International Politics

The long-running guerilla war in the Indonesian province of Aceh is finally over. Indonesian troops (other than those recruited locally) have been withdrawn, and the military wing of the Free Aceh Movement has been disbanded and disarmed. The pointlessness of this long war was brought home to both sides by the catastrophic tsunami a year earlier, which killed 170 000 people and forced everyone to co-operate in rescue and rebuilding.

Sadly, a similar impetus towards peace in Sri Lanka, appears to have faded. And of course the slaughter just goes on in places like Iraq and Darfur.

Overall, though, it’s Aceh that is representative of the trend. The number and severity of wars and conflicts has declined greatly since the end of the Cold War.

It would be a salutory effort to look over the wars, revolutions and civil strife of the last sixty years and see how many of the participants got an outcome (taking account of war casualties and so on) better than the worst they could conceivably have obtained through negotiation and peaceful agitation. Given the massively negative-sum nature of war, I suspect the answer is “Few, if any”.

Cheney “asks”:http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31120

bq. “Would the United States and other free nations be better off or worse off with (Abu Musab al-) Zarqawi, (Osama) bin Laden and (Ayman al-) Zawahiri in control of Iraq?” he asked. “Would be we safer or less safe with Iraq ruled by men intent on the destruction of our country?”

Let me get this straight. At time _t_ you advocate a policy involving the invasion and occupation of Iraq on multiple grounds, none of which include the forestalling of an Al Qaeda seizure of power in Iraq (since such an eventuality is risibly improbable). At time _t+n_ , as a direct consequence of that brilliant policy, the only options are (a) its continuation or (b) an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq. Genius. No wonder that man got re-elected.

Hilzoy and Katherine’s new posts at Obsidian Wings (just keep scrolling) on Lindsey Graham’s despicable move to strip non-citizens of habeas corpus rights are must reads. I warn you, though, they will turn your stomach. The details of the allegedly frivolous malpractice suits brought by Guantanamo detainees are sickening.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds asks “Has the senate suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus?” Yes, it has! Thanks for asking!

Jamie Love has an FT op-ed with an “interesting suggestion”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/162f47ce-4713-11da-b8e5-00000e2511c8.html (behind paywall) about solving the incentive problems for anti-flu drugs and similar.

bq. The proposal is to permit governments to acquire medicines freely for stockpiles from generic suppliers, on the condition that if the medicines were used to treat people, the patent owner would receive royalties. This makes it much cheaper to acquire the stockpiles, but also increases the value of the ­patented invention, as long as there is some probability that the emergency use will occur. The price of medicines is related to their expected benefit. But this assumes a nearly 100 per cent probability that someone will actually use them. In the case of stockpiles, on the other hand, there is often a fairly low probability of use. Indeed, the lower the risk of the emergency, the lower the expected benefit of the stockpile. As long as the prices for the medicines are above marginal costs and the ­patent owner insists on a price related to the price of the drug when used, stockpiles will be small. But if governments could freely obtain stockpiles at marginal costs, with only a liability to remunerate the patent owner in the event of use, the incentives to match costs and benefits will be far more efficient.

bq. The amount of royalties to pay in such a system should be generous for higher income countries and much smaller for countries with poor populations. As noted, this works best when the medicine has a parallel commercial market for non-emergency uses. For those drugs that would only have a market in the case of an emergency, such as an anthrax or small pox vaccine, the liability rule could also be used, but in combination with other incentives, such as the medical innovation prize fund approach now being considered in the US, which provides for large cash rewards for developers of new drugs.

I can’t see any very obvious problems with this suggestion – it seems to provide an excellent means of addressing short term crises while solving the problem of long term incentives. Any disagreement?

(slight revisions following comments).

Now is as good a time as any to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905. This upsurge of revolt against Czarism was the occasion of some of the most tragic and inspiring scenes in the revolutionary drama: the “Bloody Sunday” march to the Winter Palace, Trotsky’s leadership of the St. Petersburg Soviet and the Potemkin mutiny. The revolution seemed likely to prove successful when the government agreed to a parliamentary constitution (October 17 in the Julian calendar), but once the threat was over, the autocracy reasserted itself, and the Duma was reduced to a talking shop. Less than 10 years later, the Czarists took Russia into the Great War, leading directly to nearly two million deaths and indirectly to many more.

The lesson drawn by many was that peaceful reform was hopeless: this inevitably pushed the most determined revolutionaries, Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the fore, and for much of the 20th century, they appeared to many to have history on their side. After 100 years, however, it is as clear as any historical fact can be that Bolshevism (or, perhaps more accurately, Leninism) has been a complete and catastrophic failure.

