Dworkin on Boumediene (plus a few of my own ideas)

Here is an excellent summary of the background, outcome and effects of the Boumediene v. Bush SCOTUS decision, which I wrote about earlier. There is one point that I disagree with Dworkin on, however: I think that Justice Kennedy's wording is not sufficiently broad as to extend the writ to prisoners held in Afghanistan or Iraq. Kennedy makes a point of saying that Guantanamo has been in US possession for 100 years, unlike these locals. This was a big problem I had with the ruling, as I mentioned before. I hope Dworkin is right and not me, but anyway I imagine that this point will be challenged in many future cases.

I want to clarify, in passing, something I said on this topic in my earlier post. Many people (for instance, Amnesty International) argue that the Bush Administration has violated the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of war-on-terror prisoners. I think that a case can be made for this. Of course, in practice there is no court in which such a case could be presented....

But, in my previous post I was willing to concede the possibility that unlawful enemy combatants fall outside of the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, I believe there is a strong ethical imperative not to torture or in any way violate the human rights of the prisoners. Bush should have had no reason to seek to avoid the guidelines of Geneva! Prisoners--that is to say, people--should always be treated with at least that level of respect.

Pundits and politicians (for instance, as Dworkin notes, McCain) often support Bush's evasion of Geneva on the grounds that we must hold on to terrorist suspects or else they will attack us again. But this is a bunk justification for abandoning Geneva. The current "war on terror" is not different from previous wars in this respect. It would be dangerous to release any enemy soldier before the war is over, and I agree that this war, or whatever it is, against al-Qaeda is not over. I would not be outraged if prisoners were held--even for the six years that some of them have been--as long as they were granted human rights (i.e., POW treatment) during that time, and as long as they could have the chance to confront the evidence brought against them in an open military setting. (Geneva grants prisoners charged with war crimes an appearance in a military court but not a civilian one.)

I think that there is one and only one reason why Bush tried to avoid Geneva: torture. It was assumed that torture would be needed in order to mine information from captured combatants/terrorists. But, again this not any different from any other war. It would have been useful, during the World Wars, to torture Germans to get information about their troop movements, but we didn't. We also did not systematically torture Japanese or Vietnamese, when we at war with them, even though they did not necessarily uphold our notion of jus in bello. (I'm sure that more torture went on than is officially acknowledged, but at least it was not official policy!) Why should it suddenly be ok to torture militiamen in order to find out the placement of roadside bombs? I don't want American soldiers to be killed, but this is not simply a cost/benefit analysis, where we trade the pain and degradation of the prisoners for the lives of our soldiers. This is a matter of justice.

And so, in conclusion, I'm going to segue into the issue of global justice. I think that, although most people claim to understand and agree about human rights, we have not actually worked out firm theories about the scope and force of justice on the global scale. What duties do we owe to people who are not citizens of our own country? What is the relationship between a group like al-Qaeda and the US, and what standards should each side adhere to? What happens if one side does not adhere to these standards? These are not questions about how to apply the Geneva Conventions or international law, but about what the basis for international law is or should be. The scope of these inquiries, moreover, should be global now rather than international, because we need to try to understand how people and states should interact with non-state actors as well as nations. Headway on these questions is the goal I've set for myself as I start grad school this fall. Stay tuned.

U.S. Troops in Korea: A blessing or a curse? For whom?

David Kaplan's most recent article for the Atlantic highlights the few things that Rumsfeld got right. His amazing blunder in Iraq is contrasted with his strategic success in reorganizing the military's global presence. Rumsfeld lowered the number of troops stationed permanently outside of the U.S., at bases in Germany, Japan and Korea, for example, and established instead many smaller, semi-permanent staging points scattered around the globe. Kaplan calls Rumsfeld's dealings with Korean and Japan "astute," for both strategic and political reasons. Rumsfeld managed to reorganize his troops without upsetting the delicate diplomatic relationships we have with Korea and Japan.

Specifically, in Korea Rumsfeld decided to reduce troop levels from 37,000 to 25,000, give the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul back to Korea, and hand-over wartime control of the Korean military--a control which the U.S. has had since the Korean war. Kaplan makes it seem like this reorganization was done in spite of the Koreans. Rumsfeld even threatened to remove all U.S. troops from Korea. It was the Koreans, not the Americans, who desperately wanted the troops to stay.

The story was quite different in the Korean media. What I heard about it, back in February of 2007, was that the U.S. had reluctantly caved to Korean demands for more autonomy and independence. This article (from the standard Korean news agency, Yonhap) makes the hand-over of wartime control seems like a concession to South Korea. The article reports that: "Operational control became a focal point as South Korea desired to command its own forces during wartime."

What's the truth? Did Rumsfeld give in to the Koreans or bend them to his will? Are Koreans trying to hold onto U.S. troops or kick them out? I'm inclined to believe Kaplan on this, but the wide variance in perspectives is interesting in its own right.

Korea itself seems to be massively divided on the issue. Some people see the situation as the U.S. imposing its will on Korea, and they hope for a total U.S. troop draw down. These feelings are stoked by incidents such as the accidental killing in 2002 of two school girls by a U.S. Humvee. On the other hand, other people see the U.S. military as the primary line of defence against Kim Jong Il and his budding nuclear arsenal. These people are practically begging the U.S. to keep the troops here. The election this year of Lee Myung Bak, a pro-U.S. conservative, was largely driven, I believe, by North Korea's 2006 nuclear weapon test.

See, for instance, this survey, from back in August of 2006, which shows considerable public confusion about the hand-over. A solid majority believed that the handover was a good idea. But 24% believed that the hand-over should happen as soon as possible, while over 33% said that the transfer should happen as late as possible. The middle ground--transferring control in the middle-term, as was actually agreed upon--drew less support.

