical solution. Presumably, people are using the subway to go somewhere—most likely to work. It is highly unlikely that many employers will take kindly to an excuse of not wanting to have Fourth Amendment rights violated as a reason for being late or not showing up to work. Also, a decision to turn around and leave is likely to be viewed as suspicious behavior by law enforcement and might be used as "probable cause" for detention and an even more extensive search.
Officials in Washington, DC and San Francisco are waiting to see what happens in New York before deciding to implement random searches on Metro and BART, respectively. But deliberation won't change the fact that random searches are both ineffective and a gross violation of constitutional rights. The decision should be a no-brainer.
The outrage in America after the London tube bombings is certainly understandable—as is the desire for Americans to feel safe. At most, that's all random searches on the subway will do: make people feel safer. But such measures won't actually make them safer. It is all too easy to adopt the attitude of one New York subway passenger: "It's just part and parcel of the world we live in."
But nothing could be further from the truth. The world we live in is represented by the Constitution and the principles upon which American society rests. As such, we should heed Benjamin Franklin's admonition that those who would "give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Random searches on the subway ultimately mean we have neither.
The post A Useless, Intrusive P.R. Display appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Taken together with the previous supplemental requests—$75 billion in 2003 and $88 billion in 2004—and given that the U.S. commitment of troops and resources in Iraq is five to six times larger than its commitment in Afghanistan, the latest tally of the cost of the Iraq war is over $200 billion. The U.S. Army announced that it plans to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for at least two more years, so we should expect another supplemental request of $80 billion or more next year.
Does anyone remember what the administration said the Iraq war would cost? When White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey suggested that going to war against Iraq might cost $100 to $200 billion, he was rebuked and chose to resign three months later.
Citing Office of Management and Budget estimates, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once thought the Iraq mission might cost $50 billion or less. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz once opined that Iraqi oil revenues of $50 to $100 billion, instead of U.S. taxpayer dollars, would pay for the occupation and reconstruction.
Wolfowitz also criticized Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki's estimate that it would take hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to occupy and subdue Iraq as "wildly off the mark." But it's been the administration that has been wildly off the mark when it comes to the price of Iraq.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the president doesn't feel anyone in the administration should be held accountable for all the miscalculations about Iraq. According to Bush, "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections. The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."
But accountability is an ongoing process, not a one-time "moment." It is not at all clear that the election results mean the American people want to be stuck footing the bill for a war that could cost more than $300 billion, especially with the cost of the war driving the budget deficit for fiscal year 2004 to a record $427 billion.
That the administration does not want to be held accountable for Iraq is clearly demonstrated by its continued insistence on funding the war with supplemental bills. According to Steve Kosiak, a defense budget specialist at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, supplemental bills "are supposed to be used when there is a surprise. This is no longer a surprise that we are in Iraq."
From the beginning, the Pentagon has claimed that it could not estimate the costs of the Iraq war (and subsequent occupation and reconstruction) because it is impossible to accurately predict the war's duration, its destruction, and the extent of rebuilding afterward.
But that's not even a poor excuse—it's no excuse at all. The federal government is awash in budget analysts. The Pentagon's comptroller's office routinely estimates costs of future weapon systems and programs that are difficult to predict with precision, as do the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Government Accountability Office.
It's high time for the administration to level with the American people on the cost of Iraq instead of continuing to string them along. Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has surmised that "we will never achieve democracy and stability without being willing to commit 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, probably have a draft, and have some form of war compensation."
Whether Brzezinski's assessment is right or not, Americans deserve to know what the administration thinks building democracy in Iraq will cost so they can decide for themselves whether they are willing to pay the price and make the necessary sacrifices. That is a hallmark of representative democracy. If we're going to preach it abroad in Iraq, then we ought to practice it here at home.
The post $250 Billion and Counting appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Cold War is over and Europe no longer faces the threat of Soviet tanks rolling across the Fulda Gap. And the combined economies of the European countries are healthy and strong enough for Europeans to pay for their own security requirements. In 2003, the EU's GDP was $11.6 trillion and U.S. GDP was $10.9 trillion, but America spent 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense compared to only 1.5 percent for the Europeans.
