Michael Young has the right reaction to the news that Richard Perle has resigned from the Defense Policy Board:

Is Perle so selfless as to resign on Bush’s behalf? Now say that again without howling with laughter. Either someone told Perle to walk, I’m guessing, or he wants to leverage his position while this administration is still in office.

I’ve got my money on the former possibility too. What’s nice about Perle’s announcement is the explicit recognition that the position Perle occupied does reflect on the administration – from which there is little to prevent the inference that up till now Perle’s bosses have been comfortable with the way he reflects on the administration. This is not to say that Perle’s attitudes are the attitudes of the administration, full stop. But it does confirm very nicely the point that that the admin – or elements in the admin – think his attitudes are valuable and serious.

Now, I think this makes some trouble for what has now become a standard line among some defenders of the Bush admin’s diplomacy. It goes like this: “Of course Bush isn’t a unilaterialist. He went to the UN; he tries to work with allies; he says conciliatory things at every opportunity.”

The obvious objection to this is that unilaterialism is a matter of degree, and that Bush can be far more unilateral than either precedent or prudence permit without being wholly unilateral. I’m happy to admit that many of the critiques of the admin which push the “unilaterial” criticism push it altogether too far, and in annoyingly simplistic directions. But even after we’ve discarded the nonsense, we’re left with a very serious criticism of the admin.

But there is another objection, too, which is that if you’re serious about working with allies, you don’t necessarily want someone in a position of prominence – with the implicit sanction of the admin – mouthing off all over the world about how feckless your allies are and how great it is that the U.N. is dying, since that is a fate it richly deserves. What one hand extends in diplomacy, the other truculently snatches away. When Perle writes a piece called “Thank God for the Death of the U.N.” (Friday, March 31st, 2003, in the Guardian) and receives no formal rebuke from the administration, he is correctly assumed to be representing at least one line of thinking about the matter within the admin. For my part, I always figured that Perle was a convenient proxy for Rumsfeld to make his attitudes towards adversaries and allies felt when decorum interfered with fuller expressions of irritation. (And while Rummy is awfully frank, I also doubt that he has said publicly all he has to say about the French, for example.)

I suppose Perle’s recent book (co-authored with former Bush speechwriter, David Frum) brought the basic tension here out so clearly that it could no longer be ignored. And that’s when Rummy’s excellent two-for-one deal on cakes finally collapsed.

This story in the Times on Haiti is offensively bad. The first paragraph gets things off to a rocky start:

As the Haitian crisis deepens, with violence flaring and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide locked in an impasse with his opponents, the Bush administration has placed itself in the unusual position of saying it may accept the ouster of a democratic government.

Alas, it’s not unusual at all. This is the writer’s way of expressing disapproval (and it speaks volumes that it is) for the policy. After I read this, I had a sinking feeling about where the story was going to end up. And yes, the sinking feeling was right. The author was setting us up for a Venezuela comparison.

The stance recalls the administration’s initial response to the April 2002 coup attempt against another elected, populist leader in the hemisphere, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. American officials touched off an outcry by appearing to blame Mr. Chávez for the uprising and consulting with his would-be successors.

Oh jeez. I suppose a foolish but ambitious reporter might get it into his head that if the admin took it on the nose for monkey business on Venezuela, why not be the first to hit it again for failing to support democracy in Haiti? Except, of course, that the two cases are very different. I don’t have a very high opinion of Chavez: The guy seemed to genuinely enjoy hanging out with Saddam Hussein and Castro, and his former prediliction for coups isn’t exactly endearing. Still, my understanding is that he was elected in a real election, and that the coup attempt against him was an extremely rotten business. The U.S. richly deserved taking it on the nose for supporting it after the fact, and deserved rather more than that if – as may have been the case – it supported it before the fact.

Haiti by contrast is just absolutely fucked. Aristide has simply no legitimacy and has – against the odds – run Haiti into even worse shape than Venezuela is in the minds of the most ardent anti-Chavez crowd. The 2000 elections in Haiti were a sham, and to say that Aristide isn’t a populist anymore would be putting it mildly.