The hand-over of wartime control is scheduled for 2012. This is also the year that U.S. troops will begin to vacate Yongsan. It will be interesting to see how Korean perceptions of these events develop, especially vis a vis changing relations with North Korea.

By the way, here is a totally, totally in-depth blog on us troops in korea: http://rokdrop.com/.

Boumediene v. Bush

In its ruling on Boumediene v. Bush, on June 12, the Supreme Court decided 5 to 4 to grant the writ of habeas corpus to detainees being held at the naval station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, even though they have been designated enemy combatants and they are being held outside of the territorial United States. This means that some detainees can challenge their detention in federal court.

What is controversial about this decision is that the Supreme Court had to rule unconstitutional aspects of an act of Congress, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA) and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA). The Court ruled that, contrary to the DTA, the so-called combat status review tribunals are not sufficient substitutes for habeas corpus, and that, contrary to the MCA, Guantanamo detainees are entitled to the writ.

The Court's decision hinged on the fact that the detainees were being held at Guantanamo. Because, the Court argued, Guantanamo is under de facto U.S. control, and has been for over 100 years, the Constitution has power there. This draws on case law going back to the Spanish American war, when, for instance, the Court ruled that residents of Hawaii were entitled to Constitutional rights even though the islands had not yet officially become a territory of the United States. Because the Guantanamo detainees were held within the purveiw of the Constitution, the Court held, they are entitled to its protection.

This is as opposed to prisoners of war who were captured, for example, during World War II and held in German prisons. Because they were being held outside of the territorial United States, on land that the U.S. was occupying for only a short time, the prisoners were not entitled to any rights afforded by the United States Constitution.

The German prisoners were, however, entitled to rights under international treaties of war, such as the Geneva Convention of 1929. They were not tortured, they were given honor and respect befitting their rank, they could communicate with their families and, under the Nuremberg Charter, if they were to be charged with a crime they were given public trials at which they could face the evidence brought against them.

These are all rights that the Bush Administration has denied prisoners held not only in Guantanamo but also in prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world. The prisoners at Guantanamo will now get their day in court, but what about all the others who have the misfortune to be held in territories that are not under permanent US control, out beyond the ken of our Constitution? The government has argued that, because they are not "lawful combatants," they do not deserve protection under Geneva. So, they are left with no legally enforceable rights. They are disrespected, hidden from their families, tortured and denied the opportunity to come before a judge. The Constitution does not extend to these prisoners, and a case can be made that Geneva does not, either. But the jurisdiction of justice and respect for human dignity has no limit. The US government should voluntarily offer these prisoners their basic rights, but, barring that, an international -- or, perhaps, global -- law should be crafted that would guarantee them.

Of Protesting: the Korean Candlelight Vigils

In my previous post I mentioned the candlelight vigils being held in Seoul currently. They are not planned in advance, but are organized over the internet with little warning. According to the awkwardly nomikered "The People's Countermeasure Council against Full Resumption of Imports of U.S. Beef Endangered with Mad Cow Disease", 65,000 people attended the June 6 protest and 20,000 people were expected for the June 13 protest outside of Seoul City Hall. The Socialist Worker claimed that there were 700,000 in Seoul on June 10, but I guess these numbers might be somewhat suspect. There has been at least a protest per week for the past month, and the crowd has evolved from a few thousand school kids to a group that cuts across all demographics. The aim of the protests, originally only to halt resumption of US beef imports, has actually expanded to encompass many political issues, including opposition to President Lee Myung Bak's Grand Canal scheme and the privatization of medical service. The protests have been remarkably effective, forcing the government to postpone US beef imports and to renegotiate with the US diplomats on the issue. President Lee has also agreed to scrap the canal if the people oppose it. The candles are intended to symbolize non-violence, a striking contrast to the pro-labor and anti-dictatorship protests of old. The protesters stay out till dawn singing old popular resistance songs.

Nevertheless, the police are cracking down heavily on the demonstrations, and there have been instances of violence. Police are using batons and tear gas, and, according to this article, from one of the pro-government dailies, protesters have damaged 58 police buses and hospitalized 16 officers. For the June 13 protest, the National Police Agency estimated that only 7,000 people would attend but that 10,000 police officers would be on hand. As I have written before, the goal was to actually outnumber the protesters. But there is something very different about these protests from the others that I wrote about. These protests are not allowed. They are contained, as much as possible, but they are not allowed.

The vigils are not sanctioned and, therefore, they are not impotent. They are, I think, actually a model for successful protesting today. They are internet-mobilized, frequent and visible. They are putting people in the streets, and they did not ask for permission to be there. They are non-violent in outlook but still a force of which the police must be wary. A good model to follow elsewhere, perhaps, except that Korea is unusual in that Seoul is the focal point of the whole country in a way that New York, for example, simply is not.

And here's a related question for my avid readers, whoever you may be: If I have the opportunity to attend one of these protests, as an observer, should I do it? I have respect for their method of protesting, but I have no real solidarity with these protesters and their concerns. The issues are not mine. I sort of think that protest is sacred, and that, if you are not actually an interested party, you should not sully the event with your indifference. I say this in light of reports I've heard that foreigners in Korea have started attending the protests just for a laugh. This seems reprehensible to me. On the other hand, perhaps it is one's duty to observe history when it is happening, like a reporter, even if it is not properly your history. What do you think?

Here's the beef

Last year, I wrote a few posts on the pending U.S.-Korea FTA. A consensus was eventually reached between the negotiators, and the agreement is currently waiting to be ratified by the respective legislatures.

