A Lesson NOT To Learn From Iraq

Of course, there are going to be numerous lessons and consequences of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Many of them will have to do with the nature of decision making, the wisdom of unilateral, or more accurately unsanctioned multilateral, intervention, the problems inherent in intelligence analysis, and other similar issues. However, in two recent article we can see warnings of a lesson we should hope odes not get learned. In the Washington Post, Robert Kaplan warns us that a move back to realism (as evidenced by the appointment of Robert Gates to SecDef) ignores the vital moral element of US foreign policy. And in the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol warn that the dictates of realism demand foreign policy decisions that clash with the interests of the US.

As the appointment of Gates to replace Rumsfeld shows (although Rumsfeld was no neo-con; just a realist convinced in two things: Terrorism as an existential threat to the state, and the need to transform the US military), one of the dominant reactions to the on-going debacle that is Iraq is a return to the basic tenets of realism. As Kaplan puts it, "U.S. foreign policy will be defined by an obdurate caution, coupled with a ruthless, almost mathematical application of balance-of-power principles." According to Kagan and Kristol, a return to realism would mean "the United States should turn a blind eye to Iran's nuclear weapons program, in exchange for Iran's help in easing our retreat from Iraq" and "putting pressure on Israel to deal in a more forthcoming way with the Hamas-dominated Palestinian government. Israel should be induced to make concessions despite the ongoing violence and the refusal of Hamas to ratify even Yasser Arafat's acceptance of Israel's right to exist."

If we learn anything from Iraq, it's that the US must be exceedingly careful if it ever thinks about attempting large-scale coercive nation-building. But that lesson must not force the US to retreat from its liberal mission. The US does not always act in accordance with its principles, but it is unthinkable that the US would NEVER do so. It was the US that rebuilt the shattered European and Japanese states after World War II, it was the US that presses Zimbabwe and Burma to improve their human rights records, it is the US that is standing firm in its refusal to negotiate with North Korea, it is the US that is keeping attention focused on Darfur. And without the security umbrella provided by US military hegemony, issues of human security such as the ICC would be nowhere near the international agenda.

Iraq should, and very likely has, taught the US humility and restraint, both of which are valuable and important to learn. But those lessons must not be taken too far. A retreat to a realist foreign policy would betray the ideals of this country, and would abandon the rest of the world to misery.

Live-Blogging the Persian Gulf Security Summit

Security Dilemmas has been selected to live-blog the Third Annual Regional Security Summit for the Persian Gulf, now known as the Manama Dialogue, sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which will take place December 8-10. According to the invitation:

The Manama Dialogue is the primary security institution in the Persian Gulf and will see the greatest ever involvement of the national security establishments of the region with key outside powers this year. As in previous years, the Dialogue will provide a unique forum for the discussion of the regional security challenges by the most senior authorities responsible for defence, foreign policy and security issues in the participating states.

The summit will be opened formally by the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Bahrain, His Highness Sheikh Salman Bin Hamad Al Khalifa, who will deliver the Keynote Address on Friday 8 December. On Saturday 9 December, the US National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley, will make a key statement on US security strategy in the Persian Gulf. Delegation leaders from the other participating countries will also deliver official policy statements throughout the course of the weekend. Plenary session subjects include: “The U.S. and Gulf Security,” “Regional Perceptions of Gulf Security,” “The Gulf and the East,” “Security Guarantees and Regional Stability,” “The Situation in Iraq,” “The Gulf and Europe,” and “Iran and Outside Powers.”

This should be a fascinating look at the major security issues of the Persian Gulf. The conference organizers will be sending me summaries of the plenary sessions immediately after their conclusion, after which I will post the summaries and provide analysis.

If you want more information, you can see the draft agenda, the information sheet, or the poster.

I hope that you will join me and participate in what should be an excellent examinatioin of Gulf security issues.

Milton Friedman, RIP

Milton Friedman died today. There has been no more passionate, intelligent, and accurate voice for the role of capitalism in protecting and preserving freedom and liberty. If you've never read the first two chapters of Capitalism and Freedom, run out and get a copy immediately. You'll find no better statement of why only capitalism can ensure our rights, liberties and freedoms.

He will be missed.

---

November 16, 2006

Milton Friedman, a Leading Economist, Dies at 94

By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE

Milton Friedman, the grandmaster of conservative economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward lesser government and greater reliance on free markets and individual responsibility, died today. He was 94 years old.

A spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation confirmed his death.

Conservative and liberal colleagues alike viewed Mr. Friedman as one of the 20th century’s leading economic scholars, on a par with giants like John Maynard Keynes, Joseph A. Schumpeter and Paul Samuelson.

Flying the flag of economic conservatism, Mr. Friedman led the postwar challenge to the hallowed theories of Lord Keynes, the British economist who maintained that governments had a duty to help capitalistic economies through periods of recession and to prevent boom times from exploding into high inflation.

In Professor Friedman’s view, government had the opposite obligation: to keep its hands off the economy, to let the free market do its work. He was a spiritual heir to Adam Smith, the 18th-century founder of the science of economics and proponent of laissez-faire: that government governs best which governs least.

The only economic lever that Mr. Friedman would allow government to use was the one that controlled the supply of money — a monetarist view that had gone out of favor when he embraced it in the 1950s. He went on to record a signal achievement, predicting the unprecedented combination of rising unemployment and rising inflation that came to be called stagflation. His work earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1976.

Rarely, his colleagues said, did anyone have such impact on both his own profession and on government. Though he never served officially in the halls of power, he was always around them, as an adviser and theorist. In time, his influence was felt around the world.

“His thinking has so permeated modern macroeconomics that the worst pitfall in reading him today is to fail to appreciate the originality and even revolutionary character of his ideas,” said Ben S. Bernanke, now chairman of the Federal Reserve, in a speech honoring Mr. Friedman in 2003.

Professor Friedman also a leading force in the rise of the “Chicago School” of economics, a conservative group within the department of economics at the University of Chicago. He and his colleagues became a counterforce to their liberal counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, influencing close to a dozen American winners of the Nobel prize in economics.

It was not only Mr. Friedman’s anti-statist and free-market views that held sway over his colleagues. There was also his willingness to create a place where independent thinkers could be encouraged to take unconventional stands as long as they were prepared to do battle to support them.

“Most economics departments are like country clubs,” said James J. Heckman, a Chicago faculty member and Nobel laureate who earned his doctorate at Princeton. “But at Chicago you are only as good as your last paper.”

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said of Mr. Friedman in an interview Tuesday: “From a longer-term point of view, it’s his academic achievements which will have lasting import. But I would not dismiss the profound impact he has already had on the American public’s view.”

Mr. Greenspan said that Mr. Friedman came along at an opportune time. The Keynesian consensus among economists, which had worked well from the 1930s, could not explain the stagflation of the 1970s, he said.

But he also said Mr. Friedman had made a broader political argument, which is at the heart of his classic book “Capitalism and Freedom”: that you have to have economic freedom in order to have political freedom.

As a libertarian, Mr. Friedman advocated legalizing drugs and generally opposed public education and the state’s power to license doctors, automobile drivers and others. He was criticized for those views, but he stood by them, arguing that prohibiting, regulating or licensing human behavior either does not work or creates inefficient bureaucracies.

Mr. Friedman insisted that unimpeded private competition produced better results than government systems. “Try talking French with someone who studied it in public school,” he argued, “then with a Berlitz graduate.”

Once, when accused of going overboard in his anti-statism, he said, “In every generation, there’s got to be somebody who goes the whole way, and that’s why I believe as I do.”

In the long period of prosperity after World War II, when Keynesian economics was riding high in the West, Mr. Friedman alone warned of trouble ahead, asserting that policies based on Keynesian theory were part of the problem.

Even as he was being dismissed as an economic “flat earther,” he predicted in the 1960s that the end of the boom was at hand. Expect unemployment to grow, he said, and inflation to rise, at the same time. The prediction was borne out in the 1970s. Paul Samuelson labeled the phenomenon “stagflation.”

