Flotilla folly
The startling simplicity of a tragic clash
Over the weekend, Israeli military forces raided a flotilla of Turkish activists who attempted to pass through Israel’s blockade of Gaza and provide aid to the Hamas-governed population. Some of the activists were killed in skirmishes with Israeli commandos; hundreds of others are in custody.
While the international reaction has been harsh, Israel says that the blockade is legal and defends its right to enforce it.
There is little question that any loss of life is grave and this incident underscores the importance of continuing to seek a mutually-agreeable way forward on Israeli-Palestinian relations. At the same time, we should not be surprised to hear commentators add needless complexity to an issue that, to my mind, is not that morally confusing.
For Israel, the Gaza blockade is an issue of national security. It’s no secret that it exists, and they rely, where possible and appropriate, on non-violent efforts to enforce it. Five of the six Turkish boats were stopped using a technique that interferes with rudders. The sixth was apparently too large for the technique. While an investigation is in order, early reports suggest that commandos were met with armed resistance on the sixth boat.
For activists who see a serious moral wrong occurring in Gaza and feel the need to provide aid, there is little question that they should do everything they can to deliver that aid. If they feel the moral obligation is high enough, it’s not outlandish to resort to force.
These two sides are morally opposed, but both can mount legitimate arguments for their respective positions.
This problem can only be addressed through a blockade policy that assuages the Israeli security interest and the desire for activists to see adequate humanitarian capital flowing into Gaza. If only a total blockade satisfies Israel or if activists really are after some kind of political outcome beyond the provision of necessary supplies, conflict will inevitably follow.
You can’t think your way out of that kind of dispute.
-Sam
Greek to me
Greece is in trouble and Greeks are angry. What should they do?
A deal has finally been struck between Greece, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund. To help combat the debt crisis engulfing the southern European nation, the EU and IMF will provide a combined $145 billion. In return, Greece will agree to a classic series of so-called “austerity measures” to address the profligate spending the helped fuel the crisis in the first place.
This kind of deal is old hat for the international economic community. The so-called “Washington Consensus,” dominant for much of the 1990s, provided debt relief to developing nations on many of the same conditions.
The more interesting question may be how we should expect Greek citizens to react. Read more
How many chances should government get?
Is it even worth trying to get Haiti right?
The Washington Post reports that at an international donor conference today, the U.S. will pledge $1 billion to reconstruct the Haitian government as part of an international effort to rebuild the earthquake-ravaged state. The U.S. has a long history of such aid to Haiti — roughly $4 billion since 1990 — with, admittedly, little clear lasting impact to show. Yet as the Post article notes, “this time, U.S. officials say, they will do things differently.”
Of course this is a common refrain every time someone wants to try something that was unsuccessful in the past. Yet two decades of failure should leave us, at the very least, skeptical of the U.S. government’s ability to get it right. So how many chances should it get? At what point should we say, even if the goal of reconstructing Haiti is right, our inability to do it means the policy is wrong?
Must we call genocide “genocide”?
The Armenian genocide? Or The Armenian mass killings? And does it matter?
In a debate that seems to recur every few years, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted today to condemn as “genocide”, the mass killing of Armenians during and after World War I. Like in 2007, the last time an Armenian Genocide resolution came up, the Administration (then Bush, today Obama), sought to halt the vote – both times to no avail.
Unlike with the situation in Darfur, the hesitancy to use the word “genocide” stems not from worries about the responsibilities to which the use of the word would commit the United States, but from simple geopolitics. Turkey, while acknowledging that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks, has always denied that the deaths were part of a planned orchestrated campaign – a prerequisite for calling them “genocide.” And fearing the genocide label would tar their national reputation, Turkey has long fought the official declaration by other governments of the events as such. Because of this lobbying, only twenty countries, to date, have recognized the Armenian genocide. Read more
Religion and foreign aid
I owe thanks to Nicholas Kristof for publishing a piece on religious missionaries in the NYT the day after I was discussing this issue with friends.