If you go back and read my old posts, you will at least agree that the issues surrounding this agreement are complicated. It seems to me, for instance, that the U.S. should ratify the agreement simply for geopolitical reasons: South Korea is a close ally in a crucial region that has been drifting out of the fold of late. An FTA, if done properly, would more closely wed Korean and U.S. interests, and would enhance Korea's opinion of the U.S. Moreover, economists on both sides have argued for the economic benefits. Automobiles, for instance, seems to be roughly win-win: an FTA would open up the higher-end Korean market to U.S. manufacturers, so that they can compete better with Mercedes and BMW, while opening up the smaller car market in the U.S. to Korean companies, so that they can compete better with Toyota. On the other hand, Korean drug companies worried about increased competition and regulation in the Korean drug market, and Korean food companies and consumer groups worried about the lack of regulation governing U.S. food manufacturers. These are just a few of the contentious issues the negotiators had to work through in no fewer than seven drafts, each hundreds of pages long.

Nevertheless, the FTA has boiled down to one issue: beef. As I've mentioned before, after the mad cow scare in 2002, Korea banned all import of U.S. beef. Korea had been the third or fourth largest importer, but since the ban public opinion in Korea has hardened against U.S. beef as more and more news programs and journalists document the absurd practices that dominate the U.S. cattle industry--see, for example, "The Meatrix," which was featured in one Korean documentary.

But, Sen. Sam Brownback and others in Congress have stated explicitly that they will not support the FTA unless the Koreans completely lift the ban. And so, here we see the effects of democracy in America today: take an incredibly complicated issue, and cut it down to a sound bite that fits on the evening news.

The interesting thing is that the Koreans have taken up beef as the key issue as well. There have been a series of massive, daily protests against allowing U.S. beef back into Korea. Carrying candles--a clear sign that they are different from the petrol-bombing anti-dictatorship protesters of the previous generation--and stalling traffic around the main government buildings, the demonstrators have forced the government to halt the resumption of imports a few times over. Originally started by middle and high school students who organized on the Internet, the demonstrations have become a powerful political force here.

Here are some pictures from the Boston Globe to help you get an idea of the scope of it. (Thanks for the tip, Frazer.)

The latest on the beef dispute is that South Korea has decided not to allow imports of US beef that is from cows that are older than 30 months. This was a concession to the demonstrators in Seoul. Why 30 months? According to NPR, which has a helpful Q & A, "Mad cow has rarely been detected in animals younger than 21 months, so many countries feel mad cow disease will not be a problem in animals younger than that. The United States' safety standards regard animals younger than 30 months as safe for consumption, since the number of cases in animals up to 30 months in age is still extremely small."

The U.S., for it's part, has said that it is not willing to place a quarantine on been aged over 30 months, and that the U.S. beef companies should voluntarily comply with South Korea's wishes. This has lead to a stalemate, and the governments are "in talks."

So, keep an eye on this issue. I will update when I can.



UPDATE: The NY Times ran an article saying that the U.S. has crafted an agreement with beef exporters not to ship beef from 30-months or older cattle to S. Korea. Basically this is just the U.S. companies voluntarily agreeing to abide by S. Korean demands. It is not clear whether this will pacify the Korean negotiators, or protesters. We shall see. The Times also notes that Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has stated that he will support the FTA if, and only if, the Korean ban on U.S. beef is lifted.

Global Migration: Tangential clarificatory observations

In a previous post, I advocated a sort of open market for migration. Perhaps now I should seek to clarify my points a little. As it happens, Korea provides two concrete examples of policies that conflict with my open migration proposal. It will be worth examining these two examples in order to figure out what my proposal means, in practice.

South Korea faces a similar if more pronounced version of the problems facing many developed countries: In my previous post, I mentioned the Filipino and Malay migrant workers in Korea, and the fact that they cannot get citizenship. According to the city of Seoul, the number of alien residents has been increasing rapidly in the past decade, especially those from China, India and Vietnam. So why aren't these aliens becoming citizens? I'd chalk that up to two factors: supposed Korean ethnic homogeneity and amazing population density (which I have had occasion to mention before). The Korean idea of Koreanness includes ethnic Koreans, even those who live abroad, and excludes "foreigners," even those who live in Korea. In addition to this, it is simply hard to be a supporter of immigration when your country is already overcrowded.

But that's what Koreans should do. They have a great infrastructure and their unemployment is low. The system can absorb more people. And business, especially blue-collar business, can too. In the past thirty years, Korea has made the leap from developing to developed, from third-world to industrialized. Now, the population is completing the complimentary shift from laborers to educated professionals. A whopping 75% of the younger generation graduate college. (Compare this to 25% in the U.S.) This leaves a lot of vacant spots in the old labor industries--including especially construction and manufacturing--which remain vital to the economy.

It is true that college grads have a hard time landing a first job, but this makes the job market seem tighter than it is. College-educated jobs are in short supply; blue-collar work is still readily available. This is an imbalance that cannot be corrected, and may even be exacerbated, by limiting migrant workers. In fact, a large part of the reason that professional jobs are hard to find is that women are getting more education and are working a lot more than they used to. Korea's workforce today is holding steady now only because women are joining it. This, however, has lowered birthrates even further, and the future decline in the workforce can only be corrected by bringing in outside help.

Few Koreans are likely to dispute this conclusion. But here's the point I am making, and that I was making in my earlier post: this outside help that the Koreans are bringing in needs to be treated fairly--i.e. they need to be given a chance for citizenship. Strict immigration laws are not really meant to protect average working Koreans, but to protect some notion of Koreanness. This is a notion that, along with nationalisms all over the world, I think we can do without.

(Let me dwell on this point for a second. Has everyone really forgotten that the idea of national membership by no means predates the existence of nations? Koreans consider themselves to be a distinct race as well as country (or two countries), but the history is much more complicated. There is a band of Korean-speaking Chinese nationals living in the provinces of China that boarder North Korea. Most Koreans consider these people to be Korean, but their "race" is certainly mixed, with Mongols over the past millennium and Chinese more recently. But, wait: why do we consider "Chinese" to be a race? Or, for that matter, "white"?)

