Human Rights

A group of musicians has joined the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo and issued a formal protest against the use of their music as part of the Bush-era torture regime.  Music from performers like Bruce Springsteen, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine and the Bee Gees (?) was reportedly played at excruciatingly high volumes as part of various sleep-deprivation and enhanced interrogation techniques, and some of the artists whose music was involved (Trent Reznor, Jackson Browne, David Byrne, R.E.M., and many others) are now seeking additional information about these practices and demanding that their music not be used in this fashion.
 
Good for them. Being forced to listen to the Bee Gees at any volume might be construed as a form of torture by some of us, although I don't think President Obama's ban on the various Bush-era practices goes that far.

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While everyone else is welcoming the hopeful signs from the nuclear negotiations with Iran -- and I'm cautiously encouraged too --I'm going back to the less-than-hopeful news from elsewhere in the Middle East. According to the Associated Press, the Palestinian National Authority has agreed to defer its efforts to get the Goldstone Report on war crimes in the Gaza conflict referred out of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to the Security Council or the General Assembly. This seems puzzling: given the findings of the report, and the fact that roughly 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the carnage (along with 13 Israelis), why would they decide to hold back? Simple: because the United States, principled defender of human rights, put a lot of pressure on them. Here's the Associated Press's explanation (my emphasis):

Senior U.S. and Palestinian officials in Washington and Ramallah, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the Palestinian decision came after heavy U.S. pressure and a warning that going ahead with the resolution would harm the Middle East peace process."

A few comments. First, critics of the report -- including, unfortunately, senior officials in the United States government -- have repeatedly charged that the U.N. Human Rights Commission is biased against Israel and that the original charge given to Goldstone was slanted. I think there's merit to both charges, but they are also irrelevant to judging the report itself or determining how it should be handled. Why? Because Goldstone demanded that the original charge be modified to cover both sides' conduct before he accepted the job, and his demand was accepted by the UNHCR. The fact that the UNHCR has been overly concerned with Israel in the past is regrettable, but says nothing about the validity of the report itself. UNHCR didn't do the investigation and write the report; a distinguished international panel with impeccable credentials did. And other respected human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, have endorsed the report's recommendations too.

Second, although the report contains damning evidence that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes, its main recommendation is that the Security Council require each side to carry out credible investigations of their own conduct and take appropriate action against those responsible for any crimes that were committed. If the responsible parties do this, there is no danger of a subsequent referral to the International Criminal Court, because the Court only has jurisdiction when responsible authorities refuse to investigate in a credible manner.

The United States is reportedly encouraging Israel to conduct a thorough and fair-minded investigation, as are Israeli human rights organizations like B'tselem. And it should be noted that Israel has done so effectively on certain occasions in the past, such as the Kahan Commission that investigated the Sabra and Shatila massacres during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. So in theory, Israel can avoid any call for sanction against specific individuals by doing a serious investigation of its own, provided that it doesn't just whitewash the whole business. (The same logic applies to Hamas, of course, and such a step would in fact be a very interesting move on their part. But I doubt they will.)

Third, it is more than a little ironic to see how the "peace process" (and by extension, the occupation itself) has become a reason to deep-six a report documenting human rights violations. (Never mind that the occupation is itself a violation of human rights and international law). Once again, U.S. policy inadvertently encourages Israeli intransigence: by driving a hard bargain with us on settlements and other key issues, the Israeli government gets its American patron to offer it more and more help (this time in the form of diplomatic cover) just to keep the illusion of a two-state settlement alive. Indeed, the obvious response to the U.S. argument that it has to suppress the Goldstone Report in order to protect the "peace process" is simple: what peace process?

Meanwhile, the stakes for the United States and President Obama just went up a little further. He laid down some big markers in his Cairo speech -- openly committing himself to "two states for two peoples" and declaring that "the settlements must stop" -- only to back down a few months later. Now he's apparently pressured the Palestinian Authority to put the Goldstone Report on the back burner, so as not to harm the "peace process." Well, ok, but he'd better produce something tangible for this latest Palestinian concession. If another six months goes by and there's no meaningful progress toward a two-state solution, then Abbas will look even more ineffectual, Hamas's hard-line approach will gain more adherents, and Obama's big push for Middle East peace will be seen as no different than the patently insincere "peace initiative" that President Bush began at Annapolis in 2007. We will be headed for a one-state solution -- if that is not already inevitable -- and that means big trouble for everyone. And that beautiful speech in Cairo will sound like yet another case of American double-talk.

