Beginning May 16th, I wrote a series of diaries here that sought to heighten awareness of the renewed and refreshed strident militance being shown by the Israeli government toward critics, and sought to bring more attention to the flotilla of boats and ships determined to lift the illegal siege of Gaza.
Saturday evening, as the flotilla was leaving the vicinity of Cyprus, I began a live blog post here. Sunday afternoon, as the flotilla neared the Levantine coast, Siun took over. Her firedoglake post ended up collecting information almost in real time, as the most serious attack by a foreign power in history on a collection of boats flagged by NATO members unfolded.
The blogs mondoweiss and Daily Kos also contained posts which sought to live blog the crime as it played out.
On May 16th, I noted that the freighter, MV Rachel Corrie, was leaving Irish waters, to join vessels already in the Mediterranean.
On May 20th, in light of Elvis Costello’s cancellation of an Israel concert tour, I speculated that it might be time to consider gathering artists together to create a 2010 version of the pivotal protest album from 1985, Sun City. That album helped galvanize resistance to the South African government policy of Apartheid.
On May 22, I noted the absence of mainstream media, especially in the USA, toward the gathering of vessels for the flotilla, and wondered how the approach of the the small fleet to the Gaza coast might be covered.
On May 25, I wrote about the assembly of boats, their problems, and the mounting evidence that the IDF would forcefully attempt to commandeer the vessels. I was concerned.
On Saturday May 29, I began the live blog, which was passed on to Siun yesterday, during her regular Sunday afternoon slot.
I’ve learned a lot from the process of writing about this. Foremost, perhaps, is that in spite of the stated IDF intention of isolating the vessels from being able to emit real time information during the attack, they were unsuccessful. As in the demonstrations in Iran in the wake of their farcical election last year, people managed to bypass jamming and blackouts, through workarounds or through discovery that government jamming had holes in it.
Twitter, through hundreds of cell phones on board the vessels, described the attacks in terse tweets from bloodstained decks. These tweets were passed back and forth between twitter sites throughout last night, as they aggregated incoming news from many early sources.
The Turkish video feed from the large cruise ship, where most casualties occurred will become iconic, even as the IDF releases their night vision videos that seek to purport the IDF was responding to a "lynch mob" as it opened fire on dozens of unarmed civilians, attempting to defend themselves from a brazen, illegal act in international waters.
Norman Finkelstein’s 2009 book about the 2008-2009 Gaza invasion is titled This Time We Went Too Far. It is an apt title. Many of us have experienced how friends or relatives finally stopped straddling the fence over how Israel conducts itself, as we and they witnessed the barbarity of the IDF assault on schools, hospitals, clinics, fire departments, bakeries, dairies and houses in the besieged Gaza enclave.
This time, the IDF went too far in ways that may be pivotal. Juan Cole, writing this morning, observes:
It is worth noting on Memorial Day that the Israeli attack deeply complicates the task of the US military in the region. It is a propaganda boon for Sunni extremists and Shiite activists such as Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, and for the Taliban in Afghanistan. It undermines the authority of the Egyptian and Jordanian governments, which have US-brokered peace treaties with Israel, treaties that are deeply unpopular with ordinary people in both countries. That some demonstrations are being held in front of US consulates and not just Israeli ones tells us who will get the blame for Netanyahu’s machismo.
Turkish-Israeli relations, already in an abysmal state, might never recover. Turkey has recalled its ambassador to Israel. The attack on several NATO-related vessels, in international waters, and without provocation, as noted above, is unprecedented. Turkey will be right to bring this before the NATO North Atlantic Council, which meets about once per week. The United Nations Security Council is meeting right now about the attack, with the Secretary General having already made a harsh statement.
If the flotilla was actually moving away from the coast when boarded, after having responded to IDF enquiries regarding intent and course, this is a lost cause for the Israelis to defend. They have no claim that their response was appropriate.
Some, if not all, of the vessels were giving out position reports up to the boarding. The record of these is indelible. The Turks will surely bring this fact up to the North Atlantic Council this week, and it may have been brought up today at the UN Security Council.
A Daily Kos Diary, analyzing NATO responsibilities regarding Turkey in this matter, has hundreds of comments, Here is the key part of NATO doctrine that might pertain directly to actions after this attack:
Israel’s attack on the MV Blue Mamara, a Turkish vessel, means they just attacked a member of NATO. According to the NATO Charter, Article 5
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
If you think there is wiggle room in that definition, you would be mistaken. Article 6 is explicit about where attacks will trigger responses. Vessels in the Mediterranean Sea are mentioned explicitly.
The Israeli Prime Minister has cut short a North American trip that was to conclude with a White House meeting Tuesday. He’s had to return home to prepare for the Third Intifada, and to attempt to salvage diplomatic relations with a number of counties besides just Turkey.