The topic of nationalism provides a nice segue to North Korea, my promised second example. I'm not going to make policy suggestions for Kim Jong Il; that seems a bit presumptuous. Instead, North Korea provides an example of how open migration, if supported and implemented globally, can weaken a poorly run, "rogue" state. The idea is this: there are many North Koreans who would love to leave the country. If all of them left, Kim Jong Il and his cronies would be out of the laborers they need to grow rice and pick ginsing and fight in the army. This would be nothing but good for the global community. Rather than confront a tyrant like Kim Jong Il directly, we would simply open the gates and let his citizens, his life-blood, drain away. There is not much point being a totalitarian without a bunch of people to oppress. A similar tactic could drain all of the warriors--and civilians--out of war zones.

North Korea does it's part to prevent its citizens from fleeing, but they can only do so much. If other countries granted amnesty to North Koreans, it would be much easier for them to escape. Of course, the countries that actually boarder North Korea will be the most important. South Korea happily (if warily, because of spies) accepts North Korean defectors, and it certainly shares a boarder with North Korea. The problem is, this border is guarded by something like a half-a-million troops and there is a big wall there. Most North Koreans who make it to the south do so via boat from China. (Cf. Aquariums of Pyongyang)

So that leaves China and Russia. If these countries started making it easier for North Koreans to escape, the regime would feel it immediately. Check out this post, from way back in 2006, about an op. ed. that foretold the imminent collapse of Kim Jong Il simply because China recognized a couple North Korean defectors as refugees. If China were to give North Koreans asylum, North Korea would collapse in days, I imagine. This is a large part of the reason why China is unlikely to pursue this strategy, as I wrote about elsewhere.

Leaving aside geopolitics, if North Koreans could escape North Korea, that would be nothing but good for the North Koreans. This is the humanitarian aspect of immigration. So, open immigration, in my view, can accomplish two things: it can support ageing economies, like in the West and in developed Asia--and I think that this should be done fairly, by offering citizenship--and it can aid people trapped in war zones or other bad situations. So, what the U.S. should do is simply set the example. Open our own boarders, and encourage others to do the same. Accept refugees. Give citizenship to migrant workers. Simple as that.

Global Migration: Am I a post-American?

Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies, a "pro-immigrant, low-immigration" think-tank, introduced the term 'post-American' to refer to someone who has renounced the sanctity of the American nationality, and supports throwing open our doors to immigrants. His writings (here and here, for instance) have mostly to do with the debate about whether or not to offer amnesty to illegal immigrants--a debate that, oddly enough, seems to be happening mostly within the Republican party (correct me if I'm wrong here), and seems to hinge fundamentally on the question of whether or not Latino voters can be conned into voting Republican.

I'm not here going to write about what to do about illegal immigrants who are in the U.S. right now. I agree that simply opening our fences seems impractical, and that "rewarding" law-breakers we might set an unwieldy precedent, etc. Since, thankfully, no one has yet entrusted me with the responsibility of drafting policy, I am going to focus only on the abstract issue of immigration in general. I'm going to throw my ideas out there, and I hope that, if anyone out there actually reads this blog, and I have reason to believe that someone, at some time did, you will put in your two cents as well.

Here's my idea: the world needs to have an open migration market. Just as liberal economists argue that the world needs an open financial markets, in order to allow money to flow to where it is needed, so should the world open its boarders to emigration and immigration. We need to move beyond national identity. Nations should become mere record keepers, tax collectors, service providers. Global citizens should be as free to move from country to country as they currently can from city to city. Imagine!

Well, it's not too hard to imagine. This is essentially already the case in the EU. (In the EU you can live and work wherever you want, although you do not change citizenship.) But even outside of the EU, there is already a mobile class of global citizens, people who are able to live and work in a wide variety of places because they possess skills that they are willing to sell at marketable prices. This class includes not only finance managers, scientists, engineers and academics, but also skilled and unskilled laborers--from oil-rig workers to produce pickers.

Given that this sort of world is at least possible, I'll give a few arguments why it might be desirable. First of all, it is worth pointing out that on the current system, highly educated or skilled workers are usually able to secure citizenship if they should so desire. It is the unskilled migrant workers who get the short shrift. This is true in the U.S. certainly--most of the illegal immigrants are the low-skilled ones, ones who are nonetheless necessary for the economy--but it is also true, for instance, in Korea. There is a whole segregated class of Filipino and Malay construction workers who are certainly necessary but who are never granted citizenship, even when they do come legally. Opening migration would be beneficial primarily, and most obviously, to these sort of migrant workers.

But more generally, it seems to me that an open migration system would reward good governance. Just as a free capital market rewards a well-run company with profit, an open migration "market" would reward well-governed countries with immigrants. Immigrants should be seen as capital inflows, as increased production potential. A net outflow of migrants would punish a government for incorrect policy; a net inflow would reward good governance.

Wouldn't people from poor countries simply flood the rich ones, you might ask, overflowing all public services and entitlements. Certainly there is a limit to how many citizens a county can ever support, but ideally, migration would level out at about the point at which the country/government could no longer absorb more immigrants. If we are really to a point in the U.S. where another citizen cost the country more than he put into it, then we really are in trouble. Immigrants are, anyway, cheaper than home-grown citizens, because we don't have to educate them or pay for their childhood medical care.

Nevertheless, I agree that people from poor countries would mostly move to richer ones. There might be some concern that a world with open migration policies, as I am suggesting, would simply cement the current geopolitical order, with rich countries on top and poor countries on the bottom. What I am proposing is one giant brain- and muscle-drain. On the other hand, if we are serious about ending global poverty, open migration would be the most efficient way to redistribute global wealth. Rather than try to reform and prop up bad governments around the world, we would simply allow their citizens entry into our country, if they should so choose.