If the US government wants to signal that it is no friend of Aristide it has my full blessing.

Another silly Safire column.

It’s too tedious to discuss at length. Just want to point out one thing. Safire has a long list of things supposedly accomplished by Bush’s aggressive foreign policy. The enemies of the U.S. worldwide are, according to Safire, finally willing to bargain with a U.S. that clearly means business.

But here’s the thing: The U.S. military is now tied down and over-extended in Iraq. It has also lost a great deal of the diplomatic support it needs to wage wars. Still a force to be reckoned with, of course, the most powerful in the world. But it is less able now, far less able, to threaten its enemies militarily. That’s because everyone can see perfectly well that the military is tied down and the U.S. discredited diplomatically.

Nor is it really right to attribute gains to enhanced U.S. credibility. Do anyone really think before the invasion of Iraq that the U.S. wouldn’t invade a country if it seriously wanted to?

So I don’t think it’s right to interpret diplomatic progress with difficult countries as evidence that acting all tough works. Not at least if acting tough has obviously made you weaker.

A Nuclear Headache: What if the Radicals Oust Musharraf?

I have often wondered if historians would see the failure to fully and constructively engage Pakistan after Sept. 11th as the gravest of the Bush administration’s mistakes. Indeed, if Sept. 11th were an argument for nation building anywhere, it was in Pakistan. Of course, I don’t mean invading the country. But a far larger carrot and a larger stick were both called for, I think, by the fact that an unstable nuclear power turned out to have directly supported fanatics like bin Laden. Bush has been stinting with his carrots – he wouldn’t even give Pakistan a decent (and fair) deal on textiles which might have strengthened his domestic hand, and he hasn’t been particularly aggressive in promoting civil society or stability in the country either. The dispute over Kashmir is managed to avoid a crisis, but not engaged in any meaningful way.

If you think the war on Iraq diverted energy and attention from this effort – or rather, from what might have been this effort – then we ought to reckon that among the consequences of the war.

It isn’t clear yet what the consequences are of allowing Pakistan to continue rotting in this way. But I’m afraid they will be cataclysmic.

Sometimes Hitchens drives me nuts. Really, really nuts. But then he goes and gives this savagely funny and intelligent interview. (Link via Normblog) Two highlights:

Still, the solution of a local land-dispute between competing petty tribes ought not to be beyond the wit of man. The argument is contained within a quadrilateral. Either one side can defeat and expel or exterminate the other. Or there can be a sharing of the territory. Or the conflict may exhaust and destroy both parties. Or the status quo – a kind of armed and unstable apartheid truce – can be assumed to continue indefinitely.

And how about this:

In my opinion, Israel doesn’t “give up” anything by abandoning religious expansionism in the West Bank and Gaza. It does itself a favor, because it confronts the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews, and because it abandons a scheme which is doomed to fail in the worst possible way. The so-called “security” question operates in reverse, because as I may have said already, only a moral and political idiot would place Jews in a settlement in Gaza in the wild belief that this would make them more safe.

Yes, yes, and yes, Mr. Hitchens. When you’re not being a simplistic dolt you’re really bang on.

In a way this makes me even more annoyed with him for being a simplistic dolt: It’s obvious he can avoid it when he chooses.

OxBlog’s David Adesnik has the right idea about yesterday’s decision to bar companies from Iraq rebuilding contracts if they hail from countries who were unsupportive of the war. But he also writes:

Coming from an administration that is usually so good about looking for its own self-interest, it is hard to know why no one seems to be watching out for Iraq as the election approaches and voters show more and more concern about the lack of visible progress on the ground.

I’m astonished that anyone still thinks that the administration is good at looking after itself. They’re not even good at that. They’re actually quite incompetent. This goes well beyond questions of politics. Whatever your political orientation, you should be disgusted by the admin. Indeed, if you’re an ideological ally you should be tearing your hair out as you watch the Bush team discredit all your favourite ideas.