Mr. Friedman’s analysis and prediction were regarded as a stunning intellectual accomplishment and contributed to his earning the Nobel prize for his monetary theories. He was also cited for his analyses of consumer savings and of the causes of the Great Depression; he blamed government in large part for it, saying government had bungled early chances for recovery. His prestige and that of the Chicago school soared.

Government leaders like President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain were heavily influenced by his views. So was the quietly building opposition to Communism within the East Bloc, including intellectuals like Vaclav Klaus, who later became prime minister of the Czech Republic.

As the end of the century approached, Professor Friedman said events had made his views seem only more valid than when he had first formed them. One event was the fall of socialism and Communism, which the economist Friedrich A. Hayek had predicted in 1944 in “Road to Serfdom.” In an introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of the book, Professor Friedman wrote that it was now clear that “progress could be achieved only in an order in which government activity is limited primarily to establishing the framework with which individuals are free to pursue their own objectives.”

“The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy,” he said.

Professor Friedman was acknowledged to be a brilliant statistician and logician. To his critics, however, he sometimes pushed his data too far. To them, the debate over the advantages or disadvantages of an unregulated free market was far from over.

Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn on July 31, 1912, one of four children, and the only son, of Jeno S. Friedman and Sarah Landau Friedman. His parents worked briefly in New York sweatshops, then moved their family to Rahway, N.J., where they opened a clothing store.

Mr. Friedman’s father died in his son’s senior year at Rahway High School. Young Milton later waited on tables and clerked in stores to supplement a scholarship he had earned at Rutgers University. He entered Rutgers in 1929, the year the stock market crashed and the Depression began.

Mr. Friedman attributed his success to “accidents”: the immigration of his teenage parents from Czechoslovakia, enabling him to be an American and not the citizen of a Soviet-bloc state; the skill of a high-school geometry teacher who showed him a connection between Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and the Pythagorean theorem, allowing him to see the beauty in the mathematical truth that the square of the sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse; the receipt of a scholarship that enabled him to attend Rutgers and there have Arthur F. Burns and Homer Jones as teachers.

He said Mr. Burns, who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, instilled in him a passion for scientific integrity and accuracy in economics; Mr. Jones, who was teaching at Rutgers while pursuing a doctorate at the University of Chicago, interested him in monetary policy and a graduate school career at Chicago.

In his first economic-theory class at Chicago, he was the beneficiary of another accident — the fact that his last name began with an “F.” The class was seated alphabetically, and he was placed next to Rose Director, a master’s-degree candidate from Portland, Ore. That seating arrangement shaped his whole life, he said. He married Ms. Director six years later. And she, after becoming an important economist in her own right, helped Mr. Friedman form his ideas and maintain his intellectual rigor.

After he became something of a celebrity, Mr. Friedman said, many people became reluctant to challenge him directly. “They can’t come right out and say something stinks,” he said. “Rose can.”

In 1998, he and his wife published a memoir, “Two Lucky People” (University of Chicago Press.

His wife survives him, along with a son, David Friedman, and a daughter, Janet Martel.

That fateful university class also introduced him to Jacob Viner, regarded as a great theorist and historian of economic thought. Professor Viner convinced Mr. Friedman that economic theory need not be a mere set of disjointed propositions but rather could be developed into a logical and coherent prescription for action.

Mr. Friedman won a fellowship to do his doctoral work at Columbia, where the emphasis was on statistics and empirical evidence. He studied there with Simon Kuznets, another American Nobel laureate. The two turned Mr. Friedman’s thesis into a book, “Income from Independent Professional Practice.” It was the first of more than a dozen books that Mr. Friedman wrote alone or with others.

It was also the first of many “Friedman controversies.” One finding of the book was that the American Medical Association exerted monopolistic pressure on the incomes of doctors; as a result, the authors said, patients were unable to reap the benefits of lower fees from any real price competition among doctors. The A.M.A., after obtaining a galley copy of the book, challenged that conclusion and forced the publisher to delay publication. But the authors did not budge. The book was eventually published, unchanged.

During the first two years of World War II, Mr. Friedman was an economist in the Treasury Department’s division of taxation. “Rose has never forgiven me for the part I played in devising and developing withholding for the income tax,” he said. “There is no doubt that it would not have been possible to collect the amount of taxes imposed during World War II without withholding taxes at the source.

“But it is also true,” he went on, “that the existence of withholding has made it possible for taxes to be higher after the war than they otherwise could have been. So I have a good deal of sympathy for the view that, however necessary withholding may have been for wartime purposes, its existence has had some negative effects in the postwar period.”

After the war, he returned to the University of Chicago, becoming a full professor in 1948 and commencing his campaign against Keynesian economics. Robert M. Solow, of M.I.T., a Nobel laureate who often disagreed with Mr. Friedman, called him one of “the greatest debaters of all time.” But his wisecracking style could infuriate opponents like the British economist Joan Robinson, who called him a “paper tiger.”

Mr. Samuelson, also of M.I.T., who was not above wisecracking himself, had a standard line in his economics classes that always brought down the house: “Just because Milton Friedman says it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily untrue.”

But Professor Samuelson said he never joked in class unless he was serious — that his friend and intellectual opponent was, in fact, often right when at first he sounded wrong.

Mr. Friedman’s opposition to rent control after World War II, for example, incurred the wrath of many colleagues. They took it as an unpatriotic criticism of economic policies that had been successful in helping the nation mobilize for war. Later, Mr. Sameulson said, “probably 98 percent of them would agree that he was right.”

In the early 1950s, Mr. Friedman started flogging a “decomposing horse,” as Mrs. Thatcher’s chief economic adviser, Alan Waters, later put it. The horse that most economists thought long dead was the monetarist theory that the supply of money in circulation and readily accessible in banks was the dominant force — or in Mr. Friedman’s view, the only force — that should be used in shaping the economy.

In the 1963 book “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” which he wrote with Anna Jacobson Schwartz, Mr. Friedman compiled statistics to buttress his theory that recessions had been preceded by declines in the money supply. The same was true of the Great Depression, he found, in attributing it to Federal Reserve bungling. And it was an oversupply, he argued, that caused inflation.

In the late 1960s, Mr. Friedman used his knowledge of empirical evidence and statistics to calculate that Keynesian government programs had the effect of constantly increasing the money supply, a practice that over time was seriously inflationary.

Paul Krugman, a Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist, said Mr. Friedman then managed “one of the decisive intellectual achievements of postwar economics,” predicting the unprecedented combination of rising unemployment and rising inflation that later came to be called stagflation.

In this regard, his Nobel Prize cited his contribution to the now famous concept “the natural rate of unemployment.” Under this thesis, the unemployment rate cannot be driven below a certain level without provoking an acceleration in the inflation rate. Price inflation was linked to wage inflation, and wage inflation depended on the inflationary expectations of employers and workers in their bargaining.

A spiral developed. Wages and prices rose until expectations came into line with reality, usually at the natural rate of unemployment. Once that rate is achieved, any attempt to drive down unemployment through expansionary government policies is inflationary, according to Mr. Friedman’s thesis, which he unveiled in a speech to the American Economic Association in 1968.

For years economists have tried to pinpoint the elusive natural rate, without much success, particularly in recent years.

Mr. Friedman, the iconoclast, was right on the big economic issue of that time — inflation. And his prescription — to have the governors of the Federal Reserve System keep the money supply growing steadily without big fluctuations — figured in the thinking of economic policy makers around the world in the 1980s.

Mr. Friedman also pursued his attack on Keynesianism in a more general way. He warned that a government allowed to regulate the economy could not be trusted to keep its hands off individual liberties.

He had first been exposed to this line of attack through his association with Mr. Hayek, who was predicting the failure of Communism and “collectivist orthodoxy” in the early 1940’s in his book “Road to Serfdom.” In an introduction to a 1971 German edition, Professor Friedman called the book a revelation particularly to the young men and women who had been in the armed forces during the war.”