Within the American progressive community Israel has always had and still has staunch supporters of every action by the IDF or Israeli government. But those numbers were severely diminished by this highly criminal attack. But, as a commenter at Mondoweissobserved this morning:
There are now 4 diaries on the rec list at Daily Kos condemning the Israeli piracy. Even during Cast Lead, this didn’t happen.
Other lefty blogs that generally avoid discussing Israel/Palestine issues at all will, should they continue to blind themselves in this matter, lose readers and influence.
A very important article recently appeared in the New York Review of Books. In The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, by Peter Beinart, the author explains in detail how the large family size and emigration into Israel of ultra Orthodox inhabitants and their growing influence on internal Israeli politics will inevitably force young American Jews who are liberal to forsake support for the Zionist state and its brutal expansionist goals. The article has caused quite a stir, to say the least.
Israel has succeeded, in last night’s attack, in further isolating itself as an increasingly rogue nation. Some are even predicting an implosion there, similar to those of Apartheid South Africa, or of the Warsaw Pact communist governments.
Two things are certain though. Twitter, as a driver of non-MSM instant information has come of age.
And firedoglake, thanks to Siun and our commenting community, has once again led the way in live blogging a pivotal moment.
The Palestinian leadership tried to regain lost credibility by pressing forward Wednesday on a United Nations report on the Gaza war at a specially scheduled debate at the United Nations Security Council, saying it would call for a formal endorsement of the report this week in Geneva.
The Security Council debate represented the first major step in the Palestinian effort to reverse its surprise decision two weeks ago to delay action on the report, which found evidence of Israeli war crimes, at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. The decision, made under American pressure after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel threatened that advancing the report would end any chance of peace talks, prompted a strong reaction against the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr. Abbas is a relatively moderate leader whom the United States and Israel have tried to bolster in the face of popular gains by Hamas, and there was a sense that the pressure on him had backfired.
Riyad al-Maliki, the foreign affairs minister for the Palestinian Authority, told delegates gathered at the Security Council that the Palestinians would seek to “rectify the malfunction that occurred” in Geneva when the Human Rights Council met on Thursday and Friday. He added that Palestinian leaders were hopeful that the 47-member council would “endorse and formally convey the report to the appropriate United Nations agencies, in accordance with the report’s recommendations.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gabriela Shalev, responded by reiterating Israel’s stance that the report was one-sided and biased against Israel. The report, she said, “favors and legitimizes terrorism” and was “destructive to the peace process.” She added: “If Israel is asked to take further risks for peace, the international community must recognize our right to self-defense.” But there was no Israeli comment as harsh as Mr. Netanyahu’s earlier warnings.
The 575-page report, created by a four-member panel led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, details evidence of war crimes committed by both the Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups in connection with last winter’s fighting, though it reserves its harshest language for Israeli actions. Foremost among its recommendations is that allegations of war crimes by both sides should be referred to the Security Council for possible prosecution at the International Criminal Court in The Hague if credible investigations are not undertaken within six months.
Israeli officials have engaged in extensive diplomatic efforts to discredit the Goldstone report since its release in mid-September. Their efforts intensified this week as it became clear that the Human Rights Council was no longer going to delay until March a decision on whether to formally endorse the report. Facing a furor at home, particularly from Hamas — the militant Islamic group that is the Palestinian Authority’s main rival — Mr. Abbas backtracked on his support for the delay, instructing his ambassador in Geneva to gather enough signatures to have the council reconvene. The council announced the special session on Tuesday.
To shore up support for Israel before the Geneva meeting, Defense Minister Ehud Barakspoke Tuesday night with the foreign minister of France, Bernard Kouchner; the British foreign secretary, David Miliband; and the foreign ministers of Spain and Norway, among other foreign officials. According to a statement released by Mr. Barak’s office on Wednesday, the Israeli minister told the foreign officials that the Goldstone report was “false, distorted, tendentious and encouraged terrorism.”
In Geneva, although the Palestinians mustered the 16 votes needed to call a special session, it was unclear just how strong a majority they could get on a new resolution. An endorsement of the report with a less than significant majority of the Human Rights Council would be considered weak.
Given the record of the Human Rights Council, the chance of a no vote on a resolution appeared slim. But an official in Jerusalem said privately, because of the delicate nature of the diplomacy, that Israel hoped to see “at least a moral victory — to get all the reasonable countries on the right side of the vote.”
Other countries expressed reservations about a resolution for a number of reasons, namely that the Palestinians were reversing course in such a short time span, and that a draft in circulation complicated the issue by adding demands, including that Israel cease excavations around Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem and ensure access to the holy site for Palestinian worshipers.
In compromise negotiations that were expected to continue into Thursday at least, the Brazilians offered alternative wording for a potential resolution that would basically keep the Goldstone report within the Human Rights Council for the time being. Under the Brazilian language, the resolution would endorse the findings of the report and the call for both Israel and the Palestinians to conduct investigations into any possible war crimes. But it would stop short of endorsing the recommendation that the matter be referred to the Security Council or even the International Criminal Court if such investigations did not take place.