There are signs on the right that people are starting to get that. But it’s taking an astonishing amount of time to sink in.

A few further points to add to Adesnik’s post:

First, many of the allies punished in yesterday’s decision are still actively engaged in Afghanistan. This has been a dangerous and costly mission. Where the hell is the recognition for that? Does anyone even remember that? Do the morons sitting at home crowing all day about American sacrifices in Iraq remember?

Second, the decision reinforces the impression that the U.S. thinks it has the right to divy up the spoils of war in pursuit of its own foreign policy agenda. But it doesn’t, however tempting it might seem. The resources belong to the people of Iraq, and the U.S. currently (and temporarily) holds them in trust. Decisions about rebuilding ought to reflect that fact.

None of this is to deny that countries should pay some price for arming and supporting Iraq during its long nightmare under S.H. I’m a big fan of debt forgiveness for Iraq. I also think it’s absurd and immoral to hold the Iraqi people hostage to debts incurred when they were held hostage by S.H. And I would love a full airing of who gave what to whom and when and with whose permission during the 80s and 90s. But you’re not allowed to hyperventilate about this (according to the CY “rules of engagement,” of course) until you write on long post about the U.S.’s complicity in the same nasty business.

Finally, the billion dollar question here is whether Baker was informed of this decision before it was made. I’d bet everything I owe that he wasn’t, and that he turned very red when he got wind of it. But I’m also guessing that we won’t need to speculate for long. Baker knows how to play the media game as well as anyone in Washington, and if there’s something damaging here about someone who just made his life harder, we’ll learn about it in the next few days.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention the 300 million Canada has promised Iraq. Wonder if Canada will throw a suck now and procrastinate on this promise . . .

SECOND UPDATE: And Canadians think that Bush is a real hoser, eh.

FINAL THOUGHT: And anyway, if it’s a real coalition, where were the British in this decision? Were they even consulted? Everyone is talking about this decision as if it’s a slap against the countries who failed to support the war on Iraq. But if such an important decision was made without consulting the allies, it’s also a slap on them.

Is this really what the Bush admin wants to do now, in the middle of delicate negotiations with other governments over how to handle Iran and North Korea?

I’m the last person to want Iran or North Korea to get nukes. It’s not just that they’re potentially quite unstable countries led by people I don’t at all trust. It’s that the more countries with nukes, the greater the chances of miscalcuation and disaster.

Still, for Pete’s sake, at what point does a position just become too hypocritical to sustain? If you really believe in non-proliferation, if you noisily trumpet the danger of nuclear weapons, does this carry any corresponding responsibilities to restrain yourself with the same class of weapons?

Jackson Diehl writes of the International Criminal Court:

Though it lacks foolproof safeguards, the risk that it would prosecute a U.S. citizen is pretty small: It is designed to punish war criminals in failed states, not citizens of countries with their own functioning justice systems.

Is that true?

It seems to me that U.S. resistance to the court is based on two concerns: a) The concern that frivilous lawsuits would harrass U.S. policymakers long after they had left office. Enough of these lawsuits might eventually have an influence on the formulation of policy. b) The concern that lawsuits with genuine merit would harrass U.S. policymakers long after they had left office. And enough of these lawsuits might eventually have an influence on the formulation of policy.

As for a), I don’t know enough about the design of the ICC to say. But the temptation for abuse is surely going to be very strong. What’s more – and perhaps just as important – is that a case doesn’t need to be successful in order to generate a huge amount of negative publicity for its intended target. In other words, the ICC could end up being a useful political tool even if all the safeguards actually work. This may be one reason that so many people in the Bush admin think the thing is rotten all the way through.