“ Their recent experience had enhanced their appreciation of the value and meaning of individual freedom,” he wrote.

In 1962, Mr. Friedman took on President John F. Kennedy’s popular inaugural exhortation: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” In an introduction to “Capitalism and Freedom,” a collection of his writings and lectures, he said President Kennedy had got it wrong: You should ask neither.

“What your country can do for you,” Mr. Friedman said, implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward; and “what you can do for your country” assumes that the government is the master, the citizen the servant. Rather, he said, you should ask, “What I and my compatriots can do through government to help discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all protect our freedom.”

It was not that Mr. Friedman believed in no government. He is credited with devising the negative income tax, which in a modern variant — the earned income tax credit — increases the incomes of the working poor. He also argued that government should give the poor vouchers to attend the private schools he thought superior to public ones.

In forums he would spar over the role of government with his more liberal adversaries, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also a longtime friend (and who died in May 2006). The two would often share a stage, presenting a study in contrasts as much visual as intellectual: Mr. Friedman stood 5 feet 3; Mr. Galbraith, 6 feet 8. Though he had helped ignite the conservative rebellion after World War II, together with intellectuals like Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr. and Ayn Rand, Mr. Friedman had little or no influence on the administrations of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. President Nixon, in fact, once described himself as a Keynesian.

It was frustrating period for Mr. Friedman. He said that during the Nixon years the talk was still of urban crises solvable only by government programs that he was convinced would make things worse, or of environmental problems produced by “rapacious businessmen who were expected to discharge their social responsibility instead of simply operating their enterprises to make the most profit.”

But then, after the 1970s stagflation, with Keynesian tools seemingly broken or outmoded, and with Ronald Reagan headed for the White House, Mr. Friedman’s hour arrived. His power and influence were acknowledged and celebrated in Washington.

With his wife, Rose Director Friedman, in 1978 he brought out a best-selling general-interest book, “Free to Choose.” and went on an 18-month tour, from Hong Kong to Ottumwa, Iowa, preaching that government regulation and interference in the free market was the stifling bane of modern society. The tour became the subject and Mr. Friedman the star of a 10-part series on public television in 1980.

In 1983, having retired from teaching, he became a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The economic expansion in the 1980s resulted from the Reagan Administration’s lowered tax rates and deregulation, Professor Friedman said. But then the tide turned again. The expansion, he argued, was halted by Presidents Bush’s “reverse-Reaganomics” tax increase.

What was worse, by the mid-1980s, as the finance and banking industries began undergoing upheavals and money began shifting unpredictably, Mr. Friedman’s own monetarist predictions — of what would happen to the economy and inflation as a result of specific increases in the money supply — failed to hold up. Confidence in his monetarism theory waned.

Professor Robert Solow of M.I.T., a Nobel laureate himself, and other liberal economists continued to raise questions about Mr. Friedman’s theories: Did not President Reagan, and by extension Professor Friedman, they asked, revert to Keynesianism once in power?

“The boom that lasted from 1982 to 1990 was engineered by the Reagan administration in a straightforward Keynsian way by rising spending and lowered taxes, a classic case of an expansionary budget deficit,” Mr. Solow said. “In fairness to Milton, however, it should be said that one of the reasons for his wanting a tax reduction was to force the spending cuts that he presumed would follow.”

Professor Samuelson said that “Milton Friedman thought of himself as a man of science but was in fact more full of passion than he knew.”

Mr. Friedman remained the guiding light to American conservatives. It was he, for example, who provided the economic theory behind such “prescriptions for action,” as his one-time professor, Jacob Viner put it, as the landslide Republican victory in the off-year Congressional elections of 1994.

By then the 5-feet 3-inch 130-pound Professor Friedman had grown into a giant of economics abroad as well. Mr. Friedman was sharply criticized for his role in providing intellectual guidance on economic matters to the military regime in Chile that engineered a coup in early 1970s against the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. But, for Mr. Friedman, that was just a bump in the road.

In Vietnam, whose constitution was amended in 1986 to guarantee the rights of private property, the writings of Mr. Friedman were circulated at the highest levels of government. “Privatize,” he told Chinese scholars at a meeting in Shanghai’s Fudan University, as he told those in Moscow and elsewhere in Eastern Europe: “Speed the conversion of state-run enterprises to private ownership.” They did.

Mr. Friedman had long since ceased to be called a flat-earther by anyone. “What was really so important about him,” said W. Allen Wallis, a former classmate and later faculty colleague at the University of Chicago, “was his tremendous basic intelligence, his ingenuity, perseverance, his way of getting to the bottom of things — of looking at them in a new way that turned out to be right.”

Louis Uchitelle and Edmund L. Andrews contributed reporting.

The Legal Status of the Iraq War

The Associated Press is reporting that Lieutenant Ehren Watada will be court-martialed for his refusal to deploy with his unit to Iraq. Watada will be charged with missing troop movements, conduct unbecoming of an officer, and contempt towards officials for comments he made about President Bush (military officers have a legal duty not to publically disparage their superiors). Watada's defense is that the Iraq War is illegal, and thus his obligation as a US solider to refuse unlawful orders precludes him from deploying. According to Watada's lawyer, “This case is really about the duty of individual soldiers to look at the facts and fulfill their obligation to national and international law.”

Since the attempt by Nazis to use the "only following orders" defense in the Nuremberg trials, there is a strong belief that individual soldiers must be allowed to refuse illegal orders. But, can it be claimed that the Iraq war is illegal? Certainly not under US law. The war was most definitely authorized by the US Congress. But can Watada defend his actions by claiming that the invasion and occupation are illegal under international law? After all, the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld found that the Geneva Conventions are binding law on the US and limit the ability of the president to use military commissions.

However, the Supremes did something else in Hamdan. While international law may exist and may in fact, when signed by the president and ratified by the Senate be the binding equivalent of domestic law, it is not sacrosanct or immutable. In fact, the Court told the Bush Administration that it could in fact convene military tribunals in the desired form, but only if Congress passed a law permitting it to do so. Thus, international law only binds the US so far as Congress hasn't superseded it with a new law. Since the US Congress has in fact authorized the Iraq War, it's legal status vis-a-vis international law is moot.

Unfortunately for Lt. Watada, his defense will fail, and he will go to jail for a very long time.

More On The New Congress And Free Trade

Yesterday, the House of Representatives failed to approve Vietnam's permanent normal trade relations, which is a pre-condition for Vietnam's entry into the World Trade Organization, by a vote of 228-161. Because the vote was held on the "suspension calendar," it required a 2/3 majority to pass, and the bill will likely pass when re-voted on during normal proceedings later this week.

What's disturbing is that the bill, which Democratic leaders had referred to as a "slam dunk," was so widely opposed by Democrats. While Republicans voted 2-1 for giving Vietnam PNTR, Democrats split almost evenly on the issue. As I blogged about yesterday, the prospects of anti-trade Democrats scuttling international free trade is bad for many MANY reasons. It's bad for the domestic economy, it's bad for developing countries, it's bad for the poor here and abroad. But it's also bad on larger issues as well. Free trade and the international economy is a critical element of the logic of the democratic peace, and manifests itself in, for example, the current policy of engagement with China. Free trade is critical for institutionalizing international relationships, which helps states escape the anarchic pressures of the international system that creates security dilemmas, arms races, and raises tensions. Free trade is a vital asset of soft power. Free trade is so important to so many aspects of national and international security that undermining it could be said to be, without exaggeration, disastrous.

Things are likely going to get worse when the newly-elected nationalistic illiberal Democrats take their seats. Will President Bush expend his precious (and limited) political capital to advance free trade? Not likely, given the other issues on his plate. However, none of those issues, Iraq included, are likely as important to the economic health of this country, the international system, and international peace and stability as free trade. A Democratic Congress must not be allowed to block the spread of trade.