Kristof reminds us that religious groups are doing great humanitarian work. He reminds us that
Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That’s incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.
I’m sure I’m one of the “some Americans” Kristof has in mind. I’ll freely concede that humanitarian work is good regardless of the reason why it’s done. I think a convincing argument could also be made that humanitarian aid would still be good even if it was used as a “lure” for conversion, if that’s the only way that the aid would be allocated. However, I don’t think Kristof takes seriously enough the case against faith-based intervention. He writes:
A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.
Accusations of elitism or “snoobbishness” generally point to poor argumentation to follow. The critique against faith-based groups is more serious than Kristof believes.
It’s never clear where commitments end and humanitarianism begins. The issue of condoms is a good example. Faith-based organizations that do not provide condom distribution are doing their constituency a grave disservice. if secular international organizations are not on the ground because the most pressing needs are being addressed (hunger, disease) by faith-based groups, there’s no locus in which good policy can be made. When aid money is channeled through government organizations, there’s room for an open debate on best practices. This debate cannot happen when aid money is simply granted to religious organizations. Fundamentally, Kristoff is ignoring that to at least some extent, the aid channeled through religious organizations trades off with aid provided by secular NGOs or governments.
The tragic case of Ugandan efforts to pass a law punishing homosexuality by death are another example. This farce was supported by a few US evangelical groups; probably the groups Kristof praises had nothing to do with it. But what will those groups do to actively oppose such initiatives? (Perhaps this is colonialism, and therefore should also be opposed by us snobs.)
But of course, Kristof is right in his central point — that many faith-based organizations do a lot of good and do not actively contribute to these harms. However, while he’s able to mention one group that seems to keep it’s religious commitments away from its humanitarianism, us pointy-headed liberal snobs are right to stay on guard.
-John
Brooks vs. Taibbi on Haiti
The interwebs have been buzzing about David Brooks’s recent column on Haiti and Matt Taibbi’s acerbic response.
Brooks says the following:
Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10 … We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them … It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.
Taibbi responds with a lot of language I won’t reprint here, but suffice it to say he thinks Brooks is making a racist, ignorant, arrogant, and cold-hearted argument.
An earthquake is nobody’s fault. There’s nothing to do after a deadly earthquake but express remorse and feel sorry. It’s certainly not the time to scoff at all the victim country’s bastard children and put it out there on the Times editorial page that if these goddamned peasants don’t get their act together after a disaster this big, it might just be necessary to start swinging the big stick of Paternalism at them.
Even setting aside the issue of sensitivity, this is an interesting and vitally important debate – Brooks (and others) argue that well-intentioned aid from wealthy nations is largely useless and that many underperforming cultures – like spoiled, recalcitrant children – just need a dose of tough love. Taibbi thinks this view is born of profound ignorance and that Brooks et al overstate the extent to personal or cultural “initiative” is really the problem.
So we arrive back to our familiar, central dilemma. How do external circumstance and personal will collectively create our outcomes? The balance between the two is at the nexus not only of the development debate, but of most liberal – conservative debates as well.
-Colin
Obama & international relations
Ross Douthat evaluates Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and explains that Obama’s approach to foreign policy draws on elements of competing schools of international relations:
In a sense, this was one of the clearer statements of foreign policy principle that Obama has delivered to date: An extended defense of using realist means in the service of liberal internationalist ends. It’s an approach that fits at least some of the challenges we face, and the turn toward modesty and pragmatism, in particular — toward the pursuit of “a more practical, attainable peace
-Luke
Obama and Afghanistan
Déjà vu all over again?
On Tuesday night, President Obama addressed the nation from West Point and outlined his plan to commit more troops and resources to Afghanistan. After watching and reading the speech, as well as taking in reaction from (mostly liberal) commentators, it seems that the crucial question is this: Has Obama embraced the Bush Doctrine?