There would be some practical limit to this, as immigration itself cost money, and cannot be afforded by everyone, but I'll leave these sort of merely practical concerns out of this post. The idea, in theory, would be that citizens of a failed state could at first emigrate to neighboring countries safely, and from there spread out further. In the meantime, the complete loss of population--and, crucially, international support--would hopefully have undermined the bad government.

Would this be a return to the Middle Ages, with roving bands of outlaws and refugees? Would there be much more Darfur-like violence or terrorist safe-zones, ungoverned space opened up by weakened national governments. Steps would have to be taken to ensure some level of global law and order. We have found ways of doing this when it comes to global finance; I see no reason why we cannot find ways to regulate and police the movements of global citizens as well.

Finally, in the world I'm imagining, it seems like there would basically never be any need for war. War could be in the interest of governments who are trying to secure resources so as to secure immigration. But who would fight it? If a county's citizens can move about freely, then why would they commit to attack--or, for that matter, defend--another country? If everyone just decided to leave the vicinity, the war would dissolve pretty quickly.

Perhaps this fact should set off alarms in our heads, since historically any political system that promised the end to war was doomed to fail. But, anyway, I'm just theorizing here. I welcome any vitriol-filled comments you may have.

An update on protesting in America:

Read this article, and see if you don't agree with my previous post.

Of Protesting

In a recent post, I said that "we need people in the streets." What do I mean by that? Is setting up formal protests on the Mall really going to change things? I'm afraid not; not unless we've got someone like Dr. King up in front of Lincoln. Cindy Sheehan ain't gonna cut it.

I don't know if you remember, but there were massive protests in both New York and DC before the Iraq invasion. Even though 77 Senators supported the war, there was a substantial chunk of the country that opposed it from the beginning. And it is a mistake to say that college students were indifferent. We made up the core group of protesters. And the protests were very well organized. Ever heard of moveon.org? Remember how they first got started: organizing pre-Iraq-war protests.

But what effect did these protests have on policy? Nada. Why? Here is my theory: Protests are not really protests when they are allowed.

I was in Kyoto recently, and I met a man from Tehran. We were chatting and walking, and we ran into a big anti-war protest. A lively, shouting group from all demographics was protesting against proposed changes to Japan's constitution that would allow for a military build-up. Shouting and dancing, brandishing rainbow flags and Che posters, the protesters stood in stark contrast to the austere Kyoto neighborhood. But the really striking thing was not the protest itself but the number of police deployed to monitor it. On all sides, the protesters were barricaded in by troops in riot gear. There was no trouble; it was a model of peaceful political action. I'm sure that the permit to protest was properly filed--the forms were filled out--and the police were only there "for the protection of the protesters."

I've seen a similar thing in Seoul. I've run into two protests since I've been here: a striking union and a very, very small protest against the Burmese junta in front of its embassy. In both cases, the police outnumbered the protesters. (In the case of the strike, this required no small amount of manpower.) But I have to wonder: can something really be a protest, if the protesters are outnumbered by the police?

The police presence sends a very evident message: you are allowed to protest. If we wanted, we could stop you. We are indulging you, indulging your eccentricities. In sum: you are meaningless.

This was the same message I got in New York in February 2003. Although the protesters greatly outnumbered the police, the protest itself was contained. It was barricaded in, forced to follow a route. There were minor scuffles between police and protesters; most of these were provoked by the protesters in an attempt to feel something--to feel like we were actually bucking the law.

If Vietnam-era protest veterans want to complain about the college students today, they should realize this: In the '60s--not only in America but all over the world--governments realized what protest can do to a democracy. To prevent such things from happening again, certain rules were put in place. The idea of protest was legalized, sterilized. In the U.S., a right guaranteed by the Constitution now has to be authorized by a local government. "Public safety" has to be taken into account. And now that authorization is required, if a protest is not properly authorized, then it is lawful for the police to stomp it out, violently. Look at what happened at G8 conferences in the '90s. And now these conferences are held in inaccessible, heavily fortified locations.

The authorization of protests killed protesting. When protests are allowed they are no longer protests.

My friend from Tehran saw the Kyoto protest with different eyes. For him, to protest is an ideal, a remarkable democratic institution that, he believes, could change his country. But I wonder if he's right. If Tehran allowed protests, and surrounded them with troops, do you think they would have any effect? Probably, they would just single out the radicals for, if not imprisonment, then at least public ridicule. If anything, the authorization of impotent protests could kill off--in seas of red-tape banality--a real anti-government movement.

So what did I mean, "people in the streets"? We had people in the streets before the war, and now I'm saying that that doesn't work. If you agree with me that we've got to do something to change our government's policy--especially about torture--then what is to be done? What should we have done, before Iraq, before Guantanamo? Should we stage illegal protests all around the country? If we did, we would be stomped out with tear gas and night sticks. Because of a subtle shift in the notion of the right to assembly, the law would be against us. If the law is against us, most likely the public would be as well.

Or, should we lobby to change the law. Something about that seems absurd to me: lobbying the government in order to allow us to protest without a permit. Still, if a bill appeared that guaranteed the right to protest without the need for government consent, I would support it. (But wait, haven't we got such a law already...?)

Or should we, like the French, fight fire with fire? The recent suburban-Paris riots actually get attention, actually affect government policy, for better or worse. Perhaps this is what protest today must be: flaming cars, baseball bats and hunting rifles. The French always seem to set the standard for protests. And there's something beautifully inarticulate about simple violence. There's no need for policy suggestions; violent rioting sends the simple, far-from-subtle message that the government is doing it wrong. No need to specify what it is doing wrong, or how to fix it.

I'm not actually prepared to do this, of course. There must be another way. But whatever we do, we cannot allow the hallowed status of our government-guaranteed freedoms to hide the fact that basic democratic procedures--protesting, and, perhaps even voting--are ineffective.