The North Korean threat to South Korea remains real but, like the Europeans, the South Koreans can afford to pay for their own defense. According to the CIA, "North Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions." North Korea's GDP in 2003 was $22.9 billion with defense spending of $5.2 billion (22.7 percent of GDP). By comparison, South Korea's GDP was $855.3 billion (more that 37 times that of the North) with $14.5 billion for defense (almost three times the North and only 1.7 percent of GDP). So South Korea has both the economic advantage and capacity to to defend itself.
Democrats were quick to criticize the president. According to retired General Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander and presidential candidate, the decision would "significantly undermine U.S. national security." But with the demise of the Soviet Union, there is no threat to U.S. security in Europe, and North Korea hardly qualifies as a threat when military capabilities are compared. The United States outspends North Korea 80-to-1 and the U.S. military is the most modern and well-equipped in the world compared to North Korean forces that have older Chinese and former Soviet equipment.
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke, said: "I know the Germans are very unhappy about these withdrawals. The Koreans are going to be equally unhappy." But U.S. military forces do not exist to make friends and allies happy. They exist to defend the United States against external military threats. If those threats no longer exist, then the requirement to deploy those forces is also non-existent.
But that doesn't mean there isn't room for criticism. To begin, the U.S. military is not completely withdrawing from either Europe or South Korea. But if the threats don't warrant the need for U.S. forces in either of those countries, then all of the troops should be brought home. And in an act of legerdemain, although two Army divisions in Germany will return to the United States, a Stryker brigade (built around the Army's new smaller, lighter combat vehicle instead of heavy armor) will be going to Germany in their stead. The Pentagon admits that "a substantial U.S. military ground presence will remain in Germany." But keeping troops there defies the reason behind removing them in the first place.
President Bush claims that the plan to realign troops "will help us fight and win…wars of the 21st century." But the war facing the United States is against the al Qaeda terrorist threat and the spreading radical Islamist extremism it inspires. Large-scale conventional military operations will be the exception rather than the rule in the war against al Qaeda. In fact, special forces—not regular units—will play the greater role in finding and destroying al Qaeda. So maintaining a large military is not necessary for the war on terrorism.
It's worth remembering that the globally deployed U.S. military was not an effective defense or deterrent against 19 suicide hijackers on September 11. The hard truth is that most of the war on terrorism—fought in 60 or more countries around the globe, many of them friends and allies of the United States—will be waged through unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation.
In the final analysis, removing 70,000 U.S. troops from Germany and South Korea is the right thing to do. But like the proverbial joke about the demise of 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea, it's just a good start.
The post Time To Clear the Board appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>No one would argue that the Pol Pot regime's killing of some 2 million Cambodians was anything but the brutal, savage slaughter of innocents. The same is true for Saddam Hussein's destruction of over 4,000 Kurdish villages in Iraq and the deaths of an estimated 55,000 to 75,000 Bosnians (according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the International Committee of the Red Cross), an unknown number of which were mass killings of Muslims attributed to Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian forces. But do these acts constitute "genocide"? And, more pressing, should the United States have intervened in any or all of these acts? The difficult answer to these questions is no. To understand why, consider Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which argues otherwise.
In June 1995 Power was a reporter covering Bosnia when she learned of a 9-year-old girl named Sidbela Zimic who was killed by a Serbian shell that hit a playground in Sarajevo where Sidbela and three other children were jumping rope. As Power saw it, Sidbela's death resulted from Bosnian Serb genocide of Muslims and the lack of American intervention. The event became the impetus for A Problem from Hell, her survey of genocide in the 20th century and of American responses to it. She takes her title from former Secretary of State Warren Christopher's description of the intense hatred between the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats.
Power leads her readers on a long and often gut-wrenching journey that starts with a 24-year-old Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, murdering former Turkish Interior Minister Talaat Pasha on March 14, 1921, to avenge the death of his family. (Pasha had presided over Turkey's "solution" to its Armenian "problem," resulting in the deaths of nearly 1 million Armenians in 1915.) At the time, the concept of genocide did not even exist; the Turkish government's persecution and killing of Armenians was called "race murder" by the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr. Power uses the pre-Holocaust Armenian experience to outline a pattern of genocide she sees repeated in Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, and Bosnia.