“We feel that if we escalate this issue it might not be productive for the peace talks,” said Maria N. Farani Azevedo, the Brazilian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.
So far, the Palestinians have been reluctant to make changes, which diplomats and human rights organizations attributed in part to their intensive effort to quell the domestic fallout after the previous postponement. As part of that effort, the Security Council agreed last week to move up its monthly debate on the Middle East to Wednesday, from next week, to discuss the report’s findings.
Human Rights Watch said that internal investigations into the accusations were crucial and that the prospect of some international action was most likely needed to spur them.
“We are convinced that without addressing the issues contained in this report there is no solid basis for a peace process,” said Julie de Rivero, the Geneva advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “For us, it would be important that there is a strong endorsement of the findings.”
Official Says Peace Effort Stalled
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, said Wednesday that the Obama administration’s efforts to restart an Israeli-Palestinian peace process seemed to be at an impasse and that he feared the Israelis intended to offer the Palestinians “a Mickey Mouse state, if that.”
By that, he meant a state that is “not serious,” according to an aide — one that fell short territorially and in other ways.
Mr. Fayyad said the Palestinians aspired to an “independent, sovereign, viable Palestinian state” in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Mr. Fayyad, a respected economist, was speaking to foreign reporters at a news conference in Ramallah.
Sharon Otterman reported from New York, and Neil MacFarquhar from Rome. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Expected Council Action No Council decisions on Timor-Leste are expected in October, but the Council is likely to receive a briefing from the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Timor-Leste, Atul Khare.
At press time the Secretary-General’s progress report on the activities of the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) was expected by 30 September. As requested in resolution 1867 (which in February extended UNMIT’s mandate until 26 February 2010), the report will update the Council on the transfer of policing responsibility from UNMIT to the Policia Nacional de Timor-Leste (PNTL). Khare may also brief on the village (suco) and sub-village (aldeia) elections for chiefs and councils due on 9 October. top • full forecast
Key Recent Developments The 10th anniversary of the UN-organised referendum that led to Timor-Leste’s independence was marked on 30 August. In remarks to the press, the president of the Council said the Council commended the people and government of Timor-Leste on their efforts towards peace, stability and development. In Timor-Leste Khare said that “in the last 10 years, Timor-Leste had achieved significant progress in the areas of consolidation of the institutions of democracy, respect for human rights”. He noted the development of the police and the local military, but added that “the road ahead is still long.”
In a report released on 27 August, Amnesty International warned the Council that there was a need for a long-term comprehensive plan to end impunity for crimes in Timor-Leste. It proposed that an international criminal tribunal be set up with jurisdiction over all crimes committed in Timor-Leste between 1975 and 1999. There are 400 outstanding arrest warrants issued by the Serious Crimes Unit, originally set up within the UN Transitional Authority in East Timor (UNTAET) in 1999.
Timor-Leste President José Ramos-Horta, speaking on the 10th anniversary of the referendum, rejected the idea of an international tribunal and said it was time for the UN to disband the Serious Crimes Unit.
The impunity issues were highlighted on 30 August with the release of Martenus Bere, who had been indicted in 2003 by the Serious Crimes Unit on charges of crimes against humanity, including the Suai church massacre in September 1999. Bere had been detained in Timor-Leste on 8 August. However, a top Indonesian official invited to participate in the 10th anniversary celebration refused to enter the country if Bere remained in custody. A spokesperson for the Secretary-General has said Bere’s release is contrary to resolution 1704, which set up UNMIT in 2006, and conflicted with the UN’s position of no amnesty or impunity for crimes against humanity. Timor-Leste’s Supreme Court is investigating the case to determine if Bere’s release violated the constitution.
The gradual resumption of policing responsibilities by the PNTL started in 14 May. It had been halted in 2008 due to the security situation following the dual assassination attempt against the country’s president and prime minister. So far the UN Police have transferred to the PNTL control of three of Timor-Leste’s 13 districts. In September the PNTL took over an UN-supported police training centre in Dili. The criteria that had to be fulfilled included: the PNTL being able to respond appropriately to the security environment; final certification of at least 80 percent of eligible officers; availability of initial operational logistical requirements; institutional stability; and mutual respect between the military and the national police.
Council activities in the first half of the year included an open debate of the Secretary-General’s report on 19 February, the renewal of UNMIT’s mandate on 26 February and a private meeting on 27 May with troop-contributing countries to discuss the updating of the concept of operations and rules of engagement for UNMIT. top • full forecast
On 13 March the Secretary-General’s Representative on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), Walter Kalin, reported to the Human Rights Council on the situation in Timor-Leste (amongst other countries). Kalin commended the government for voluntarily closing the majority of the IDP camps established during the 2006 crisis. The return of IDPs from the Metinaro camp will bring more than 13,500 to the total number of families who have received recovery or reintegration packages under the National Recovery Strategy. This leaves 2,480 individuals remaining in transitional shelters.