What Do Patrick Buchanan And The New Democratic Congress Have In Common?

Answer: An antipathy towards free trade.

As Buchanan makes clear here, he remains a staunch opponent for free trade, disguising his economic philosophy with a flag of patriotic nationalism. He asks:

But if the free-trade era is over, what will succeed it?

A new era of economic nationalism. The new Congress will demand restoration of its traditional power to help in shaping trade policy. When the U.S. trade deficit for 2006 comes in this February, it will hit $800 billion, pouring more fuel on the fire.

A rising spirit of nationalism is evident everywhere in this election, not simply in the economic realm. Americans are weary of sacrificing their soldier-sons for Iraqi democracy. They are weary of shelling out foreign aid to regimes that endlessly hector America at the United Nations. They are tired of sacrificing the interests of American workers on the altar of an abstraction called the Global Economy. They are fed up with allies long on advice and short on assistance.

Other leaders in other lands look out for what they think is best for their nations and people. Abstractions such as globalism and free trade take a back seat when national interests are involved.

We are entered upon a new era, a nationalist era, and it will not be long before the voices of that era begin to be heard.

Free trade was, in a sense, the "stealth" issue of the recent elections, as it received little public attention and yet is perhaps the foreign policy issue on which Congress can have the most effect. And while few candidates made trade their main issue, there is a lot of evidence that many of the new Congresspeople share Buchanan's opposition to free trade. For example, Jacob Weisberg writes in Slate:

Many of the Democrats who recaptured seats held by Republicans have been described as moderates or social conservatives, who will be out of synch with Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi. The better term, with props to Fareed Zakaria, is probably illiberal Democrats. Most of those who reclaimed Republican seats ran hard against free trade, globalization, and any sort of moderate immigration policy. That these Democrats won makes it likely that others will take up their reactionary call. Some of the newcomers may even be foolish enough to try to govern on the basis of their misguided theory.

...An even harder-edged nationalism defined many of the critical House races, where Democrats called for a moratorium on trade agreements, for canceling existing ones, or, in some cases, for slapping protective trade tariffs on China. These candidates also lumped illegal immigrants together with terrorists and demanded fencing and militarization of the Mexican border. In Pennsylvania, Democratic challengers Chris Carney and Patrick Murphy defeated Republican incumbents by accusing them of destroying good jobs by voting for the Central American Free Trade Agreement and being soft on illegal immigration. "Fair trade" candidates also won back formerly Republican seats in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Jerry McNerney, who defeated 14-year Republican incumbent Richard Pombo in California, says on his Web site: "I am deeply worried about the way this nation is plunging head-long into the global economy without a plan or a national consensus."

Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post echoes Weisberg's fears on trade, writing:

During their long years in the wilderness, Democrats lashed out against trade and globalization, even though denying the economic case for trade is like pretending that tax cuts pay for themselves. Now that they have won Congress, the Democrats must prove that they are more than the mirror image of their opponents. This means reviving the pro-market centrism of the Clinton era -- a spirit that lives on in the form of the Hamilton Project.

...During the recent congressional campaign, Democratic candidates mostly had the right diagnosis and the wrong prescriptions. They saw that middle-class and poor Americans have not experienced wage gains during the past five years of growth, and they saw that families are one health crisis away from financial hardship. But the Democrats' remedies -- bashing Wal-Mart, railing against globalization -- offered little more than symbolism for the poor and middle class while promising damage to the economy.

Why is trade is a critical issue? Because protectionism, even when garbed with the much nicer "fair trade" moniker, can create devasting economic inefficiencies. For example, Walter Williams points out:

The Washington-based Institute for International Economics has assembled data that might help with the answer. Tariffs and quotas on imported sugar saved 2,261 jobs during the 1990s. As a result of those restrictions, the average household pays $21 more per year for sugar. The total cost, nationally, sums to $826,000 for each job saved. Trade restrictions on luggage saved 226 jobs and cost consumers $1.2 million in higher prices for each job saved. Restrictions on apparel and textiles saved 168,786 jobs at a cost of nearly $200,000 for each job saved....

A lot is at stake for those in the sugar industry, workers and bosses. They dedicate huge resources to pressure Congress into enacting trade restrictions. But how many of us consumers will devote the same resources to unseat a congressman who voted for sugar restrictions that forced us to pay $21 more for the sugar our family uses? It's the problem of visible beneficiaries of trade restrictions, sugar workers and sugar bosses, gaining at the expense of invisible victims -- sugar consumers. We might think of it as congressional price-gouging.

It gets worse. Not only is protectionism an unabashed economic loser, it also most hurts the very people the Democratics typically claim as their constituents. From Edward Gresser's Toughest on the Poor in the Nov/Dec issue of Foreign Affairs:

Tariff policy, without any deliberate intent, has evolved into something astonishingly tough on the poor. Young single mothers buying cheap clothes and shoes now pay tariff rates five to ten times higher than middle-class or rich families pay in elite stores. Very poor countries such as Cambodia or Bangladesh face tariffs 15 times those applied to wealthy nations and oil exporters.

Last year, the U.S. Customs Service collected $18.6 billion in tariff revenue on $1.1 trillion in goods imports -- meaning the effective U.S. tariff rate is 1.6 percent. But the low overall average masks something more troubling. Tariffs on industrial imports are not just low but extremely
low. For expensive consumer goods such as cars, appliances, and televisions, rates are also generally low and are further reduced in practice by trade agreements with Mexico and Canada. But for light consumer goods, the story is different. Tariffs on these products (with a few
exceptions, such as toys and furniture) remain at levels other industries last saw in the 1960s and 1970s: for instance, 8.7 percent for cutlery and tableware, 13.8 percent for suitcases and handbags, 10 percent for bicycles, and 11.4 percent for shoes and clothes, the largest category of consumer imports for the United States. In effect, the United States now has two tariff systems.
One, for low- tech consumer goods, has an average rate of 10.5 percent. The other, for everything else, has an average rate of 0.8 percent.

Cheap sneakers valued at $3 or less per pair carry tariffs of 48 percent (a rate, incidentally, far above that of any product on the administration’s steel list). Virtually none of these shoes is made in the United States. Last year, the United States imported 16 million pairs of these sneakers, at a total cost of $35 million. Thus the average price at the border was $2.20 per pair. The Treasury Department then collected $17 million in tariffs, adding another $1.06 per pair to the buyers’ cost. The extra dollar and change is then magnified by retail markups of around 40 percent and state sales taxes of about 5 percent to raise the final consumer price of the sneakers from about $3.25 (without tariffs) to $4.80 per pair (with tariffs).

Such tariff-based overpricing exists, though at less dramatic levels, in store aisles stocking baby clothes, T-shirts, silverware, and other typical family products. Because it is most pronounced on the cheapest shoes and clothes, its effect falls most heavily on single-parent families.
Incomes for these families are very low: at an average of about $25,100 per year, they are about 40 percent of a typical two-parent family’s income. But single-parent families face shoe and clothing bills nearly as high as those of wealthier families. In total, the average singleparent
family spends nearly $2,000 a year on clothes and shoes. Depending on the mix of purchases, as much as $400 of this total may simply be price inflation due to tariffs. Budgets for other tariffed goods, though smaller, are still a larger expense relative to income for poor families than for rich families. And so single-parent families lose much more of their income to tariffs than do other
families.

Average tariffs on European exports to the United States -- primarily cars, power equipment, computers, and chemicals -- now barely exceed one percent. Developing countries such as Malaysia, which specialize in information-technology products, get rates just as low. So do natural- resource exporters such as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. Middle-income exporters that ship a broader variety of goods, such as China, Thailand, and Brazil, face rates typically between two percent and four percent -- above average but still not exorbitant. The least-developed
Asian countries, however, take it on the chin. For Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, Mongolia, and a few others, clothes make up 90 percent of all exports to the United States. So they face average tariff rates of 14.6 percent -- nearly 10 times the world average, and 15 times the rate for wealthy Western countries. Translated into real dollars, the disparities can be remarkable.
As Table 3 notes, the U.S. now collects more tariff revenue from Bangladeshi goods than from French goods, even though Bangladesh exports $2 billion in goods a year to the United States and France $30 billion. Cambodia’s exports to the United States total $900 million and
Singapore’s usually reach $15-$20 billion -- but the U.S. government collects nearly twice as much revenue from Cambodian goods as from Singaporean goods.