For her, that pattern consists of the following progression:
? Initial warning signs that a regime intends to take action against a specific ethnic group. (In January 1915, The New York Times reported Talaat's statement that there was no room for Christians in Turkey, and that their supporters should advise them to leave.)
? The first steps. (In late March, Armenian men serving in the Ottoman army were disarmed.)
? Justification. (The Turkish leadership used the pretext of an Armenian revolutionary uprising and the cover of war to facilitate the eradication of Armenians.)
? Recognition met with disbelief or denial. (British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey cautioned that Britain lacked direct knowledge of massacres and that the massacres were not all on one side.)
? Ineffective response. (The Allied governments declared that they would hold members of the Turkish government personally responsible for the massacres, but there was no intervention.)
The first several chapters of A Problem from Hell are devoted to the tireless travails—spanning more than two decades—of Polish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin to invent and legitimize the concept of genocide and to make it a crime under international law. Lemkin's achievement was the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defined genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group the condition of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
It is important to recognize that this legal definition of genocide is very different from the more common dictionary definition, which probably is how most people think of it. The American Heritage Dictionary defines genocide as "the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group."
Power also chronicles a similar journey by U.S. Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) to persuade the United States to ratify the genocide convention. On January 11, 1967, Proxmire delivered his first genocide speech on the floor of the Senate. During the following 19 years, he would make over 3,000 speeches on the subject, until the Senate adopted a ratification resolution in February 1986. Full ratification did not occur until October 1988.
The remainder of Power's book can best be described as a series of post-Holocaust case studies: Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. In each instance, Power walks her reader through events and actions that constitute, for her, the pattern of genocide. She does not spare the reader the grim and horrific details: children delivering death blows to the back of the head with a hoe in Cambodia; four small Kurdish girls lying like discarded rag dolls in a stream, victims of Iraqi chemical weapons; Bosnian Muslims forced to watch family members have their throats slit by Serbian paramilitaries; Rwandan men, women, and children hacked to death with machetes in churches where they sought refuge.
Regardless of what one believes about what the United States could have and should have done to stop the killings, Power's book raises vital questions. It deserves the most serious possible response.
When does "genocide" begin? This is a particularly difficult legal issue, because there must be some explicit criteria on which to base a decision to take action, especially U.S. military intervention. But there is no consensus, and probably never can be, on how many people have to be murdered (or, given the broader definition, expelled from their homes) for such acts to be considered genocide. Establishing such a number (or a percentage of the population) would invite perpetrators to kill up to the limit. We are left with determining genocide amorphously: You know it when you see it.
How many people have to be killed to warrant intervention? Is it 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000? Prevention would dictate the earliest possible intervention. But the fewer people killed, the less the evidence of genocide. Does genocide have to have occurred before one can recognize it as such and take action against it?
If genocide can't be adequately defined by the number of people killed, how else are we to know when action should be taken to stop it? Power points out that genocide is just as much about intent as it is about action. But how do you establish the intent to exterminate a group, especially in the absence of action? In the extreme, intervention should be pre-emptive. But does that mean committing military forces and possibly changing a regime based on declarations that may or may not signal intent? When it comes to intervention, genocide presents us with a vast gray area.
Genocide is by definition ethnic. It is about a ruling ethnic group that is unwilling to share the same territory with another (usually minority) ethnic group. One solution would be to separate the different ethnic groups so they don't come into direct contact or conflict. Yet this is in direct opposition to the traditional U.S. approach to such problems, which has focused on "nation building." The goal of such efforts is always to try to get different groups to share power within a prescribed geographic boundary. The latest instance of this is the U.S.-led effort to build a representative, multi-ethnic government in Afghanistan.