Nostra Culpa

I would not usually link to a Times op-ed piece, but I'm doing so now, not because this one is particularly timely or well-written, but because Frank Rich makes a point that I almost never hear made. Namely, WE are to blame for our country's failures. We, all citizens, are the U.S.A. We are culpable for the lives taken, in Iraq and elsewhere, as well as for the complete loss of respect and influence the U.S. has suffered around the world.

I have often consoled myself, and defended my country against Bush-haters, by saying that America has been lead astray. Or that most people in the U.S. are good, and that the mistakes made in Iraq are not representative of my country. Or, I say, just wait a few more years, and we'll vote him out.

This, I now realize, is bull shit. If the people in the U.S. wanted to change course, we would have. Bush is obviously not so secure in his power that we cannot influence him. And even if he were, his power is based solely on public approval, or, perhaps, apathy. I'm not saying that we are to blame because we live in a democracy. In the modern era, I'm not convinced that democracy functions at all differently from any other type of government. Instead, public opinion, or lack there of, is the defining feature of a country. Just as Germans enabled Hitler even if they did not all support him, by allowing Iraq to happen we are just as guilty as if we were the ones actively participating. The relevant comparison here is not Bush to Hitler. And we can no longer be consoled by the limited scope of Iraq. The conflict there is spilling over into the entire region and into all aspects of our foreign relations.

What's to be done? A society is easily poisoned when the people who govern control the press and the organization of its citizens. I'm thankful that, in the U.S., these freedoms are guaranteed, or at least not currently challenged. But a democracy of the sort we have today has it's own dangers. Power is shielded behind a legislative and executive bureaucratic system that blunts public action and diffuses responsibility. Merely voting is not enough; in fact, it can be a distraction. Our elected and non-elected employees and representatives must ask for our mandate every day when they wake up, not just every two, four or six years. By tacitly granting it, even as they mire us deeper and deeper into immoral policy, we are participating in our own demise. God bless America? God have mercy...

And free speech can be a distraction as well. It's not clear whether Frank Rich is claiming this, but he is not absolved simply by writing this piece. A spot in the Times is little more than a soapbox. Perhaps the reporters who expose Blackwater massacres are doing their part, but pundits (including me) clearly are not. There is a sense in which we are mesmerized by the free press. Because we are able to say anything, we have an excuse for failing to act. What, pray tell, has Internet mobilization achieved? We need people in the streets.

Torture Fatigue

If anyone still doubted whether the U.S. is torturing prisoners, or whether there are legitimate legal concerns about it, they should check out this article. It seems that in 2005 the Justice Department endorsed, in secret, the legality of torturing prisoners deemed to be terrorists. First, if this wasn't already old news, we should leap out of our seats and say, "What has the world come to!?! My government is torturing prisoners!!!" Second, we should be appalled by the very possibility that this can be justified legally. And finally, we should seriously doubt that it can, in fact, be so justified. I have elsewhere outlined reasons for doubt, but we should also be skeptical of the simple fact that the Justice Department kept their endorsement secret!!! In an open democracy, laws must by nature be public. It makes no sense, then, for interpretations of those laws to remain secret, that is, until they are inevitably leaked to the press. A secret legal justification of torture has the smell of a conscious-soother, not a serious legal argument intended for use in court.

Let me make one more point. This is a moral, rather than legal point, but it cuts close to the moral foundations of the law. The Bush Administration and the Justice Department strove to find loopholes in treaties and U.S. laws that would protect their agents in the field, military and otherwise, from prosecution once they got back home. But by eliminating the laws, they eliminated the rules that establish and limit what counts as proper procedure. They opened a Pandora's box of unregulated activity. Abu Gharib is the obvious result, but there have no doubt been many such incidents. (If you have not, you should read "The General's Report" about a general assigned to investigate Abu Gharib.) When soldiers, or anyone, are given a carte blanche to act however they want, we can no longer expect them to act rationally or to any longer conform to decorum. (See the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.) Laws are there for a reason, and not simply to limit executive power. The Bush Administration was foolish to even suggest that rules about torture should not apply. I hate to say it, but the U.S. deserves the bad reputation it has lately acquired.

Diplomacy? What diplomacy?

Well, who'd of thought it, but kudos to President Bush, or, perhaps Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, for finally netting a diplomatic success. In Beijing yesterday, the parties to the six party talks signed an agreement in which North Korea will disable its nuclear program in exchange for increasingly normalized relations with the U.S. and Japan and economic aid (full text). In February, North Korea agreed to shut-down its reactor and reprocessing facilities, and in July inspections showed that they had followed through. They have now agreed to permanently disable these facilities.

Whether there is any reason to trust Pyongyang is an open question. What Bush and co. deserve credit for is offering to "[remove] the designation of the DPRK [North Korea] as a state sponsor of terrorism and advance the process of terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to the DPRK." That is, to finally renounce the "axis of evil" bigotry and approach foreign affairs in a rational manner.

Of course, credit is also due to Kim Jong Il, for pushing our buttons in just the right way to get just what he wants. Having nukes is not about blowing things up--it's about threatening to blow things up. We've all know this since 1945. Did anyone notice that the Bush administration's stance softened only after a nuclear weapon was successfully tested? Does anyone else foresee a parallel here with Iran?

It's interesting, though, that North Korea has totally abandoned its old claim of self-sufficiency. It is now quite clearly willing to trade whatever it can for energy aid and open economic relations. Perhaps this has something to do with its cooling relations with China. Whether willing to admit it or not, North Korea has been on a rapid decline at least since the fall of the Soviet Union and the famines in the early '90s. According to the CIA (who cites an OECD estimate from 1999 as their best source), North Korea's GDP is about $40 billion. From parity with the North after the Korean War, South Korea's economy has grown to be thirty times that size. (The South's population is about double the North's). The only possible way for reunification to happen is for North Korea to greatly expand economically. And this will clearly take incorporation, to some degree, in the the international market.