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I’m just back from Germany where I’ve been to a very interesting interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Bremen ‘s Sonderforschungsbereich “Staatlichkeit im Wandel”:http://www.staatlichkeit.uni-bremen.de/ on Trade Governance, Democracy and Inequality. As usual in such cases, the bringing together of philosophers and practitioners was both stimulating and revealing of how little we know about one another. Starting my own, basically normative, paper, I asserted that a central purpose of trade rules should be to promote justice. I was informed that “justice” was one word that would never pass the lips of a WTO negotiator. Which, doesn’t show, of course, either that I’m wrong about what should happen or that concerns about justice aren’t lurking in the shadows somewhere. But it suggests a startling disconnect between the public rhetoric about global inequality and the concerns at the negotiating table.

Almost three years to the day after the last bomb attack in Bali, suicide bombers have struck again. (This is a good article about the aftermath.) Our family just got back from Bali last week. My heart goes out to the victims and their families, and also to the Balinese people more generally: they are all victims of these cowardly attacks. Bali’s economy, so dependent on tourism, was only now beginning to make a full recovery from the 2002 bombing; everyone I spoke to said that things were better, but not back up to pre-bombing levels. This second blow may cripple Bali for a long time. Hotels and expensive clubs like Ku De Ta have armed guards who check vehicles, but nothing can make a beachfront seafood restaurant, or a cafe on a heavily trafficked street, safe against a suicide bomber. What will happen to these families? [click to continue…]

“David Kopel”:http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4105129,00.html argues, rightly, that there is something very nasty about the willingness of companies like Google and Yahoo! to knuckle under to authoritarian regimes such as China by banning words from search engines, snitching out democracy activists and so on. He’s also correct when he “claims”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_09_25-2005_10_01.shtml#1127700874 that “the greedy and immoral policies of these corporations directly endanger Americans.” However, his claim that “[p]erhaps only consumer and shareholder pressure can persuade the American companies to change their evil ways” seems to me to be quite mistaken. Consumer and shareholder pressure simply isn’t likely to have much of an impact, when measured against the power of the Chinese government to ban these companies from access to a quite enormous and important marketplace. Nor does it seem likely to me that many large shareholders are likely to raise a fuss in any event. More generally, when firms weigh the power of consumers to use exit and protest against the ability of powerful states to impose heavy sanctions, and completely block access to important markets, they are usually going to do what the state(s) want them to do. The only solution that would have some chance of biting would be if the US passed legislation requiring US-based firms not to cooperate with Chinese government authorities on pain of substantial penalties, and enforced this regulation vigorously, transforming it into a battle between powerful states with big markets.

We’re going to see more and more of these problems cropping up. People used to think that the Internet would empower firms and other private actors against the state, helping the spread of democracy, free markets and all that. What we’re seeing instead is that firms and private actors have an interest in keeping powerful states happy, regardless of the impact on global prosperity, freedom and so on. This has always been the case – but it’s being exacerbated by the Internet. I’ve just written a “paper”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=799269 which talks about what this means for international politics (although it doesn’t discuss the particulars of the Yahoo! case).

Back in January, 2004, Nicholas Kristof wrote that the condition of Cambodian sex slaves had improved compared to the 1990s (it’s here, behind the wall):

“These days the girls are 17 rather than 13, fewer are beaten or physically imprisoned, and Cambodia’s success in fighting AIDS with condoms means that sexual slavery is not necessarily a death sentence.

“The progress in Cambodia is mirrored by strides elsewhere, from South Korea to Romania and the Dominican Republic. And most of the credit goes to the courageous members of grass-roots organizations – mostly women – who often put themselves on the line to defend the weak and powerless against overwhelming economic and political interests.”

Just kidding, of course! Actually, he wrote: “most of the credit goes to the Bush administration.”

Despite their, um, reluctance to promote the use of condoms, Kristof zeroed in on the most effective tool that the Bush administration used in its battle: “The new director of the trafficking office, John Miller, has bludgeoned foreign governments, telling them to curb trafficking or face sanctions.”

Now, according to the Washington Post:

President Bush decided Wednesday to waive any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Washington’s closest Arab ally in the war on terrorism, for failing to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers.

In fact, back in June, the State Department listed 14 countries that failed to adequately address trafficking problems, but President Bush ruled that only Myanmar, Cuba, and North Korea were “barred completely from receiving certain kinds of foreign aid.” (Trade assistance and humanitarian aid, apparently, are excluded.) “The White House statement offered no explanation of why countries were regarded differently. [The State Dept. spokeswoman] also could not provide one.”

A year ago, when confronted with documentary evidence that the United Arab Emirates had lied about cracking down on the kidnapping and enslavement of young boys as young as 3 to be camel jockeys, John Miller reacted angrily: “I will tell you this. From what I know of the president and the secretary of state’s feelings about the slavery issue, the fact that a government is a friend or an ally is not gonna keep this government from speaking out.”

Naturally, President Bush struck the UAE from the State Department’s list. We’ll see whether Mr. Miller attempts to regain some of his credibility – by returning to his position as board chairman of the Discovery Institute.