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Former (future?) GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has been on a visit to Israel this week, sponsored by a pro-settler organization. According to the Associated Press, Huckabee said "'there is no room for a Palestinian state' in the middle of the Jewish homeland, and Israel should be able to build settlements wherever it wants." He also said "The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

Given that current demographic trends suggest that Arabs will be a majority in the lands currently controlled by Israel in the not-too-distant future, Huckabee is either endorsing ethnic cleansing or calling for the permanent denial of democratic rights to the Arab residents of the Occupied Territories, which is a form of apartheid. Either way, he is no friend of Israel, and the policies he's endorsing will do great damage to US interests throughout the region.

I thought about writing at length about Huckabee's trip, but Glenn Greenwald, Richard Silverstein, and Spencer Ackerman already did, and I doubt I could improve on their insights. So I suggest you read them instead.

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Welcoming Joe Biden to Tbilisi yesterday, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili declared that "in America, as anywhere on earth you can find lots of cynics and realpolitik followers. But in America, idealists ultimately run the show."

It's easy to understand why Saakashvili said this: he's desperate for American backing and that requires portraying Georgia as a beacon of democracy and freedom and making a none-too-subtle appeal to America’s commitment to defend these values everywhere. Why? Because it requires real creativity to divine a powerful strategic interest for an alliance with Georgia, especially when Washington is trying to get Russian cooperation on issues that clearly matter more, like Iran. It also requires overlooking Saakashvili's less-than-democratic behavior in the past, and the foolish war that he launched a year ago.

In any case, I hope Saakashvili also read the Times piece on U.S. policy in Central Asia, where human rights and other idealistic considerations are taking a back seat to strategic interests (i.e., the need for regional backing for the U.S. war in Afghanistan). It suggests that Saakashvili has got American foreign policy exactly backwards: yes, you can always find lots of "idealists" trying to get the United States to take on various philanthropic projects overseas, and of course U.S. leaders will always invoke cherished U.S. ideals when describing their policies. But in the end, realpolitik tends to win out, even if we don't like to say so too openly. To be sure, sometimes various special interest groups succeed in getting their pet projects onto the policy agenda, especially if they know how to work the American political system, and sometimes hubris leads U.S. leaders to take on grandiose plans to spread democracy or human rights, or other admittedly desirable things. Indeed, because the United States is so strong and comparatively secure, it's been able to take on more of these projects than anyone else, and probably more than it should. 

But when push comes to shove, U.S. leaders usually fall back on the less sentimental calculations of realpolitik, and they are rarely willing to risk much blood or treasure on behalf of purely moral concerns. I hope the Georgians keep that in mind.

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Today we learned that the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan are now spearheading a major effort at (drum roll) ... prison reform. We've figured out that the brutal treatment that even petty criminals face while in jail is facilitating Taliban recruitment in the prisons, and so the United States is going to build some new facilities and try to get the Afghan government to change its incarceration practices. Your tax dollars at work.

Given that we are trying to defeat an insurgency, I don't have a big problem with any initiative that might weaken Taliban recruitment. But am I the only one who sees the irony in this situation? Prison reform is badly needed back here in the United States -- where the incarceration rate is the highest in the world (Russia and Belarus -- well-known bastions of freedom -- are #2 and #3). In fact, the incarceration rate in the United States is nearly four times the world average, and nearly seven times higher than in the EU.  Recidivism rates in the United States are also high (about 60 percent), which suggests that prison life isn't doing a very good job of rehabilitating convicts. As sociologist Bruce Western has shown, this situation has far-reaching negative consequences. Although Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) has been trying to spearhead a reform effort, this hasn't generated a lot of momentum so far. So the Afghans may get significant prison reform before Americans do.

Let's not forget how we got here: about eight years ago a small group of anti-American criminals hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into buildings in the United States. The ringleaders of the plot were in Afghanistan, and the Afghan government (at that time under Taliban control) refused to give them up. So the United States invaded to overthrow the Taliban and capture the al Qaeda leadership. Unfortunately, we failed to get the latter, and we bungled the subsequent reconstruction effort by going into Iraq, thereby enabling the Taliban to make a comeback. So now we're escalating there once more, in a potentially open-ended effort to build a functioning and legitimate Afghan state. And now that means fixing their prison system too. How does one say "mission creep" in Pashto?