As for b), I think it speaks volumes about U.S. political culture that a functioning justice system is casually assumed to be sufficient to punish war criminals. As long as Henry Kissinger is a free man I will be doubtful about the U.S.’s ability to apply even the standards of domestic law to its top policymakers, let alone international law. The fact is that the man broke domestic and international law and nothing was ever, or will ever, be done about it. (The problem runs very deep here. It’s not just that Kissinger has escaped prosection. It’s that he’s regularly invited onto television to give his opinion about international matters. It’s a cultural problem, as well as a legal one.)

(Just to be clear, I think that most countries in the world find it extremely hard to deal with criminal behaviour among their own policymaking elite. It’s not as if the U.S. is alone in this, even if it finds itself rather isolated on the question of the ICC itself.)

Now, this example is not directly relevant to the ICC, since the ICC doesn’t consider cases based on events prior to its inception. Still, it isn’t just failed states who have trouble dealing effectively and lawfully with criminals who are policymakers, and basing an argument for the ICC on that assumption is no way to win the argument.

On the left we often talk as if the Bush admin’s resistance to the ICC is simply willful stubbornness. But I think that officials who resist the ICC know exactly what they’re doing. The resistance makes perfect sense if you take the ambitions and the likely effects of the ICC seriously.

UPDATE: A friendly reader complains that I’m not clear enough about “the ambitions and likely effects of the ICC”. I just meant the ambition to actually punish people for actually committing crimes against international law, regardless of nationality. That’s pretty ambitious. If they were even partway successful at this, the likely effect would be a serious strenthening of the relevant international norms.

Mark Kleiman has a very interesting post up at Open Source Politics.

Kleiman argues that the progressive critique of Bush’s policy on Iraq is flawed in its assumption that preventative war is always wrong. Bush’s policies may be bad, Kleiman argues, but they’re not bad simply because preventative war is bad as such.

There’s a lot to disagree with in Kleiman’s piece, but I completely agree with him that we need to rethink a lot of the assumptions we make about preventative war, and about the justification for war in general. It’s very healthy at this point to have a debate about exactly when preventative wars are bad and why.

First a little terminology. I assume that Kleiman is using the term “preventative” as a term of art, and so that he intends a contrast with a closely related term of art, “preemptive”. A preemptive war is one undertaken when the threat is immanent (in the real, and not Bushian, sense, of the word) – that is, when another party is poised to strike, has made clear its intention to strike, and all other plausible mechanisms for resolving the dispute have failed. The locus classicus of comtemporary discussions of preemption, for better and for worse, is Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars. The classic example of preemptive war is Israel’s 1967 preemptive strike on the Egyptian airforce, since it is usually agreed to meet all these criteria.

A preventative war is one that is undertaken without an immanent threat, and is instead based on a plausible forecast of serious danger from another country, whose timing is longer term or uncertain.

There is an impressive consensus, rooted in international law, centuries of moral reflection on war, and common sense that preemptive wars may be just, so long as the conditions are genuinely met. Political rhetoric pays the highest tribute to the doctrine of preemptive war by frequently depicting aggressive war, no matter how unprovoked, as preemptive. There is also a consensus, almost as impressive, that preventative wars are not legitimate.

One reason for this consensus is practical: Because the threat involved in preventative war is vaguer and presumably longer term than the threat involved in a preemptive one, a fair standard for a geninely preventative war can be extremely difficult to draw in practice. This makes the standard easier to abuse. In the wrong hands, it’s especially easy to imagine the standard being twisted to justify wars of aggression.

But this kind of worry isn’t particularly compelling as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of the principle. A standard’s openness to abuse might make us wary about particular applications of it, especially when the statesmen applying it are not disposed to be honest about motives or rationales. But it’s in the nature of things that some cases are hard to judge, and if a principle is abused, we should blame the abuser, and those taken in by the abuse, rather than the principle itself.

A more compelling worry is that allowing for the legitimacy of preventative war seems too permissive. Any country with serious rivals has long term reasons to fear those rivals. And this fear is all the more rational – notice – if a country’s leadership has reason to believe that the rival country’s leadership subscribes to a doctrine of preventative war. If we considered preventative wars legitimate, the worry goes, we would be declaring a very large number of wars justified, at least in principle (though they might be morally bad in a number of other respects). And this seems incompatible with our sense that war ought to be a genuine last resort.