Kalin identified a number of ongoing challenges: addressing the underlying causes of violence and displacement, redressing prevailing impunity, adopting a land and property law in order to resolve and prevent further land disputes and adjusting compensation packages to assist the most vulnerable, including those with no place of return.
The UN’s third human rights report on Timor-Leste, covering July 2008 through June 2009, was published on 15 September. The report said that Timor-Leste had made progress in key human rights areas such as the strengthening of the judicial system and adherence to the rule of law, but still had work to do in the area of accountability.
Key Issues A key challenge for the Council is factoring the specific needs of Timor-Leste into its overall approach to peacekeeping, represented in its most recent review in an August presidential statement (S/PRST/2009/24).
A related issue is finding ways incorporate more peacebuilding elements into UNMIT’s work in light of paragraph 9 of that statement.
Recent history shows the risks in Timor-Leste of the Council and UNMIT being lulled into a sense of security. Ensuring that UNMIT retains an effective oversight function in the districts transferred to the PNTL may be a key issue.
Developments in the Bere case and the response to the Amnesty International proposal suggest that accountability for past human rights violations will continue to be a serious issue. Bere’s release to the Indonesian government may feed underlying discontent among some sectors of the Timor-Leste population about continuing impunity for crimes committed over the years. top • full forecast
Options The most likely option is a general discussion in the Council of the situation in Timor-Leste, particularly progress in the handing over of policing responsibilities to the PNTL.
Possible options include:
initiating expert-level discussions on possible adjustments to UNMIT’s mandate and strength leading to the February 2010 expiry of the mandate;
requesting the Core Group to provide Council members with recommendations on how to better involve UNMIT in peacebuilding as well as peacekeeping; and
issuing a press statement emphasising the need to see concrete progress in developing a national security policy and reminding the Timor-Leste government of its pending accountability and justice obligations.
Council Dynamics Timor-Leste struggles to get priority attention from most Council members. The apparently stable security situation again leads most members into feeling that things are moving in the right direction. In the last debate most members welcomed the benchmarks and the positive assessment of the overall situation.
Members are interested in Khare’s assessment of the transfer of policing responsibility to the PNTL in the three districts and the prospects for it to continue smoothly for the next ten. But members are not currently expecting any surprises from the report that would require them to make any immediate decisions.
On Sept. 24, President Barack Obama will bring together 14 world leaders for a special U.N. Security Council meeting in New York. On the agenda: how to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The summit is the latest step in the administration's campaign to eliminate nukes, a priority Obama stressed on the campaign trail and formally announced in April during his speech in Prague. U.S. attempts to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb and to pry the weapons out of North Korea's fingers are also key parts of this campaign.
These efforts are all grounded in the same proposition: that, as Obama has said several times, nuclear weapons represent the "gravest threat" to U.S. security. This argument has a lot going for it. It's strongly intuitive, as anyone who's ever seen pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki knows. It's also popular; U.S. presidents have been making similar noises since the Eisenhower administration, and halting the spread of nukes (if not eliminating them altogether) is one of the few things Obama, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, and Benjamin Netanyahu can all agree on. There's just one problem with the reasoning: it may well be wrong.
A growing and compelling body of research suggests that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous, as Obama and most people assume. The bomb may actually make us safer. In this era of rogue states and transnational terrorists, that idea sounds so obviously wrongheaded that few politicians or policymakers are willing to entertain it. But that's a mistake. Knowing the truth about nukes would have a profound impact on government policy. Obama's idealistic campaign, so out of character for a pragmatic administration, may be unlikely to get far (past presidents have tried and failed). But it's not even clear he should make the effort. There are more important measures the U.S. government can and should take to make the real world safer, and these mustn't be ignored in the name of a dreamy ideal (a nuke-free planet) that's both unrealistic and possibly undesirable.
The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations. First, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Second, there's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it's hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading "nuclear optimist" and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley puts it, "We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It's striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states."
To understand why—and why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same way—you need to start by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it's almost certain it can get what it wants at an acceptable price. Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn't think they could win. The problem historically has been that leaders often make the wrong gamble and underestimate the other side—and millions of innocents pay the price.
Nuclear weapons change all that by making the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to ashes with the push of a button—and everybody knows it—the basic math shifts. Even the craziest tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is unwinnable and thus not worth the effort. As Waltz puts it, "Why fight if you can't win and might lose everything?"
Why indeed? The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear peace: the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's major powers have avoided coming to blows. They did fight proxy wars, ranging from Korea to Vietnam to Angola to Latin America. But these never matched the furious destruction of full-on, great-power war (World War II alone was responsible for some 50 million to 70 million deaths). And since the end of the Cold War, such bloodshed has declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the nuclear powers have scrupulously avoided direct combat, and there's very good reason to think they always will. There have been some near misses, but a close look at these cases is fundamentally reassuring—because in each instance, very different leaders all came to the same safe conclusion.