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In my last post, I argued that the U.S. policy of "don't ask don't tell" is contrary to a realist view of world politics, because it excludes qualified people from military service and thus makes it harder for the United States to field the most effective forces in a competitive international environment. I think there are other objections to the policy as well, but I was primarily concerned in that post with the strategic implications. The policy obviously doesn't prevent the United States from producing highly capable fighting forces, but restricting the talent pool in this way means our forces will cost more than they have to and/or be less effective than they could be.

This got me thinking: might a similar logic be at work at a more global level? Specifically, does the competitive nature of international politics give some states an advantage because their political systems and social values make it relatively easy to attract and assimilate talented citizens from other countries, thereby enabling them to draw more-or-less selectively on the entire global talent pool? If so, then these states will be able to improve their relative position over time, and to the extent that globalization now facilitates people moving from place to place, that tendency should be increasing. By contrast, states that make assimilation difficult or that discriminate on other areas will tend to be less attractive destinations for highly educated and/or entrepreneurial individuals, and these states will for the most part have to work with the citizenry they've got or pay a very high premium to attract talent from abroad.

One can see this dynamic by comparing Japan and the United States. Japan is an ethnically homogeneous society, with small minority populations who remain objects of discrimination. It is possible for foreigners to become naturalized citizens after five years of continuous residence, but this practice is not widespread. Japan also has a rapidly aging and declining population, which will have significant long-term effects on its power and influence. Yet given Japan's current policies discourage talented foreigners from immigrating and assimilating, thereby making it harder for Japan to attract the best and brightest from around the world and reverse its demographic slide.

The United States, by contrast, is the very model of a melting-pot society. People automatically qualify for citizenship if either parent is a citizen or if they are born on American soil, and naturalization is quite common (about one million people became naturalized citizens last year). Although support for immigration has waxed and waned throughout U.S. history and remains a contested issue today (mostly due to issues pertaining to illegal immigration), the United States has had remarkable success attracting and assimilating some of the best and brightest from all over the world. All I have to do is look at my colleagues, whose ranks include an impressive number of scholars born outside the United States. Each of them was hired as a result of a global talent search, and we'd have a less distinguished faculty if we had looked only at U.S. citizens. Some of my colleagues eventually returned to their countries of origin (such as Andres Velasco, currently Minister of Finance in Chile), but others are likely to spend most if not all of their careers here in the United States.

The success of the American melting pot, as many scholars have commented, is due partly to good fortune (North America was rich in natural resources, arable land, etc.) but also to the particular nature of American civic nationalism (or what Anatol Lieven calls the American Creed): faith in liberty, constitutionalism, democracy, the rule of law, individualism, and political and cultural (but not economic) egalitarianism. Although the United States has hardly been free of racial or ethnic conflicts during its history, these features have made it possible for every new group to integrate itself as full citizens. The United States is an attractive destination not just because it is a wealthy society, but also because many different groups and individuals can become integral parts of that society instead of facing permanent second-class status.

If I'm right, then the pressures of international competition give an advantage to any society that can "cream" some of the smartest and/or hardest working people from all over the world. How? By making that society an attractive place to live and work, mostly by creating an atmosphere of equality and toleration. By contrast, societies that limit their de facto talent pool by defining citizenship narrowly, by treating minorities badly, by discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or other characteristics are placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

Over time, therefore, we should expect a growing gap between "cosmopolitan" societies that develop institutions and cultures in which diversity and tolerance are prized and where potential conflicts between them are managed well, and more restrictive societies that are either attractive only to a fixed population of particular ethnic identity, or who are face recurring internal conflicts between various contending groups. My bet would be that, other things being equal, the former do better over time.

And note that this argument isn't just about ethnic assimilation. In effect, what I'm suggesting is that from a realist perspective, there is a strong case for "small-l" liberal toleration. All else equal, societies that establish strong norms and institutions that protect individual rights and freedoms (including those governing sexual preference, I might add) will become attractive destinations for a wider array of potential citizens than societies that try to maintain a high degree of uniformity. And when you can choose from a bigger talent pool, over time you're going to do better.

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