(Consider Iraq’s invasion of Iran. The war was quite unjust, both in the justice of its cause and in the manner in which it was fought. But recall that Iraq had very sound reasons to fear Iran in the long run. And while Iraq’s invasion may have been rash, there was surely no better time to take on Iran, which was so weakened by internal turmoil. What better, then, to strike at a time of Iraq’s choosing, instead of waiting for Iran to regain it’s strength. If we want to explain what makes Iraq’s war unjust, I think, part of the story will involve the wrongness of preventative war.)

So if we do want to allow that some preventative wars are just, we need to specify a great many further qualifications that will rule out unjust wars which are undertaken for long term strategic reasons. If we can specify these further restrictions clearly enough, we may still be able to make room for the justness of some preventative wars.

It’s important not to overestimate the extent to which countries have always been able to take each other by surprise. Still, nuclear weapons do more to challenge the distinction between preemption and prevention than any other development in the history of warfare, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. The sheer destructive capacity of nuclear weapons, combined with their ease of deployment, make hostile countries especially dangerous to one another. Add to this the fact that it’s often difficult to know how much faith to put in deterrence. Even if he had had nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein is not likely to have used them, except in the most extreme difficulty. But they would surely have had an emboldening effect on him, and this would have opened up far more chance for miscalculation and error.

What I’m not sure about is how exactly we might rethink the distinction between prevention and preemption. We might argue that nuclear weapons force us to reclassify apparently preventative cases as cases of preemption, but leave intact the moral intuition that preventative war is wrong. Or we might leave the distinction itself intact, but argue that its moral significance has been misunderstood. Or we might simply discard the distinction as completely unhelpful and morally irrelevant.

I suspect that it’s better to leave the distinction between preemption and prevention as it is, but to allow, as Kleiman suggests, that there may be special cases in which prevention is legitimate. But I’m still working through all this, and find it very difficult to draw a plausible line.

A few of Kleiman’s other points are worth commenting on. First, it’s true that Iraq did not hold up it’s part of the bargain by submitting to inspections. But the case for war obviously depends on some sense of proportionality between the offence and the punishment. So some further argument is badly needed to demonstrate that war was a just response to Iraq’s cheating. I’m also afraid that the situation with inspections was more morally complicated than Kleiman suggests here. For all of Iraq’s lies, the U.S. never really played the inspections game straight either. It allowed the inspection team to collection intelligence which was passed along to Israel, for example. I’m very sympathetic to Israel’s desire for this intelligence, but this fact gives the lie to the idea that inspections were apolitical and reasonably conducted. And it was also perfectly obvious from the outset of the inspection regime that the U.S. would try to keep inspections in place as long as Saddam Hussein was in power, as a series of top officials all the way up to George Bush Senior made clear.

Also, Kleiman expresses doubt about whether sanctions were really much worse than war. It’s very useful to remember how awful the sanctions were, and to face up to the fact that continued sanctions as an alternative to war would have led to further suffering among the Iraqi people. Still, remember that many of the early deaths were due not to sanctions but to the (deliberate) destruction of the civilian infrastructure. And this was an effect of the actual fighting and not the sanctions. Second, there is evidence, collected for example in a UN report released just prior to the war, that the worst of the health crisis in Iraq was over. Both of these points, however, pale in comparison to the third point, which is that if Iraq undergoes a civil war, as I am increasingly afraid it will, then I can say with great confidence that the sanctions were preferable to war.

Op-Ed Contributor: Make Baghdad Pay

Imagine you are enjoying your breakfast some quiet Sunday morning. The coffee is brewing and your family is bickering peaceably, as it often does. Now imagine that the calm is broken by armed intruders smashing their way into your house. Even before the sound of tinkling glass has faded, they have set upon your spouse, and put a bullet through the forehead of your favourite child. You are strapped to a chair as your wallet and bank statements are examined to determine your worth.