What explains the willingness to impose such massive economic costs on the poorest American citizens, the poorest developing countries, and the US and global economy as whole? Trade presents an exceedingly difficult collective action problem that makes those opposed to it much more political powerful than those in favor of free trade. Returning to the sugar example, each US citizen may be $21 more each year due to sugar trade, but that loss is disguised in hundreds or thousands of transactions containing sugar. However, the 2,261 people whose jobs were saved, and would be at risk from free trade have much more to lose. Their potential costs are concentrated and huge. Sugar workers will lobby much louder for protection that will the free traders.

It's still too early to predict that a Democratically-controlled Congress will scuttle free trade. Indeed, just recently leading Democrats declared that there would be no problem admitting Vietnam in to the WTO. But, free trade is far to important to this country, the international political and economic environments (let's not forget the Smoot-Hawley Tariff), and the country's and the world's poor to let it be undermined by economic and political nationalists. For those Democratic voters who did such a great job making your voices heard, don't drop the ball on this one.

And You Thought You Were Voting For Change

Over at TCS Daily, J. Pham and Michael Krauss have a piece warning about a troubling decision that soon-to-be Speaker of the House Representative Nancy Pelosi may be about to make. Pelosi is likely to give the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, one of the most important Congressional committees related to national security issues, to Alcee Lamar Hastings (D-FL 23). Doing so is, of course, Pelosi's right and responsibility as Speaker. So what's the problem?

Hastings was impeached from the federal judgeship he held from 1979-1989.

Barely two years into office, "Judge" Hastings accepted a $150,000 bribe in exchange for giving a lenient sentence to two swindlers, then lied in subsequent sworn testimony about the incident. The case involved two brothers, Frank and Thomas Romano, who had been convicted in 1980 on 21 counts of racketeering. Together with attorney William Borders Jr., Hastings, who presided over the Romanos' case, hatched a plot to solicit a bribe from the brothers. In exchange for a $150,000 cash payment to him, Hastings would return some $845,000 of their $1.2 million in seized assets after they served their three-year jail terms.

Taped conversations between Hastings and Borders confirmed that the judge was a party to the plot. Hastings was also criminally prosecuted for bribery, but his accomplice Borders went to prison rather than testify against him. Hastings was acquitted thanks to Borders' silence. [Borders was then pardoned by President Clinton, confirming the wisdom of his refusal to testify. In a remarkable display of chutzpah, Borders then applied for reinstatement to the District of Columbia Bar, claiming that Clinton's federal pardon eliminated his local disbarment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit did not agree, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. To former D.C. delegate Walter Fauntroy, Borders' case had a spiritual quality to it. "Being pardoned by the president is like being pardoned by Jesus," Fauntroy sermonized. Thankfully, the Supremes evidently disagreed with this "theology."]

"Be assured that I'm going to be a judge for life," Mr. Hastings told reporters in 1983 after his acquittal. But the arguments that swayed a Miami jury did not sway the Congress. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives impeached Hastings for bribery and perjury by a lopsided vote of 413 to 3. Then the Democrat-controlled Senate convicted him on eight articles of impeachment by well over the required two-thirds majority in 1989. Thus Mr. Hastings became only the sixth judge in the history of our Republic (and only the third in the 20^th Century) to be removed by Congress. He was, and is, an utter disgrace to the nation and to the legal profession. Among those voting to impeach him were Ms. Pelosi herself, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip who is likely to become the new House majority leader, and Mr. Hastings' fellow African-American Congressman, Michigan's John Conyers, who took pains to deny that race had anything to do with the removal of the bribe-taking jurist.

It is shocking to think that this man has been allowed to serve as one of nation's legislators. But it is not only horrifying but dangerous to give him a position of such important as the chair of the House intelligence committee. The position is, according to the article, a reward from Pelosi:

a payback to the Congressional Black Caucus, to whose support Pelosi owes her election as Minority Leader and whose members she angered by picking Ms. Harman to be ranking member over Georgia Rep. Sanford Bishop in 2003. The incoming Speaker must also mollify the Black Caucus for having pushed Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson (he of the frozen cash) off the Ways and Means Committee.

Hopefully, Pelosi will think about what such a move would mean. But let this be a lesson to all. If you thought that the Democrats would be "better" than the Republicans, think again. Politics is politics, and politicians are politicians. Regardless of party, they will vote for pork. Regardless of party, they will get involved in scandal and break ethical rules. So please, get off of your moral high horses.

Rumsfeld Resigns

The first casualty of the midterm elections is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who has just announced he will resign. I called some time ago for Rumsfeld to step down, if only because as SecDef the burden of the poor decisions in Iraq ultimately rests with him. Rumsfeld will be replaced with Robert Gates, current president of Texas A&M University and former head of the CIA under George H. W. Bush. Gates is a fine, if pedestrian, choice. He is unlikely to bring any fresh thinking or ideas to the problems in Iraq, but at least Rumsfeld has finally paid the political price for his decisions.

Rethinking the ICC

Today's Washington Post has an article indicating that the US may be rethinking its stance towards the International Criminal Court. According to the article:

the debate among senior U.S. military officials seems to be shifting away from staunch opposition, and a fresh assessment of the court seems to be underway.

The new attitude has been prompted in part by the court's record since it began operations three years ago; Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, an Argentine, has dismissed hundreds of petitions for cases against the United States. The cases were turned down for lack of evidence, lack of jurisdiction, or because of the United States' ability to conduct its own investigations and trials. Out of some 1,500 petitions to the chief prosecutor, almost half accused the United States of war crimes.

In a letter made public last year, Moreno-Ocampo's office said it was throwing out 240 such cases concerning the war in Iraq. Reviews of each claim determined that none fell within the court's jurisdiction, his letter said, because the United States is not a signatory.

A congressional study released in August said the ICC's chief prosecutor demonstrated "a reluctance to launch an investigation against the United States" based on allegations regarding its conduct in Iraq.

I have made clear numerous times my general skepticism about international legal bodies such as the ICC. I am not convinced that international tribunals are the most efficacious or just solutions to most problems. However, I have also made clear that I would like to see international organizations develop, in some way, in to stronger institutions that are capable of enforcing some kind of international law, including the ICC specifically. If the US can enter the ICC in a way that will not hinder its ability to project force, when needed, around the world, than US accession to the Court can provide increased legitimacy both to the Court and to the US as well.

It will not, however, become a panacea to the moral failings of international politics; powerful states will still be free to either remain outside of ICC jurisdiction, block investigations, or simply ignore the findings of the Court. As I mentioned in my series of "Big Stick" posts back in July, the US must work hard at building a web of institutions that connect states to one another. If institutions like the ICC are to have meaning even with US membership, then states like Russia and China should suffer for their non-participation or non-compliance. The US and other Western states must find ways to make participation in the global economy contingent on behavior in other fora; if you fail to meet your obligations in the ICC, for example, the WTO could authorize trade sanctions. Only when law is backed with sanction can it have meaning.

Caution: Balancing Ahead!

Over the weekend, there were numerous news reports about China's diplomatic efforts in Africa, including debt forgiveness, pledges of large aid packages, and other agreements designed to pull Africa and China closer together. Specifically, China offered $5 billion in loans and credits and promised to double its aid to the continent by 2009, as well as promised to forgive the interest-free loans of the most indebted and underdeveloped states. Among other deals, China agreed to:

-- train 15,000 African professionals, send 100 senior agricultural experts to Africa, and set up 10 agricultural technology centers in Africa over the next three years.