Take the mother of all nuclear standoffs: the Cuban missile crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union each threatened the other with destruction. But both countries soon stepped back from the brink when they recognized that a war would have meant curtains for everyone. As important as the fact that they did is the reason why: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's aide Fyodor Burlatsky said later on, "It is impossible to win a nuclear war, and both sides realized that, maybe for the first time."
The record since then shows the same pattern repeating: nuclear-armed enemies slide toward war, then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is India and Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars after independence before acquiring their own nukes in 1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction didn't do anything to lessen their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have never fought another war, despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008). They have skirmished once. But during that flare-up, in Kashmir in 1999, both countries were careful to keep the fighting limited and to avoid threatening the other's vital interests. Sumit Ganguly, an Indiana University professor and coauthor of the forthcoming India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, has found that on both sides, officials' thinking was strikingly similar to that of the Russians and Americans in 1962. The prospect of war brought Delhi and Islamabad face to face with a nuclear holocaust, and leaders in each country did what they had to do to avoid it.
Nuclear pessimists—and there are many—insist that even if this pattern has held in the past, it's crazy to rely on it in the future, for several reasons. The first is that today's nuclear wannabes are so completely unhinged, you'd be mad to trust them with a bomb. Take the sybaritic Kim Jong Il, who's never missed a chance to demonstrate his battiness, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and promised the destruction of Israel, and who, according to some respected Middle East scholars, runs a messianic martyrdom cult that would welcome nuclear obliteration. These regimes are the ultimate rogues, the thinking goes—and there's no deterring rogues.
But are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look that way from Seoul or Tel Aviv, but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United States, and in 1957, Mao blithely declared that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because even "if half of mankind died … the whole world would become socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support terrorism—but so did Moscow and Beijing. And as for seeming suicidal, Michael Desch of the University of Notre Dame points out that Stalin and Mao are the real record holders here: both were responsible for the deaths of some 20 million of their own citizens.
Yet when push came to shove, their regimes balked at nuclear suicide, and so would today's international bogeymen. For all of Ahmadinejad's antics, his power is limited, and the clerical regime has always proved rational and pragmatic when its life is on the line. Revolutionary Iran has never started a war, has done deals with both Washington and Jerusalem, and sued for peace in its war with Iraq (which Saddam started) once it realized it couldn't win. North Korea, meanwhile, is a tiny, impoverished, family-run country with a history of being invaded; its overwhelming preoccupation is survival, and every time it becomes more belligerent it reverses itself a few months later (witness last week, when Pyongyang told Seoul and Washington it was ready to return to the bargaining table). These countries may be brutally oppressive, but nothing in their behavior suggests they have a death wish.
Still, even if Iran or North Korea are deterrable, nuclear pessimists fear they'll give or sell their deadly toys to terrorists, who aren't—for it's hard to bomb a group with no return address. Yet look closely, and the risk of a WMD handoff starts to seem overblown. For one thing, assuming Iran is able to actually build a nuke, Desch explains that "it doesn't make sense that they'd then give something they regard as central to their survival to groups like Hizbullah, over which they have limited control. As for Al Qaeda, they don't even share common interests. Why would the mullahs give Osama bin Laden the crown jewels?" To do so would be fatal, for Washington has made it very clear that it would regard any terrorist use of a WMD as an attack by the country that supplied it—and would respond accordingly.
A much greater threat is that a nuclear North Korea or Pakistan could collapse and lose control of its weapons entirely. Yet here again history offers some comfort. China acquired its first nuke in 1964, just two years before it descended into the mad chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when virtually every Chinese institution was threatened—except for its nuclear infrastructure, which remained secure. "It was nearly a coup," says Desch, "yet with all the unrest, nobody ever thought that there might be an unauthorized nuclear use." The Soviets' weapons were also kept largely safe (with U.S. help) during the breakup of their union in the early '90s. And in recent years Moscow has greatly upped its defense spending (by 20 to 30 percent a year), using some of the cash to modernize and protect its arsenal.
As for Pakistan, it has taken numerous precautions to ensure that its own weapons are insulated from the country's chaos, installing complicated firing mechanisms to prevent a launch by lone radicals, for example, and instituting special training and screening for its nuclear personnel to ensure they're not infiltrated by extremists. Even if the Pakistani state did collapse entirely—the nightmare scenario—the chance of a Taliban bomb would still be remote. Desch argues that the idea that terrorists "could use these weapons radically underestimates the difficulty of actually operating a modern nuclear arsenal. These things need constant maintenance and they're very easy to disable. So the idea that these things could be stuffed into a gunnysack and smuggled across the Rio Grande is preposterous."