Credit cards are produced, and the guests go on to ring up the charges on all kinds of choice items, though they don’t seem particularly choice to you, and you had nothing to do with choosing them. No care is taken to mask the nature of the theft. Your hopes are dashed as you realize that the people taking the orders over the phone know about your situation – they just saw it on the news – but they don’t care. They’re treating the new owners of your credit cards as the proper legal owners of your burgeoning debt, since what goes on in your house is an internal affair, and they’re not inclined to do anything as low as meddle in other people’s affairs.

The same, alas, goes for your neighbours, who were at first alarmed by the noise, but have since gone back to their business – until, that is, your guests hold a garage sale to raise more money for themselves. Then, with only a few exceptions, your neighbours do make your business their business, but only long enough to purchase all your belongings at deliciously low prices.

You are muffled and beaten when you try to cry out to them. But after a while you realize that there’s little point in crying out to anyone. None of your neighbours will meet your frantic eyes anyway. You’re an embarrassment and you’re ruining a perfectly good garage sale.

This goes on until you have lost everything. But one day, when your guard’s attention slips, you manage to take back your house. Or perhaps a sympathetic neighbour sees that your house might be resold (splitting the profits with you, of course, in some way yet to be specified) and lends a hand.

Congratulations.

Except that not only is your house cleaned out, but you also find yourself with a crushing post-party debt. Your credit card companies now take a fresh interest in you, or more precisely, a fresh interest in the interest to be gotten from you.

You consult a lawyer, and he points out that you have a degree, and plenty of potential to make money. After several years, provided you don’t crack up under post-traumatic stress, or have bad luck, you should be in a position to start repaying your debt. He says that debt relief in your case would set a damaging precedent – after all, what about all the other people whose homes have been likewise invaded? He chides you that the very rule of law depends on the principle that we pay back our debts, and so the standard for relief of debts needs to be a very, very strict one. He’s sorry to inform you that you haven’t met this standard. He reminds you that you did, after all, have a balance on your credit cards before the unpleasant business started, and points out – getting increasingly impatient with your incomprehension – that you had all those years tied to a chair in which you might have been paying it off.

Noting your distress, your takes pity and offers you a few consoling (billable) words. He’s not suggesting that you pay everything off right away. But part of getting back on your feet is assuming your responsibilities. Chin up, lad. You’ll make it through. Don’t think that your creditors have given up on you. You’ll make it. You’ll make it in spite of everything.

Piece parodied below:

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Make Baghdad Pay
By MARK MEDISH

WASHINGTON
The economic consequences of regime change in Iraq could get worse if the United States, Great Britain and their coalition partners act on radical impulses to make grand gestures. A case in point is Iraq’s sovereign debt.
Iraq’s debt includes $40 billion owed to Paris Club official creditors, most notably Japan, France, Germany and Russia; at least $30 billion to other official creditors; at least $3 billion to London Club commercial banks; and perhaps $10 billion owed to corporate creditors.

What is to be done? Already we hear calls from the right and the left to impose what might be called a “zero option”; that is, cancellation of Iraq’s debt. From the right, Richard Perle and William F. Buckley Jr. have called for freeing Iraq of its “odious debt” on moral grounds. From the other end of the political spectrum, Oxfam and Jubilee Iraq have taken much the same position, while Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobelist, is advocating relief on more prudent grounds, citing the lessons of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which required Germany to pay heavy war reparations.

These recommendations, though doubtless well intentioned, are misguided. A country like Iraq, with the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, should be expected to be able to pay its obligations. Furthermore, the moral charge that the debts are odious is simply too sweeping. Acting on it would be bad for Iraq and would set a damaging precedent for the international financial system.