The Bush Doctrine, made famous posthumously as a result of Sarah Palin’s ignorance of it, was a widely criticized approach to foreign relations that allowed for pre-emptive aggression against states which are deemed potentially dangerous. Under these guidelines, we can – and should – invest American resources and lives in occupying territories that harbor suspected terrorists, even if they haven’t attacked us yet.
Liberals have responded to the Bush Doctrine in two ways. Some have rejected fear-based interventionism, replacing it with humanitarian interventionism. Let’s get to our enemies before they get to us, but let’s do it by promoting political reform, diplomacy, education, and human rights. Others have argued that our efforts are better spent at home; America can help others only if it helps itself, and most of our so-called “help” goes unappreciated anyway. Here’s Glenn Greenwald:
“The greatest cause of Terrorism is our endless wars, invasions, bombings, occupations and other means of interfering in the Muslim world, and our escalation will only fuel the anti-American hatred and resentment that — as even our own Government has recognized — is the primary fuel of the threat we’re supposedly trying to arrest.”
And Tom Friedman:
“Given our need for nation-building at home right now, I am ready to live with a little less security and a little-less-perfect Afghanistan.”
Was Fort Hood terrorism?
The New York Times’ news blog, The Lede, has an interesting post on the Senate hearings probing the connection between terrorism and the Fort Hood shootings. Given that the definition of terrorism is traditionally limited to attacks on noncombatants but that many people want to call the Foot Hood shootings terrorism, The Lede inquires whether an attack on troops can ever be called terrorism.
Plenty of space is given to a 2004 book by and 2006 interview with political philosopher (and sometimes public philosopher) Michael Walzer, the most prominent contemporary thinker on just war theory. Walzer has defined terrorism as “the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, in order to spread fear through a whole population” with some intended political effect. Walzer sticks pretty hard to the noncombatant part of this definition: he argues, for example, that, besides the innocent civilians taken hostage on American Flight 77, the Pentagon part of the 9/11 attacks was not terrorism, since those killed in the Pentagon were soldiers or civilians actively supporting soldiers. Walzer concludes: “attacks on soldiers are not terrorist attacks”, though he is clear that this “does not make them right; terrorism is not the only negative moral term in our vocabulary.”
So what do you think? Can attacks on soldiers be called terrorism? Does it matter if the Fort Hood attacks were technically terrorism or not? Does this definition of terrorism impede our ability to investigate and prevent attacks by violent extremists (whoever they are against)?
-Marc
No visa for oil
Balancing values and interests
The New York Times has an article today on Teodoro Nguema Obiang, the forest and agriculture minister of Equatorial Guinea, who, despite being a corrupt foreign official, is regularly granted visas for travel to the United States. Internal government documents assert that “most if not all” of Obiang’s wealth comes from corruption. So why does the State Department fail to enforce the federal law prohibiting corrupt foreign officials from receiving American visas? The answer, claim a number of former U.S. officials: oil. Equatorial Guinea produces nearly 400,000 barrels of oil a day, mostly by American oil companies.
We’ve written on this blog about conflict among values (e.g. freedom and equality). Just as common is conflict between values and interests. In personal life, we face such conflicts all the time: when a grocery store clerk gives you too much change do you pocket the money or give it back? When you walk by a homeless person carrying a doggie bag of leftovers do you give it to them or save it for tomorrow’s lunch? Values and interests exert a constant tension on foreign policy – do we pursue our material interests in the world or promote the values we hold dear? Sometimes these two align (ex. foreign aid may help “drain the swamp” of violent extremism), but more often they come into conflict – call out human rights abuses in Russia or gain an ally in efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program? Promote democracy in Pakistan or further counter-terrorism efforts?
In Obiang’s case, the conflict is between punishing corruption and ensuring U.S. access to Equatorial Guinean oil and wealth for American business. So how do you balance the two? Do values always trump interests? Read more
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