Trying to force different peoples to live and govern together, however, may not be a solution. Attempts to build a multi-ethnic Bosnian nation in the wake of Serbian atrocities have simply resulted in a Bosnia-Herzegovina that is divided into Serb, Muslim, and Croat enclaves. The only thing keeping the sides from killing each other is the indefinite presence of several thousand peacekeepers. On the other hand, ethnically "pure" states (or statelets) serve only to draw the distinctions even sharper; if such states become the objective, ethnic groups might engage in genocidal action as a way to hasten their creation.
Herein lies an essential problem in the contemporary discussion of genocide: Genocide is a moral issue, but U.S. intervention using military force should be reserved for protecting vital American national security interests. The temptation to intervene in humanitarian crises on moral grounds is understandable, especially when outrageous crimes are being committed against innocent persons to further political or ideological aims. But giving into that temptation when there are no vital U.S. national security interests at stake is likely to result in exacerbating the very criminality that intervention is intended to resolve.
Genocide is the one instance—a rare exception—where U.S. action is warranted, even if U.S. vital interests are not directly threatened.
The problem is that advocates of humanitarian intervention often equate any killings of innocents with genocide and sometimes overinflate the numbers to make their case. Power, for instance, claims 200,000 Bosnians were killed, but this number is provided by Bosnia's Muslim government and includes all Bosnians killed by Serbs, Croats, and Muslims as part of ethnic civil war.
According to more reliable sources, such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the Red Cross, the number of Bosnians killed is estimated to be 55,000 to 75,000—and even these numbers cannot separate out casualties of war vs. mass killings of innocent civilians. As tragic and abhorrent as tens of thousands of deaths are, the hard truth is that such killings neither constitute genocide nor warrant U.S. intervention.
Power acknowledges that U.S. intervention has often helped create the conditions that led to her claims of genocide, but she does not seem to grasp the full implications of that deadly fact. For example, the U.S. supported the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia because it was anti-communist. But it was also corrupt, repressive, and incompetent, fueling support for the Khmer Rouge. Later, concerned about Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia, the U.S. orchestrated a vote in the U.N. Credentials Committee to favor the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. In the case of Iraq, the U.S. sided with and supplied agricultural and manufacturing credits to Saddam Hussein to support his war against the fundamentalist, anti-American regime in Tehran.
Rather than asking the United States to intervene to fix the problems it exacerbated by intervening in the first place, it would be better to break this vicious circle and adopt a less interventionist American foreign policy. While this does not guarantee that ethnic groups will not engage in genocidal actions, neither will constant U.S. intervention. Indeed, the appalling evidence suggests that an interventionist United States is likely to create more problems than it will solve.
Power is critical of "vital American interests, narrowly defined" as an excuse for American inaction against genocide. But the primary concern of U.S. policy must be U.S. interests; the United States cannot and should not be the world's policeman. The Constitution was established for the common defense, not to establish a new world order or to rid the world of evil. American policy makers must make decisions about what is vital to U.S. national security and what isn't. If the United States is constantly involved around the world for reasons that are not vital, it could be difficult to muster the necessary political will to act when national interests demand action.
If one knows genocide when one sees it, then Rwanda is a perfect example. Power admits that "no genocide since the Holocaust has been completely black and white," but of all the cases in A Problem from Hell, Rwanda is the one unambiguous case of genocide, and presents the strongest argument that the United States should have intervened. Although no U.S. national interest was at stake there, Rwanda presented an unambiguous moral imperative.
The killings in Rwanda began almost immediately following the downing of Rwandan President Juvénal Habrayimana's jet on April 6, 1994. Hard-line Hutu tribesmen used the incident as a pretext to attack rival Tutsis. The Hutu-controlled army, the gendarmerie, and the militias worked together to round up and kill Tutsi men, women, and children.
This was not a case of ethnic cleansing (expelling an ethnic group to create an ethnically pure enclave) that might involve mass killing, which was more what happened in Iraq and Bosnia. Nor was this the same as Pol Pot's killing of fellow Cambodians to eliminate political opponents in the way that communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China had done.