-- build 30 hospitals and provide 300 million yuan (37.5 million U.S. dollars) in grants to help fight malaria.

-- dispatch 300 volunteers, build 100 rural schools, and increase the number of Chinese government scholarships to African students from 2,000 per year now to 4,000 per year by 2009.

-- increase to more than 440 from 190 the number of items which will not be taxed when imported to China from Africa. He did not provide details.

There's nothing in and of itself troubling about any of these deals. But taken in context of the larger strategic picture, they could spell trouble for American foreign policy, as well as for the broader agenda of liberal international security. We can see quite clearly how Chinese ties to Sudan have negatively impacted the ability of the UN and the West to effectively deal with the problem of Darfur. As Chinese influence in Africa grows, China will continue to gain more of a say in the political affairs of Africa, and as Darfur clearly demonstrates, China and the West still don't see eye to eye on all issues.

What can the West, and specifically the US, do to counter China's growing African presence? A few things. First, the US and the West should take steps to increase their influence there. I'm not a huge fan of debt forgiveness as in isolation it can create a moral hazard and contribute to bad governance. But, it's far past time for the US and other Western countries to stop protecting their agricultural and manufacturing sectors and open up those areas to the comparative advantages of African producers. As this year's Nobel Peace Prize made clear, the surest path to peace is economic development, and the surest path to economic development is innovation and free trade. Programs like the Millenium Challenge Account need to be expanded and strengthened, as they help provide economic improvements along with strengthening governance and democracy.

The US also needs to work more at connecting China to the larger globalized economy, making it clear that China's ability to profit from its relations with the West depend on China's overall strategic behavior. If China wants to continue to protect the Sudanese government, for example, it must realize that such behavior will be costly to its larger economy and efforts to enter into the globalized world. This strategy would pay dividends with North Korea as well, but Africa will, very likely, become increasingly important in a strategic sense in the future, not only as a latent source of economic growth, but also a nexus for security challenges, such as ethnic conflict and infectious disease.

Moving to counter China's African initative not only makes sense for the strategic interests of the US and its liberal democratic allies. It also makes sense of the long-suffering peoples of Africa.

UPDATE: To see how the Millenium Challenge Account grades the performance of the developing world, and what programs have already been put in place, go here.

The Verdict Is In

Despite all of the bad news coming from Iraq -- the mounting death toll of US soldiers, the relentless massacres, the political infighting between Shiite and Sunni -- comes something that should raise the spirits of everyone.

Saddam Hussein has been found guilty of crimes against humanity by an Iraqi court and has been sentenced to execution by hanging.

The verdict only covers Hussein's crimes in Dujail, a Shiite town in which 148 men and boys were killed in retaliation for an alleged assassination attempt against Hussein. But let us not forget the other crimes of Hussein and his regime. The murder of at least 50,000 people in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, the use of chemical weapons in Halabja, the expulsion of the Marsh Arabs from their homes, the invasion and plundering of Kuwait...the list goes on.

The only question now is whether Hussein should be hanged immediately, or if he should stand trial for the rest of his crimes. I've written before about this choice, and I think that now I lean towards continuing the trial. The new judges seem to have gotten the courtroom under control, and the insurgency has grown well beyond the point where executing Hussein would take some of the wind from its sails. So let history record and let all the world publicly consider Hussein's crimes. Besides, sitting in jail is probably worse for Hussein than being executed.

Is It Civil War in Iraq?

There's an interesting story today from Reuters on whether the situation in Iraq can/should be called a civil war. Not surprisingly, the answer much depends on one's political persuasion:

U.S. and Iraqi government leaders are avoiding the term "civil war," although President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and several generals have said Iraq was "close to," "nearing" or "in danger of" civil war.

Experts outside the administration have been less circumspect.

"Iraq's conflict is now worse than civil war," said an October report by the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank close to the Democratic Party.

"The country suffers from at least four internal conflicts -- a Shiite-Sunni civil war in the center, intra-Shiite conflicts in the south, a Sunni insurgency in the west and ethnic tensions between Arabs and Kurds in the north."

...

In the latest of a series of reports on Iraq, Anthony Cordesman, a widely-respected expert at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, said this month the level and sources of violence in Iraq clearly meet a dictionary definition of civil war.

Ken Pollack and Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution think tank, reached a similar conclusion two months earlier.

"The debate is over. By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war," they said.

...

How to officially define "civil war" has been particularly difficult for the U.S. military. The U.S. Department of Defense's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms has no entry for civil war and the term is also not mentioned in a new counter-insurgency manual for the Army and the Marines.

"It's really a political question," said an army officer who did not want to be named.

"And where this is debated publicly, it is mostly driven by politics. War critics make the point that we (the U.S.) aren't where we thought we'd be in Iraq, no matter how you describe what's happening."

Moving beyond politics into the world of serious political analysis (as Cordesman and Pollack and Byman most likely are) requires developing an objective standard for what constitutes a civil war. While I'm not an expert in intra-state conflict, it seems to me that a civil war occurs when the major political actors in a state cease participating in the legitimate political processes and instead turn to violence to pursue their interests. As I see it, this hasn't quite happened yet. The majority of the Sunnis -- both the public and the political elites -- are still trying to participate in the political reconstruction of their country. The Iraqi government exists, and Sunnis are still part of it. For now. This is not to say that the government is strong or that it will succeed or that the insurgency is doomed to fail. But the political process hasn't (yet) fallen apart. So, it's not a civil war yet.

As I've written about before, it's critical that the government not collapse, and that the US not allow old hatreds and rivalrys to scuttle the process. If the Shiites and Kurds can't govern in a way that keeps the Sunnis involved and secure, there are two options: Partion the country or take the governance away from Iraqis until the situation can be stabilized. Autonomy was given to the Iraqi government far too quickly, before processes seen as legitimate by all involved parties could be put in place. It's not civil war in Iraq yet, but it's close. Democracy be damned at this point...the US must do whatever it takes to hold the country together.

An Open Letter on Darfur

Courtesy of the Henry Jackson Society:

Alarmed by the continuing murder of the black people of Darfur by the Janjaweed militias - supported by the Sudanese regime in Khartoum - The Henry Jackson Society decided that more appropriate and concerted action by the world’s great democracies should be requested from leading governments. Accordingly, The Henry Jackson Society issued an open letter on the crisis in Darfur, signed by fifty-five politicians, opinion formers, academics and journalists, to both raise awareness of this pressing moral and strategic issue, and call on the international community to end ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

The open letter has been sent to the High Representative for European Union Common Foreign and Security Policy, Dr. Javier Solana; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rt. Hon. Tony Blair MP; Chancellor of Germany, Dr. Angela Merkel; President of France, M. Jacques Chirac; President of the United States, Mr. George W. Bush; Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh; and President of South Africa, Mr. Thabo Mbeki. It was sent also to the British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Rt. Hon. Margaret Beckett MP and the Secretary of State for Defence, Rt. Hon. Des Browne MP.

An open letter on the crisis in Darfur to the leaders of the European Union, the United States, India, South Africa, and other great democracies.

After the Holocaust, the world said ‘never again’ to genocide. Yet our will to prevent the murder and destruction of particular peoples was not sufficient to stop further genocides, even in the closing years of the last century. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia are a scar on the conscience of the world, and they led to insecurity and suffering on a scale which is beyond comprehension.

Today, in the early years of a new century the world stares in the hideous face of genocide once again. In Darfur, the black population faces annihilation at the hands of Arab Janjaweed and other militias, supported by the Sudanese regime in Khartoum. This is not a civil war or a religious conflict, but a calculated strategy of intimidation and ethnic cleansing. It is designed to kill, remove or enslave black people in Darfur. 200,000 have already been murdered, with a further two million driven from their homes.