The risk of an arms race—with, say, other Persian Gulf states rushing to build a bomb after Iran got one—is a bit harder to dispel. Once again, however, history is instructive. "In 64 years, the most nuclear-weapons states we've ever had is 12," says Waltz. "Now with North Korea we're at nine. That's not proliferation; that's spread at glacial pace." Nuclear weapons are so controversial and expensive that only countries that deem them absolutely critical to their survival go through the extreme trouble of acquiring them. That's why South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan voluntarily gave theirs up in the early '90s, and why other countries like Brazil and Argentina dropped nascent programs. This doesn't guarantee that one or more of Iran's neighbors—Egypt or Saudi Arabia, say—might not still go for the bomb if Iran manages to build one. But the risks of a rapid spread are low, especially given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent suggestion that the United States would extend a nuclear umbrella over the region, as Washington has over South Korea and Japan, if Iran does complete a bomb. If one or two Gulf states nonetheless decided to pursue their own weapon, that still might not be so disastrous, given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.
Put this all together and nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening. So why have so few people in Washington recognized this? Most of us suffer from what Desch calls a nuclear phobia, an irrational fear that's grounded in good evidence—nuclear weapons are terrifying—but that keeps us from making clear, coldblooded calculations about just how dangerous possessing them actually is. The logic of nuclear peace rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad—conventional war—won't happen. This may well be a rational bet to take, especially if that first risk is very small indeed. But it's a tough case to make to the public.
Still, it's worth keeping in mind as Obama coaxes the world toward nuclear disarmament—especially because he's destined to fail. The Russians and Chinese have shown little inclination to give up their nukes, for several reasons—chief among them that the U.S. is vastly more powerful in conventional terms, and these weapons are thus their main way of leveling the playing field. Moscow and Beijing would likely be unmoved by anything short of a unilateral U.S. disarmament, which no one in Washington contemplates. And even if Russia and China (and France, Britain, Israel, India, and Pakistan) could be coaxed to abandon their weapons, we'd still live with the fear that any of them could quickly and secretly rearm. Meanwhile, the U.S. campaign to slow Iran's weapons program and reverse North Korea's is also unlikely to work. States want nukes if they feel their survival is in jeopardy. The Obama administration may have dropped talk of regime change, but it continues to threaten Pyongyang and Tehran. That ensures the standoff will continue, for so long as these states feel insecure, they'll never give up their nuclear dreams.
Given this reality, Washington would be wiser to focus on making the world we actually live in—the nuclear world—safer. This involves several steps, few of which the Obama administration has mentioned but which it should emphasize in its Nuclear Posture Review due at the end of the year. To start, the logic of deterrence works only if everybody knows who has a nuclear arsenal and thus can't be attacked—as Peter Sellers puts it in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, "The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" So the United States should make sure everyone knows roughly who has what, to keep anyone from getting dangerous ideas. On a similar note, the United States should put more effort into advancing what Harvard's Graham Allison calls "nuclear forensics," an emerging discipline that would allow scientists to trace any nuclear device exploded anywhere, by anybody—be it a state or a terrorist—back to its manufacturer and point of origin (since this would convince rogues they can't risk selling bombs to bad guys).
A politically tougher but equally important step would be to make sure that any nuclear weapons state has what's called a "survivable second strike option," a means of ensuring that even if attacked, it could still shoot back, since this is the best way to persuade its enemies not to bother trying to incapacitate it through a surprise attack (as Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund points out, this can be done with a small arsenal and need not necessitate a big buildup). Finally, Washington should continue doing what it's done with Russia and Pakistan to help those regimes keep their weapons safe. The administration has announced plans to help secure loose nukes, and that's all to the good. But it should be prepared to offer the same technology and training to other new nuclear states if they emerge—even if they're U.S. enemies. Critics will scream that doing so would reward bad behavior and encourage it in others. It might. But it would also help keep everyone safe from an accidental launch, which seems a lot more important. None of these steps will be easy to pitch to the public, even for a president as gifted and nimble as Obama. But as he heads into a rare nuclear summit in late September, the least he could do is hold a frank debate on what's really the best strategy for securing the world from—or with—these weapons. Given the stakes, he can hardly afford not to.
UNITED NATIONS -- The Obama administration is supporting moves to implement a U.N. doctrine calling for collective military action to halt genocide.
The next step is to see if the countries in favor of implementing the policy will act when a new genocide is brewing if all other diplomatic actions fail. The doctrine is political, not legal: Although these countries have expressed the political will to act, they aren't legally bound to.
The U.N. just concluded a weeklong debate on implementing the doctrine, which was endorsed by U.N. members in 2005.
The U.S. joined a majority of U.N. countries, including Russia and China, in supporting implementation of the policy, called the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. It may be invoked in only four cases: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity. Climate change, disease or natural disasters are excluded as causes for intervention.