For Iraq to normalize its external financial relations, it must respect one of the first principles of the rule of law: contracts should be honored. Without this presumption, markets cannot work. The threshold for overturning the presumption must be kept high to prevent chaos. In the case of Iraq, the threshold has not been met.
Several myths have gained currency in the debt debate. The first is that Iraq’s debts are invalid because they were accumulated under Saddam Hussein’s regime. This is overbroad and misleading. First, much of the debt, including the bulk of what Iraq owes to banks and corporations, went to finance civilian construction — roads, hospitals, apartments and utilities. By contrast, military-related debt can and should be separated out and perhaps even forgiven.

It’s worth remembering, too, that much of Iraq’s debt was incurred in the 1970′s and 1980′s, before sanctions were imposed, when the United States was willingly doing business with the Hussein regime.
Another myth is that historical precedents dictate that zeroing out the debt would be prudent. Post-Versailles Germany is a frequently cited case. But there is an important difference between punitive reparations and commercial debt incurred by a country for civilian projects. Moreover, in the last decade countries like Poland, Egypt and Yugoslavia have escaped their heavy debts not because their debts were forgiven but because the financial community created reasonable long-term repayment plans.

Third is the myth that companies have already written off the Iraqi debts and no longer care about them. This is ridiculous. How companies account for bad debts on their books is irrelevant to the legal status of their claims. It would be a perverse result to extinguish debt simply because a debtor has not paid.

Iraq is entitled to have its special case heard. So far it has been granted an official moratorium through 2004. When the international community decides to begin tackling the wider debt problem, it should follow several simple maxims: avoid radicalism and bad precedents; promote an orderly, market-friendly debt repayment schedule based on financial analysis; and encourage creative solutions, including debt swaps.
Finally, for solutions to be meaningful, Iraq must negotiate with creditors on its own behalf. This, after all, is a major aspect of sovereignty.

The Iraqis should also favor an orderly debt repayment process. The country has been a financial rogue state for the past 12 years. What the new Iraq needs is a reputation for honoring its word.

Mark Medish, a lawyer, was deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury from 1997 to 2000.

This piece in the Guardian is highly recommended.

The author writes of the very low standards which Blair and Bush apply to allies like Uzbekistan, after resting the case for war against Iraq partly on humanitarian grounds. This lack of consistency is both wrongheaded (support for dictators hasn’t proven a particularly useful strategy in the past, has it?) and corrupting.

In Bush’s case, I suppose you might argue that he’s hardly aware that such a country exists. So perhaps the piece only directly challenges the moral coherence of his position, rather than the sincerity with which he holds it (this is not exculpatory, nor am I taking a position on whether he is in fact sincere). In Blair’s case, it’s obvious that he knows exactly what the score is, but he simply does not care. The piece shreds the moral coherence of Blair’s position and his claim to be genuinely concerned about human rights.

And don’t tell me that this policy of sucking up to dictators is part of the cost of the war on terror, or that in the real world we’re forced to make difficult trade-offs. No administration that squanders as many lives and as much credibility and influence as this one has in Iraq deserves to lecture me about the costs of my policy prescriptions. And neither do any of its apologists.

Remember when things got a bit hot between Pakistan and India in the fall of 2001 (and onwards)? Many sensible people pointed out at the time that the dispute over Kashmir called for international mediation. Although quite serious, the dispute may not be intractible, and anyway, the consequences of a miscalculation between the two powers should be enough to get anyone’s attention.

In the meantime, though, no one has dealt seriously with the problem. Despite the occasional hopeful signs of thaw between the countries, no serious progress has been made in resolving the underlying causes of tension. Now things may be heating up again. I notice, for instance, that Pakistan has apparently stepped up its missile testing recently.

I think we may all look back at this and wish that the U.S. had turned its attention to the subcontinent instead of Iraq. A joint focus on settling the Kashmir dispute and encouraging the spread of civil society in Pakistan would have done more to hurt bin Laden’s recruitment than anything else they could have done. And let’s hope that by the time the threat between these two countries is appreciated, our appreciation isn’t being prompted by a mushroom cloud.