We therefore urge our leaders – of the European Union and its member-states, the United States of America, India, South Africa, and other democratic nations the world over – to ensure that genocide does not destroy the people of Darfur. And although a genocide in Darfur is a serious moral issue, it is also a concern paramount to European security. Should the situation deteriorate further, it will spill over and damage an already unstable region, creating a breeding ground for extremism and terror. Moreover, we have a clear strategic interest to prevent attempts by the People’s Republic of China to support repressive regimes in Africa in return for energy concessions.

In light of such circumstances, we call on our governments to empower and fund the African Union, so that it has one last chance to deal with the crisis. Meanwhile, our leaders must apply as much pressure as may be required on the Sudanese regime in order to make it cooperate with the international community. Khartoum must allow international forces with a robust mandate into Darfur to reverse ethnic cleansing and re-establish the rule of law, in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1706. Should this cooperation not be forthcoming, we call on our governments to take all the necessary action – insofar as is possible in coordination with the United Nations – to ensure that the people of Darfur are protected, and that those driven from their livelihoods be allowed to return to their homes. This may require the speedy deployment of peace enforcers and the establishment of no-fly zones, in order to prevent the Sudanese regime from assisting the Janjaweed in their murder.

For many months, Darfur has stood on a precipice; today, it is very close to falling off into a dark age of chaos, carnage and genocidal murder. We must not let this happen.

Supported by (institutional affiliation listed only for means of identification),

Karim Abdian - Director, Ahwaz Human Rights Organisation

Mansour Silawi Ahwazi - Foreign Relations, Democratic Solidarity Party of Al-Ahwaz

Michael Allen - Editor, Democracy Digest

Nasser Bani Assad - President, British Ahwazi Friendship Society

Paul Beaver - Commentator and Parliamentary Advisor, United Kingdom

Prof. Vernon Bogdanor - Professor of Government, University of Oxford

Nicholas Boles - Director, Policy Exchange

Roberta Bonazzi - Director, European Foundation for Democracy

Max Boot - Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

Daniel Brett - Director, British Ahwazi Friendship Society

Chris Bryant MP - Member of Parliament (Labour), United Kingdom

David Clelland MP - Member of Parliament (Labour), United Kingdom

Humphry Crum Ewing - Chairman, The Standish Group

Yahia Elbashir - Human Rights Secretary, Darfur Union

David Gauke MP - Member of Parliament (Conservative), United Kingdom

Michael Gove MP - Member of Parliament (Conservative), United Kingdom

Robert Halfon - Political Director, Conservative Friends of Israel

Dr. Hubertus Hoffmann - Founder and President, World Security Network

Gary Kent - Director, Labour Friends of Iraq (Personal Capacity)

Daniel Keohane - Centre for European Reform

Dr. William Kristol - Editor, The Weekly Standard

Bruce Jackson - President, Project on Transitional Democracies

Prof. Alan Johnson - Editor, Democratiya

Henry Knobil

Jackie Lawrence - Member of Parliament (Labour), 1997-2005, United Kingdom

The Hon. John Lehman - Secretary of the United States Navy, 1981-1987

Prof. Andrew Lever - University of Cambridge

Dr. Andrew Lilico - Managing Director, Europe Economics

Gideon Mailer - Africa Director, The Henry Jackson Society

Dr. Alan Mendoza - Executive Director, The Henry Jackson Society

Jan Mortier - Director, Civitatis International

Michael Mosbacher - Director, The Social Affairs Unit

Douglas Murray - Senior Fellow, The Social Affairs Unit

Fionnuala Jay O’Boyle MBE - Jay Associates Public and Government Affairs

Robert Philpot - Director, Progress

Dr. Efraim Podosik - Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Stephen Pollard - Columnist, The Times

Greg Pope MP - Member of Parliament (Labour), United Kingdom

Ben Ramm - Editor, The Liberal

Ben Rogers - Deputy Chairman, Conservatives’ Human Rights Commission

James M. Rogers - Executive Secretary, The Henry Jackson Society

Prof. William Rubinstein - University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Prof. Roger Scruton - University of Arlington

Dr. Gary Schmitt - Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Dr. Brendan Simms - Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge

Alex Singleton - Director-General, The Globalisation Institute

Dr. Ulrich Speck - Commentator and Journalist

Eva Strickmann - German Council on Foreign Relations

Gisela Stuart MP - Member of Parliament (Labour), United Kingdom

Peter Tatchell - Human Rights Campaigner

Rebecca Tinsley - Waging Peace

Lord Trimble - Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1998

Tomáš Weiss - Institute for European Policy EUROPEUM

Stuart Wheeler - Founder of IG Index

Prof. Alan Lee Williams - Director, Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom

MORE Honest Thinking About Torture

Score one for the ledger against using torture. Yesterday's Washington Post reports that:

"Several governments around the world have tried to rebut criticism of how they handle detainees by claiming they are only following the U.S. example in fighting terrorism, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture said Monday.

Manfred Nowak said that when he criticizes governments for their questionable treatment of detainees, they respond by telling him that if the United States does something, it must be all right. He would not name any countries except Jordan.

"The United States has been the pioneer . . . of human rights and is a country that has a high reputation in the world," Nowak said at a news conference. "Today, many other governments are kind of saying: 'But why are you criticizing us? We are not doing something different than what the United States is doing.' "

Now, I'm skeptical that countries would be less likely to torture their prisoners if the US doesn't. They may be using US behavior as a smoke screen to justify their own actions, but that doesn't mean that if the US stops said behavior and the smoke clears, that the other countries would stop as well.

Still, American reputation matters. Soft power is a critical tool of foreign policy, and US soft power stems from, to a large degree, American claims of moral rectitude and liberalism. And if one believes in democratic peace theory, it certainly becomes harder to move countries towards liberalism if the US is seen behaving badly.

This doesn't convince me that torture should be ruled out, but it certainly provides evidence towards that conclusion.

How NOT To Do Multilateralism

If serious multilateralism is to be a viable option to unilateral action in international security, then the organizations, institutions, and individuals involved in multilateralism must present themselves as credible and honest alternatives by which states can secure their security at lower costs than they could on their own. Yesterday, Mohammed ElBaradei, the executive director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, displayed why so many people are so skeptical of the ability of the UN and its related institutions to provide real international security. In the aftermath of the North Korean nuclear tests and in the midst of Iran ramping up its own enrichment programs, did ElBaradei warn these countries about their flagrant violations of international law, institutional commitments, and international norms? Of course not. To the contrary, ElBarabdei warned that sanctions could empower hardliners in both countries, stated that he does not believe Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, and argued that North Korea's nuclear test was a "cry for help."

This is so absurd as to almost be unbelievable. The UN Security Council which oversees the IAEA has condemned the actions of both states, passed sanctions against North Korea, warned Iran not to continue its path, and has clearly expressed the will of the international community that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will be not be acceptable and will not be tolerated. If states are going to put their trust to any degree in international institutions to preserve international security, those institutions must step up to the plate in the face of threats. The more the UN refuses to enforce its own laws and punish states like Iran and North Korea that break their own legal commitments, the less any state will look to the UN as a guarantor of international peace.

Regardless of one's opinion of the invasion of Iraq, a large part of President Bush's reluctance to wait (not that waiting would have altered the outcome) on the UN inspections was a lack of faith that the UN would do anything meaningful to punish Iraq. Time and time again, from silence, if not almost cooperation, in the face of genocide, to a failure to even be able to condemn states that illegally develop WMD, the unwillingness of the UN and other international institutions to chastise and punish undermines the efficacy of those institutions. ElBaradei's comments are both dangerous and foolhardy, and undermine the very mission he purports to be advancing.

Honest Thinking About Torture

Alan Dershowitz has a provocative op-ed in yesterday's Los Angeles Times in which he advocates the creation of a torture warrant. Just like the police must, if they want the legal authority to enter and search a home or wiretap a suspected criminal's phone, provide sufficient evidence and obtain a warrant, so does Dershowitz believe that the federal government should have the option to, if a situation so demands, go before a federal judge and obtain permission to use "coercive interrogation" (i.e. torture) in the questioning of a suspected terrorist. Dershowitz is fond of the "ticking time bomb" example, in which a terrorist suspected of having knowledge of an impeding terrorist attack is in custody and the authorities want to use torture to force to suspect to divulge what he knows.