To that end, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun arrived in Pyongyang on Oct. 2. His goal is to set up another special economic zone in North Korea, like the one at Kasung, and to expand the integration of the two economies. If you haven't seen the video of President Roh's arrival in Pyongyang, you should check it out here.

A North Korean Thaw?

A year ago at this time, North Korean scientists were preparing to detonate a nuclear weapon underneath Mt. Mantap in the north-east corner of Korea (which they did on Oct. 9). Now, the Six-Party talks have been restarted, South Korea resumed shipment of fuel oil in July and the two Koreas leaders will meet in Pyongyang on Oct. 2 for only the second time since the Korean War. (The first such meeting was organized by South Korean president Kim Dae Jung in 2000, netting him a Nobel Peace Prize and the scorn of hard-line pundits on both sides of the Pacific.)

So, what happened? Why the turn around? Are things finally thawing on the peninsula? Is peace in sight, and if so, why now after North Korea took what was supposed to be such a devastating step?

Here are some interesting factors to consider:

1. The six-party talks between the U.S., North and South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, resumed in February after a fifteen-month hiatus (caused by Bush Administration allegations of North Korean money laundering). An agreement was reached stating that North Korea would shut down their reactor at Yongbyon and eventually disband their whole nuclear program in exchange for oil and food. In July, inspectors confirmed that the reactor had been shut down, and South Korea promptly delivered the first of the oil. The talks should continue to help push the North Korean's program closer to disbandment, or at least keep it inactive for a while longer.

But, the latest meeting, scheduled to begin last Wednesday, has been pushed back until Sept. 27, possibly because North Korea felt slighted by the allegations last week that it was working with the Syrians on their nuke program. North Korea is a touchy negotiating partner. The Bush Administration originally introduced the six-party Talks in order to avoid bilateral negotiations (because "we do not deal with terrorists"), but this, along with the "axis of evil" comment, insulted the North Koreans. Probably they only agreed to restart the talks because Bush agreed to negotiate bilaterally as well. The effectiveness of the six-party talks is limited. But talk is always better than no talk, in these circumstances. As James Baker has said, in this context, "it is not appeasement to talk to your enemies."

2. With less that 100 days left of his presidency, with elections coming up in two months, and with single-digit approval ratings, President Roh Moo-Hyun is traveling to Pyongyang next month to try to craft a peace treaty that has eluded the two Koreas for fifty years. What is he doing? And, more importantly, will he get a Nobel? While this summit is not likely to yield long-term results, it is a sign that continued dialogue is possible. Moreover, the leading candidate in the upcoming elections, Lee Myung-bak, is not likely to change course, even though he is from the conservative party.

3. Although I've not focused on this in my previous posts, Japan's interest in North Korea extends far beyond security. Korea was an imperial colony of Japan for the first half of the twentieth century, and all Koreans hate Japan as a matter of course. But Kim Il-Sung, in North Korea, made a name for himself as an anti-Japanese rebel. The South Korean government, in contrast, was made up of many officials in the Japanese colonial bureaucracy. North Korea has always seen itself as the true defender of Koreans against Japan. Moreover, during the colonial period, many Koreans emigrated to Japan, and many of them living there have over the years supported the North Korean regime. In the '60s and '70s--the height of intellectual infatuation with communism--Kim Il-Sung convinced many Korean-Japanese to return to the homeland, promising grand futures while plundering their possessions. (The book, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang," which I wrote on elsewhere, gives a first hand account of this situation.) In retrospect, this was probably bad financial management. Capitalism works better than simple thievery. (Yes, I read "Atlas Shrugged.") The Koreans sympathetic to the regime who remained in Japan continue to provide support, while those who emigrated have already been sucked dry. The Chosen Soren is an aid group based in Japan that funnels money into North Korea. It has been branded a terrorist group by the Japanese, and they cracked down on it after the nuke test. Much more than South Korea, Japan is a haven for pro-North Korea fund raisers and supporters.

Not content to trick hapless idealists, North Korea also kidnapped Japanese citizens in the '60s and '70s. Former prime minister Abe Shinzo "rose to prominence because of his advocacy of Japanese citizens kidnapped by the North," (International Crisis Group report). While keen to improve relations with China and South Korea, Abe intended to take a hard line on North Korea. His resignation this month, due largely to discontent over his hawishness, and the ascendancy of Fukuda Yasuo, a "dove," might be good signs for relations with the North.

4. Finally, China's role is important to underscore. As the International Crisis Group notes (op cit.), of the five major players in the region (Russia is a non-factor), only China has policy options--i.e. room to maneuver. This is due mostly to the North's dependence on China as it's only remaining trade partner. But it is also no doubt because China plays its cards close and is not afraid to talk privately and bilaterally. The U.S. and Japan seem increasingly ready to bargain with a nuclear Kim Jong-Il, but the corresponding change in the North's attitude might be largely due to Chinese arm-twisting behind the scenes.

Overall, the assessment of the situation is positive. It's always better to talk. And I see little reason to worry that Kim Jong-Il is simply buying time to make more nukes. For what? Nukes buy him prestige and a place at the negotiating table. He's got that now. In fact, the resumed oil shipments, the funds freed from the Macao bank and the aid that is continuing to flow, can all be seen simply as returns on an investment. Having the bomb pays. People pay attention to you.