Now, if I had a hand in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy, one priority would be to try to avoid a mistake that the U.S. made throughout the Cold War: to support dictators uncritically as the lesser of two evils. I think it’s fair to say that many in the U.S. now rue the decision to treat Saddam Hussein with kid gloves during the 80s, to take just one example.

One area to focus on would be the stans around Afghanistan: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, especially. These are strategically important areas, and I think I can see why the U.S. would consider it in its short term interests, at least, to cultivate the cooperation of the leaders of these countries. But it has been clear to me for some time that the U.S. government is making one of its classic mistakes here: They are aligning themselves with wretched tyrants, and for little long term advantage.

Support for corrupt dictatorships doesn’t work. If you go in for morality, rely on that as your reason to reject current policy. But also reject it if you’re a cold hearted realist: It won’t work. In the long run, societies get ruined more quickly and more thoroughly if their brutal crackdowns are supported by global powers. And when societies are thoroughly ruined, they make for the kind of instability that breeds violence.

Check out this piece in the WaPo.

You would think that all the recent criticism of the U.S. decision in the 80s to back Saddam Hussein would lead to a bit of soul searching about regimes that the U.S. is currently supporting for strategic reasons. You would think.

Look, if we learned any lesson from all that, isn’t it that often we would have been better off from a strictly prudential point of view if we had just followed our consciences and refused to support evil dictators, however convenient it seemed at the time?

I think the situations in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, in particular, demand more attention from our press. These are countries that are slipping further every day into totalitarian nightmares of precisely the sort that breed instability and lawlessness in the long run. And yet they have the U.S.’s support, and the U.S.’s military aid, because they are considered important in the war on terror. I’m telling you, whatever they’re giving the U.S., it’s not worth the long term price.

Here is a nice piece from Eurasianet on the deteriorating situation in Uzbekistan which emphasizes the dilemma it poses for U.S. policymakers.

Among the rationale’s cited for the war in Iraq was the humanitarian one. I think many well-meaning people (including myself!) who wouldn’t ordinarily have trusted Bush to pick up their groceries were moved by this line of argument. Perhaps not moved all the way, but nevertheless moved. And I noticed a general pattern which I came to term ‘Iraqitis’: the more people knew about Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the more they were willing to sanction anything, just anything, to get him out of power. I think I had a touch of Iraqitis a few times during the buildup to the war, as I read Human Rights Watch reports and the like, though never severe enough to short-circuit my brain when it came to forecasting the likely outcomes of an invasion.

The same considerations moved many progressives and liberals over Kosovo: this sick in the stomach feeling that enough is enough and that force is the best option. (In fact, I think Kosovo played an important and underappreciated role in lowering – even further – the American threshold for the use of military force. Whether you supported Kosovo or not, that was one of its effects. So don’t forget to weigh it in the balance of good and evil achieved by the war.) Before then, it was the failure to act in Rwanda – and I believe that Rwanda called for a military response – that gave an extra force to the notion, as people in the West began to digest what they had allowed to happen.

Fair enough.

As I said, I’m at least open to this kind of argument, even if it’s unpersuasive in particular cases.

But humanitarian justifications for war are becoming popular enough that it’s very important now to recognize how very dangerous they can be and how open to abuse they are. What is desperately needed now is more historical context, because I think that a number of historical cases give us special reasons for humility, and special reasons to put humanitarian justifications for particular wars under intense scrutiny, even if we accept them in principle. Today, I have in mind two examples. The first is the conquest of the “New World”. This was, it is astonishing to recall, promoted by appeal to humanitarian concerns: the desire to stamp out cannibalism (save them from themselves!), whose prevalence was greatly exaggerated, and the desire to save their souls for Christianity. The Crusades were also promoted, perhaps even sincerely, by appeal to goals which were religious and moral. And we could go on.

The examples do not debunk the notion of a humantarian justifications for war. But they ought to teach us to be extremely suspicious of them.