If something can get worse it will
Is a phrase I’ve often sardonically used
But here’s some grist for Mr Murphy’s mill
I used to be disgusted
Now I’m just amused

Pretty much sums up the way I feel about the Lancet/Iraq debate these days. To be honest all the work has been done; all the big mistakes have been made and corrected, the conspiracy theories have been more or less put to bed and there are really very few people left who believe either a) that things didn’t get worse in Iraq as a result of the invasion or b) that they only got a little bit worse. All that really remains for me to do is to keep on using the term “Kaplan’s Fallacy” to describe the practice of using the mere fact of uncertainty about an estimate to draw conclusions about the direction of the estimation error, in the hope that the bloody dreadful article Fred Kaplan wrote about the Lancet study will stick to him for the rest of his career. But apparently there are still some people out there with a little bit of credibility intact (no really) who think that they can still get away with this one.

Update: Have a look at this from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. I think it’s quite extraordinary in that a) each of the individual sentences is simply a bald statement of fact and b) the cumulative effect of the whole lot of them is really much more damning than anything George Galloway has come up with.
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Alan Johnson of Labour Friends of Iraq emails to tell me of a new online journal he’s editing, “Democratiya”:http://www.democratiya.com/default.asp . It won’t be any great secret around here that we’ve not exactly seen eye-to-eye recently with people who call themselves the “pro-liberation” left (or similar). But Demokratiya includes writings from some people who didn’t think the war was such a great idea, such as Gideon Calder (who has an “interesting review of Walzer on war”:http://www.democratiya.com/details.asp?id=2 ), and involves some others whom I continue to like and respect. And I certainly share with them the hope (against hope) that Iraq somehow turns into a flourishing democracy. So surf over there and take a look.

Something that’s been bothering me for a while – the ever-smushier and less critical lovefest between leftwing opponents of the Iraq war and rightwing realist opponents of same. “Steve Clemons”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000904.html, who has contacts in both camps, quotes an unnamed _Nation_ person yesterday as saying that “realism has become the new liberal foreign policy ideology.” When it isn’t (quite rightly) ripping shreds out of the “liberal hawk” establishment, Ari Berman’s _Nation_ article reads like a mash-note to an emerging “dissident establishment”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050829&s=berman that unites left and right against foreign policy adventurism. Now there’s a lot to be said in favour of building a short-term alliance to push back against the lunacy of recent years, and inject a little reality into foreign policy thinking. Rightwing realists have smart and interesting things to say, and are, all in all, a vast improvement on the crew of yahoos and me-too cheerleaders who gave us “Operation Wishful Thinking”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/power-of-imagination-giblets-will.html. I’d be delighted to see the Perles, Boots and Ledeens of the DC foreign policy establishment consigned to the outer darkness. But leftwingers who rush too quickly to embrace their new friends on the right should meditate upon the malign example of Henry Kissinger, and the implications of _Realpolitik_ for the causes and issues that they’re committed to. We should all be in favour of the reality-based crowd taking over Republican foreign policy making – it’ll mean that our arguments with them will be conducted on a saner basis. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that those arguments will magically disappear. Whatever realism is, it isn’t a good basis for a leftwing approach to foreign policy (though it may have valuable lessons to impart to such an approach).

The Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton has launched a new initiative to make available audio and video recordings of academic lectures and events. For now, the University Channel is focusing on public and international affairs, because, as the site claims, “this is an area which lends itself most naturally to a many-sided discussion”. Perhaps the idea is to have people link to the material on the site and then host discussions on their own blogs or classrooms as I do not see a place for the suggested “many-sided discussion” on the UC site itself. The scope of materials that will be included seems quite broad judging from what is already available (IT, religion, politics, etc.).

It is certainly nice to have one central repository of such materials. If the project succeeds in getting lots of places on board and hosting material from all over then it has the potential to be a great service. In fact, the collaborators it already has lined up are already a good sign of its potential. (Then again, some people have suggested [see first comment] that “text is the only useful information on the Internet”.;)

This is a quibble with something in John’s long discourse on the war. It’s more of a question, than a quibble, really. John rightly points out that, in assessing the true consequences of some policy or action, we have to take into account the opportunity costs:

A second common feature of pro-war analysis is a failure to take account of the opportunity cost of the resources used in war. The $300 billion used in the Iraq war would have been enough to finance several years of the Millennium Development project aimed at ending extreme poverty in the world, and could have saved millions of lives. But even assuming this is politically unrealistic, the money could surely have been spent on improved health care, road safety and so on in the US itself. At a typical marginal cost of $5 million per live saved, 60 000 American lives could have been saved. This is morally relevant, but is commonly ignored.

Please don’t think about the war, or John’s more general argument about it, for the moment. Assume that all we are doing is trying to figure out the consequences for the purpose of moral evaluation (whatever weight you think the consequences should have — for me, its less than for John, but more than for some). What are the real opportunity costs that we should figure in?

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