The doctrine calls on governments to resolve internal conflicts before genocide occurs. If that doesn't work, the international community can step in. Among the options: The U.N. Security Council can vote for sanctions, the International Criminal Court can threaten prosecution, or the secretary-general can dispatch an envoy. After diplomatic intervention is exhausted, the last resort is Security Council-approved action by a multinational force. Nations would cover the costs of the troops they contribute.
The Security Council has approved multinational forces before. But some developing nations say they fear major powers would exploit the doctrine to interfere in sovereign nations for economic and strategic aims.
Proponents of the policy dismiss this view, saying the world has entered a new era after recent genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. They say the doctrine rejects unilateral intervention in favor of Security Council-authorized, multilateral action as a last resort.
During the debate, Rosemary DiCarlo, U.S. alternate representative for special political affairs, told the General Assembly, "The type of horrors that marred the 20th century need not be part of the landscape of world politics. The United States is determined to work with the international community to prevent and respond to such atrocities."
Before last week's debate, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the General Assembly to implement the doctrine and not reopen a debate on it.
The doctrine was endorsed in principle at a 2005 summit by more than 150 heads of government, including President George W. Bush. China endorsed the 2005 communiqué and voted for a Security Council resolution in support of it. Russia supports it in principle but came under criticism when it tried to justify its interventions in Chechnya and in Georgia last year with the doctrine.
The doctrine is opposed by General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a priest and a left-leaning former foreign minister of Nicaragua. Rev. d'Escoto and his allies dismiss the notion of a new era of altruistic military intervention.
Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and the architect of many the doctrine's details, said colonial motives wouldn't taint a humanitarian military mission because the world had changed after the "shame" of not responding to mass killings in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia.
Writer: ACHARA ASHAYAGACHAT AND THANIDA TANSUBHAPOL
Published: 24/07/2009 at 12:00 AM
PHUKET : Russia and China have joined the US in pressuring North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions, following Pyongyang's recent ballistic missile tests.
See no evil: Mrs Clinton and North Korean delegate Pak Kun-gwang ignore each other at the Phuket meeting.
Normally counting themselves as Pyongyang's allies, Russia and China expressed concern about the nuclear missile tests at the Asean Regional Forum yesterday.
The North Korean nuclear issue dominated security issues at talks held to wrap up the week-long meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The ARF urged North Korea to return to the six-party talks to end the regional nuclear threat, but North Korea immediately rejected the call.
The meeting also urged members of the United Nations to implement the UN Security Council's resolution to impose sanctions on North Korea.
The ARF would look at what it could do to promote peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya said after the meeting.
Asean diplomatic sources said even Russia and China shared international concern about the issue.
But in a compromising note, China said it hoped sanctions against Pyongyang would not affect North Korean people, and that the six-nation talks could resume, the sources said.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said North Korea faced strong international opposition over its missile testing programme.
"There is no place to go for North Korea as they have no friends left," Mrs Clinton said.
"There is a convergence of views that we are prepared to work with North Korea, but that North Korea has to change its behaviour," she said.
But Ri Hung-sik, who led the North Korean delegation at the meeting, said Pyongyang would not return to the negotiating table until the US changed its anti-North Korea attitude.
The six-party talks comprise China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia and the US.
Earlier, North Korea downgraded its representative attending the ARF from ambassador-at-large Pak Kun-gwang to Mr Ri, who is director-general of the International Organisations Department. It was the third time Pyongyang had sent a low-level representative to the ARF since 2000.
North Korea's insistence its position should be reflected in the ARF statement forced participants to delay issuing it for two hours.
The ARF members also called for joint efforts to fight terrorists and said the July 17 hotel bombings in Jakarta were a reminder terrorism was still a threat to the region.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman said in addressing the terrorism problem, people should avoid singling out any country, race, religion or ethnicity.
"If terrorism is associated with religion, it will create animosity," Mr Anifah said.
The meeting also pledged to promote democracy and human rights in Burma, Mr Kasit said.
Burma is under pressure to release National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners to pave the way for national reconciliation before the country holds general elections next year.
By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, June 30, 2009
UNITED NATIONS -- When Luis Moreno-Ocampo charged Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with war crimes last year, the International Criminal Court prosecutor was hailed by human rights advocates as the man who could help bring justice to Darfur.
Today, Moreno-Ocampo appears to be the one on trial, with even some of his early supporters questioning his prosecutorial strategy, his use of facts and his personal conduct. Bashir and others have used the controversy to rally opposition to the world's first permanent criminal court, a challenge that may jeopardize efforts to determine who is responsible for massive crimes in Darfur.
At issue is how to strike a balance between the quest for justice in Darfur and the pursuit of a political settlement to end an ongoing civil war in the western region of Sudan. In recent months, African and Arab leaders have said the Argentine lawyer's pursuit of the Sudanese president has undercut those peace prospects.
Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and Gabon's Jean Ping, the two leaders of the African Union, are mounting a campaign to press African states to withdraw from the treaty body that established the international tribunal. "The attacks against the court by African and Arab governments in the last nine months are the most serious threat to the ICC" since the United States declared its opposition to it in 2002, said William Pace, who heads the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, an alliance of 2500 organizations.
Moreno-Ocampo defended his work in a lengthy interview, saying that his office offers the brightest hope of bringing justice to hundreds of thousands of African victims and halting mass murder in Darfur. "It is normal: When you prosecute people with a lot of power, you have problems," said Moreno-Ocampo, who first gained prominence by prosecuting Argentine generals for ordering mass murder in that country's "dirty war."
The International Criminal Court was established in July 2002 to prosecute perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, building on temporary courts in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
Since he was appointed in 2003, the prosecutor has brought war crimes charges against 13 individuals in northern Uganda, Congo, the Central African Republic and Sudan, including a July 2008 charge against Bashir of orchestrating genocide in Darfur. Pretrial judges approved the prosecutors' request for an arrest warrant for Bashir on March 4 on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but rejected the genocide charge.
The Bush administration initially opposed the court, citing concerns of frivolous investigations of American soldiers engaged in the fight against terrorism. But President Obama -- whose top advisers are divided over whether Sudan continues to commit genocide -- has been far more supportive of the court.
The violence in Darfur began in early 2003 when rebel movements took up arms against the Islamic government, citing discrimination against the region's tribes. The prosecutor has charged that Bashir then orchestrated a campaign of genocide that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Darfurian civilians from disease and violence, and driven about 2 million more from their homes.
Bashir has openly defied the court, saying that it has only strengthened his standing. "The court has been isolated and the prosecutor stands naked," said Sudan's U.N. ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad.
The prosecutor's case "has polarized Sudanese politics and weakened those who occupy the middle ground of compromise and consensus," said Rodolphe Adada, a former Congolese foreign minister who heads a joint African Union-U.N. mission in Darfur.
In remarks to the U.N. Security Council in April, Adada challenged Moreno-Ocampo's characterization of the situation as genocide and said that only 130 to 150 people were dying each month in Darfur, far fewer than the 5,000 that Moreno-Ocampo says die each month from violence and other causes. "In purely numeric terms it is a low-intensity conflict," Adada said.
African leaders with abysmal human rights records seek to discredit Moreno-Ocampo because "they fear accountability" in their own countries, said Richard Dicker, an expert on the ICC at Human Rights Watch. Dicker concedes that Moreno-Ocampo has made missteps that have played into the hands of the court's enemies.
In September, Human Rights Watch raised concern in a confidential memo to the court about low staff morale and the flight of many experienced investigators. It also cited the prosecutor's 2006 summary dismissal of his spokesman after he filed an internal complaint alleging Moreno-Ocampo had raped a female journalist.
A panel of ICC judges, after interviewing the woman, concluded that the allegations were "manifestly unfounded." Then an internal disciplinary board recommended that Moreno-Ocampo rescind the dismissal, arguing that the prosecutor had a conflict of interest in firing the spokesman.
An administrative tribunal at the International Labor Organization ruled that while the spokesman's allegations were ultimately proved wrong, he had not acted maliciously because he believed his boss had engaged in improper behavior. It required a settlement payment of nearly $250,000 for back pay and damages.
Moreno-Ocampo, in the interview, declined to respond to the criticism of his personal reputation, saying, "I cannot answer unfounded allegations."
The case against Bashir rankles many African leaders, who say it is hypocritical. They note that the Security Council, which authorized the Sudan probe, has three permanent members who never signed the treaty establishing the court: the United States, Russia and China. "The feeling we have is that it is biased," said Congo's U.N. envoy, Atoki Ileka.
Alex de Waal, a British expert on Darfur, and Julie Flint, a writer and human rights activist, maintain that Moreno-Ocampo is the problem. They recently co-wrote an article in the World Affairs Journal citing former staff members and prominent war crimes experts who are critical of the prosecutor for not conducting witness interviews inside Darfur and for pursuing a weak charge of genocide against Bashir.
"It is difficult to cry government-led genocide in one breath and then explain in the next why 2 million Darfuris have sought refuge around the principal army garrisons of their province," Andrew T. Cayley, a British lawyer who headed the prosecutor's Darfur investigation, wrote in the Journal of International Criminal Justice last November.
Christine Chung, a former federal prosecutor and senior trial attorney for the prosecutor until 2007, dismissed the piece as "character assassination" and said the prosecutor's decision to stay out of Darfur was "in the end correct. The Sudanese government indeed detained and tortured persons believed to be cooperating with the ICC."
Moreno-Ocampo said he remains convinced that Bashir is committing genocide. "I have 300 lawyers, all brilliant people, with different opinions, but then I make the decision," he said. "I still think it's genocide, and I will appeal."
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