Dershowitz's article is less about the merits of the torture warrant idea and more about claiming an unusual and expected ally in his cause: President Bill Clinton. According to Dershowitz, in a recent interview on National Public Radio (September 20, 2006), Clinton was asked, as someone "who's been there," whether the president needs "the option of authorizing torture in an extreme case." Clinton's response:

Look, if the president needed an option, there's all sorts of things they can do. Let's take the best case, OK. You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next … three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that's the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or water-boarding him or otherwise working him over. If they really believed that that scenario is likely to occur, let them come forward with an alternate proposal.

"We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture. They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."

Clinton was then asked whether he was saying there "would be more responsibility afterward for what was done." He replied: "Yeah, well, the president could take personal responsibility for it. But you do it on a case-by-case basis, and there'd be some review of it." Clinton quickly added that he doesn't know whether this ticking bomb scenario "is likely or not," but he did know that "we have erred in who was a real suspect or not."

If they really believe the time comes when the only way they can get a reliable piece of information is to beat it out of someone or put a drug in their body to talk it out of 'em, then they can present it to the Foreign Intelligence Court, or some other court, just under the same circumstances we do with wiretaps. Post facto….

But I think if you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, we're gonna be in real trouble."

Clinton's argument is that while the US certainly doesn't want to pass laws that normalize torture, or institute it as a regular policy option, as someone who has been the position of making very difficult decisions about how to best protect the country he seems to recognize that, in very rare cases, torture may be necessary.

The idea of a torture warrant is interesting for many reasons. One big reason to oppose it, however, is that there is little evidence that courts have the backbone to oppose federal requests for actions in the name of national security. Yes, FISA may keep warrants from being used in criminal proceedings or for political purposes, but there don't seem to be many instances of the government being turned down (this may be a problem of selection bias; that is, because the feds know they have to go before a judge and ask permission, they don't bother asking about the questionable cases). Would a judge deny the CIA or FBI the right to torture a terrorist after being told the suspect may have information that could save American lives? I'm normally suspicious of slippery slope arguments, but I'm even more suspicious of government power.

However, this is a discussion that needs to be taken seriously. My colleague, David Sousa, gave a talk for "Constitution Day" (American universities that receive federal money are required to do some kind of educational programming about Constitution Day) about civil liberties in the US after 9/11, in which he warned that if you think civil liberties are under siege now, just wait until after the next attack. That is a scary prospect. That's not to say that our country needs to take any and all steps to prevent another attack at all costs. But we also can't hide behind our squeamish and liberal natures. Developing some sort of legal and political barrier to prevent torture from becoming routine, but maintaining it as an option in an extreme scenario is something that needs to be discussed.

So It Was Nuclear

The US is now acknowledging that North Korea did indeed test a nuclear device last week. But given that the blast had a yield of under 1 kt, either the test was a failure or North Korea's nuclear program is far less advanced than has been assumed. It's most likely the former: developing a successful nuclear program is much more difficult than movies, TVs, and many analysts make it seem. This doesn't mean that North Korea isn't a threat...rather, it means that the time line is not as advanced as a successful test would have meant. If North Korea can't successfully detonate a device in ideal testing conditions, it certainly can't yet be considered a threat to deploy nuclear weapons. Furthermore, North Korea still doesn't have a demonstrable delivery capability.

All of this means that there is still time to try to encourage North Korea to back away from the precipice. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, it doesn' t look like the UN is going to be able to have much effect. The US must use all of its political and economic incentives (and sanctions) to force China and South Korea to isolate North Korea. Only if those states see that their aiding and abetting of the North Korean gulag state risks their domestic economic health as well as their relations with the larger international community will they take any serious actions against North Korea. The US, and only the US, can make this happen.

Update on the North Korean "Nuclear" Test

I posted a few days ago that I didn't believe that North Korea had successfully, or even unsuccessfully, tested a nuclear device. And while the jury is not quite yet in, it's getting closer to a verdict. Air samples taken from the area around the test site displayed no traces of radiation. Chinese officials confirmed this, stating that their own testing had discerned no radioactivity.

How NOT To Respond To North Korea

In the wake of North Korea's suspected test of a nuclear device, the US Congress has reacted predictably by throwing money at a solution. Duncan Hunter (R-CA 52nd) said "lawmakers negotiating the Pentagon's fiscal 2007 budget had added $100 million for Aegis ballistic missile defense SM-3 interceptors and Aegis system development."

Congress, and government more generally, is a fundamentally reactive body. That it, when something happens, Congress reacts to it which often causes an misestimation of the threat and an unnecessarly excessive response. Rather than thinking in an analytic manner about the nature of the threat posed, the costs and benefits of a particular solution, or anything else, Congress likes to throw money at a problem, both hoping that the chosen solution will work as well as trying to look like it's on top of the problem and taking actions to protect the country.

Thus, without considering why nuclear deterrence would fail to dissuade North Korea from launching a nuclear-armed ballistic missile at the US, without thinking about how much of a threat such an attack poses to the US, without thinking about how else $100 million might be spent on more useful, more immediate problems, Congress simply adds $100 million to the budget to deal with a technology fraught with technical problems and of dubious strategic necessity.

I wouldn't go so far to say Congress is a bigger threat to this country than Kim Jong-Il, but I wouldn't trust either of them with my ATM card.

I Don't Believe Kim Jong-Il

Let me go on record: I do not believe that North Korea tested a nuclear weapon or device on Sunday. I wish I had posted yesterday, but I'm buried writing a promotion evaluation of one of my colleagues and finishing a paper that's due this weekend. But ask my students: I said this before the White House has come out questioning what actually happened in North Korea.

There is very little evidence that the explosion detected in North Korea was the result of a nuclear reaction. The yield was under 1 kiloton, pathetically weak for a nuclear explosion. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had yields of 12-15kt and 20-22 kt respectively. The first devices tested by India and Pakistan in the 1990s were 12 kt and 9 kt. So, if what detonated below North Korea was, in fact, nuclear, then it either didn't work or is so primitive and rudimentary as to be almost laughable.

But why should we believe North Korea in the first place? Since the announcement that the Hermit Kingdom there has been no confirmation of the existence of nuclear weapons. US intelligence agencies agree that North Korea should have enough fissile material to make several weapons, but having the material is a long way from being able to use them. North Korea has little to gain from a policy of "strategic ambiguity" a la Israel. North Korea wants to leverage its "arsenal" against the United States to extract economic concessions and no-attack guarantees, and it can't do that with a "bomb in the basement." However, if in fact the regime is too economically crippled to build a bomb (and given that it can't even provide electricity to its capital city for 24 hours, that's not hard to believe), then and only then would it make sense to intimate that a bomb exists. Given the lessons of both Gulf Wars (don't piss of the US unless you have a nuke), North Korea likely believes that only by making the US believe that Seoul is at risk of inceneration can the US be deterred.

Of course, I may be wrong. I don't think I am, but even if I am, I don't believe that North Korea is anywhere near weaponizing a nuclear device and is, as the most recent ballistic missile tests demonstrated, even farther away from being able to deliver such a weapon. However (and this is a big caveat), the threat posed by a "nuclear" North Korea is not so much about its capability to threaten the US, but more about the political pressure it puts on the regional security dynamic. So far, China seems to be on board with the West, Japan is reassuring everyone that it will not proliferate in response, and South Korea seems to be rethinking its idiotic "sunshine" policy. So far, so good. The US needs to work to create a regional coalition and, hopefully through the UN, work to impose serious punitive consequences on North Korea. Even if there is no weapon there, such moves are necessary to reaffirm the US dominance that is necessary for tamping down regional security dilemmas.

UPDATE: Apparently, we should know in a few days with some degree of confidence whether the explosion was in fact nuclear. Read this article to see why and how.