In Rwanda, those Tutsi who tried to flee their homes (ostensibly to seek safety across the border) were snared and butchered at checkpoints. Children of Hutu and Tutsi who had intermarried were categorized as Tutsi and killed. In one instance, a 3-year-old pleaded for his life after seeing his brothers and sisters killed: "Please don't kill me. I'll never be Tutsi again." Power writes that "the killers, unblinking, struck him down." Clearly, the Hutu were engaged in genocide, trying to exterminate the Tutsi systematically. Indeed, lists of victims had been prepared ahead of time. All this took place while a United Nations peacekeeping force was stationed in Rwanda's capital, Kigali.
Although it took time to recognize that genocide was occurring and to distinguish the mass killings of Tutsi from the inevitable casualties of Rwandan civil war or even ethnic cleansing, it is hard to imagine a more clear-cut case of genocide and the ensuing moral imperative for the United States to act. Recognizing genocide rests on a confluence of evidence. Mass killing based on ethnicity is clearly a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. That Tutsi were not allowed to flee to safety made it clear that extermination rather than ethnic cleansing was the goal.
That the killings were widespread throughout the country, not just in the area surrounding Kigali, is another piece of evidence. But it is no one single thing, and it's evidence accumulated over a period of time (in this case, probably several weeks).
One of the reasons that the U.S. failed to act in Rwanda was the disastrous American military operation in Somalia, not long before, that had resulted in the deaths of 18 Army Rangers. Scarred by a firefight gone bad on a humanitarian intervention mission that was neither vital nor important to U.S. national security interests, U.S. policy makers were paralyzed when it came to taking necessary action in Rwanda. Moreover, American politicians, pundits, and the public expressed little or no interest in Rwanda. Not only was the Pentagon opposed to military action, but there was no constituency expressing outrage. The sad and shameful truth is that American politics and policy would allow the U.S. to become engaged in Bosnia-Herzegovina because it was in Europe, but not in Rwanda because it was in Africa.
In the end, some 500,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days. The United States should have acted. But the limits of what U.S. intervention can realistically accomplish also need recognition. Writing in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs, Alan J. Kuperman argues that "although some lives could have been saved by intervention of any size at any point during the genocide, the hard truth is that even a large force deployed immediately upon reports of attempted genocide would not have been able to save even half the ultimate victims."
The rapidity of the Rwanda murders was staggering. The largest number of killings took place within three weeks of President Habrayimana's plane crash (nearly 300,000 Tutsi—almost half the Rwandan Tutsi population—were killed). Even if 5,000 U.S. troops could have prevented the killings (a claim originally made by the U.N. commanding general in Rwanda, Canadian Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire), whether they could have been deployed in time is questionable. Moving troops and equipment likely would have taken several weeks (made more difficult by the necessity of an airlift, the slowest way to transport large numbers of troops and equipment).
At best—if the order to deploy had been issued immediately after President Habrayimana's plane crash—those troops would have arrived only after several hundred thousand Tutsi had already been killed. Realistically, such an order would have come a week or two later, after there was irrefutable evidence that genocide was occurring. This is not an excuse for inaction, but simply to highlight the fact that, at least in the case of Rwanda, intervention would not have averted genocide, though it could have saved a great many lives. It also points to the tragic fact that it may not be possible to prevent genocide (because there must be strong evidence that genocide is occurring to warrant intervention) but only that further genocide might be stopped once it has started.
What is the lesson of Rwanda? That the more the U.S. involves itself in every crisis, the more every crisis begins to look the same. Without being able to make clear distinctions between crises—without maintaining political will—it is easier to marginalize and ignore the important ones.
Moreover, U.S. military resources are finite. If stretched too thin by attempting to address the myriad humanitarian crises that continue to erupt, there may not be enough critical military mass to take action when true genocide is occurring.
Indeed, the more narrowly the United States defines its national security interests, and the less engaged and entangled U.S. foreign policy is with nonvital interests around the world, the more likely that genocide will be quickly recognized and forcefully targeted.
That is exactly the point of Power's compelling narrative: The horror and tragedy of genocide is a moral issue that transcends national interest. But to prevent another Rwanda, the United States must also have the wisdom to avoid another Somalia.
The post Murder Most Foul appeared first on Reason.com.
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