Right now, it seem that the prospects of stability are better than they've been in a long time. Bush is negotiating, South Korea is negotiating, Japan has potentially changed course, and China seems to be helping the efforts. The North has shut down its reactor and agreed to inspections. But, the bigger question is: where does it end? What's the solution? Dialogue is the right way, the only way, but if our ultimate goal is a free and peaceful Korean Peninsula, we are a long way from it. This is no Pyongyang Spring. Internally, the country and its people are not better off; in fact they might be in the worst state ever. Our short-term strategy seems promising. But there also seems to be essentially no vision for an ultimate solution to the situation. Through negligence mixed with malice, Kim Jong-Il is on track to out-pace Hitler in terms of lives taken. And no one, including me, can see any way out of it.

Why Glasgow?

Some people have been asking why terrorists would try to strike Scotland, and if so, why not Edinburgh. Far from mysterious, their motives show them to be politically savvy, even it they are armatures with explosives.

Some people linked the attack in London to Salman Rushdie's. Prior to that attack, the London Times recorded the recent wave of anti-Rushdie sentiment here. But a far sounder motive can be found in Gordon Brown's appointment as Prime Minister on June 27, just two days before the London and Glasgow attempts. Brown, after all, was born in Glasgow and his constituents are Scots. An attack on his political base might force him to blink. Like Madrid in 2004, a series of attacks that, it is hard to dispute, led to the the Spanish departure from our Coalition, these attacks were intended to make the British reconsider their commitments. A move that, under Blair, could have even led to increased troop levels and at least hyped-up rhetoric, just might have the opposite effect under Brown. Brown's new foreign minister reportedly has a none-too-favorable outlook on Iraq.

We Americans should be wary of this. Our six years of terrorist-free living could be due simply to the fact that, under Bush, it makes no political sense to attack us. As the situation changes, either with a withdrawl from Iraq or a new administration, look out...

Is Guantanamo legal?

Yesterday in the NYT, Morris D. Davis, an Air Force colonel and chief prosecutor for the military commissions set to try the Guantanamo inmates, defended U.S. policy and practice regarding detainees. He pointed out that they are now been held in "clean, safe" prison facilities and that the military commissions provide them with all of the basic legal rights customarily given to international war criminals.

But it is this point--that the detainees are being treated as war criminals (i.e. "unlawful combatants") rather than prisoners of war--that should give us pause. Ever since President Bush's military order on November 13, 2001, all members of al Qaida (and subsequently the Taliban) have been treated as war criminals and not POWs. The detainees are outside of international law. Although Colonel Davis cites a passage of the Geneva conventions (a passage that does not apply to POWs), the Military Commissions Act explicitly prohibits defendants from appealing to the Geneva Conventions for protection. Once designated 'unlawful' by a combat status review tribunal--the proceedings of which, as Col. Davis notes, may be classified and closed to the detainee--the detainee is no longer protected by the Geneva Conventions and is held essentially on our whim.

If Col. Davis' account of Guantanamo is right, then we have certainly fulfilled our legal obligations to these detainees. The trouble, as I see it, is that by designating them 'unlawful' we have made these obligations very light indeed. When people, even if they are not citizens, are allowed to slip through the cracks of our legal system, falling outside the scope of both international treaties and domestic law, we should begin to worry about the independence and strength of our legal system...and our republic.

Guantanamo

Whenever I try to justify U.S. foreign policy to someone from another country, I can do pretty well talking about development aid, free trade and our efforts to liberalize markets. I even have some success defending the Iraq fiasco. But all he needs to do is mention "Guantanamo" for the conversation to fall flat. What can I possibly say to justify that?

This is reason enough to shut the whole place down. But we must do more than that. As Amnesty International argues, Guantanamo represents the "tip of the iceberg" of our international law violations during the war on terror. We must shine a bright light on all that the CIA and the Department of Defence have been doing to prisoners around the world. We need a full Congressional report detailing all of the brutal ins and outs of the process whereby men were rounded up in Mauritania or Pakistan, Iraq or Afghanistan, shipped around the world, interrogated and tortured. Perhaps this will harm our prestige in the world even more. But it is a necessary price. We cannot, we must not, allow a president of the United States, or any representative or employee of the government, to get away with violation of international law. If we do, we have come a long way down a slippery slope that leads to a revocation of the rule of law altogether. The rule of law is an elusive concept, but suffice it to say, it is whatever was missing in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and today in Kim Jong-Il's North Korea. Allowing for a secret violation of a treaty to which we are a party allows for secret violations of any kind of law we can write. Secretly reinterpreting the generally understood terms of a treaty is just as bad.

Clearly, the U.S. believes that its prisoners fall under neither "prisoners of war" nor "protected persons" (i.e. civilians) as defined and protected by the Geneva Conventions. Iraqi and Afghan citizens certainly are at the very least protected persons, since we openly declared war on those countries. All people who are held "in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals" are protected, unless they are "nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State...while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are" (Convention IV, Part I, Art.4). Iraq and Afghanistan are not neutral, so their citizens are protected. The Conventions stipulate that "No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties" (IV, III, 31).

As for nationals of a neural state which which we have normal diplomatic relations, the Convention assumes that we can sort them out through normal diplomatic channels. In the case of countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Mauritania, the countries have capitulated to the U.S. rather than defend the rights of their citizens. (All countries in question have signed the Geneva Conventions of 1949.)

Nevertheless, it is hard to make the case that "enemy combatants" of all kinds and from all nations should not be afforded protection as prisoners of war. Convention III defines most prisoners of war in terms of a "Party" to a conflict, which the the U.S. can legitimately claim does not exist. But the definition also affords protection to "Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war" (III, I, 4). I think it is not difficult to make the case that insurgents respect the laws and customs of war. Your average foreign insurgent in Iraq or Afghanistan is far different from Mohammad Atta and co., if not in temperament, then in means of combat. And in this case, means of combat makes all the difference.

Targeting civilians is, of course, not allowed. But many of the insurgents we've picked up are simply irregular soldiers fighting urban guerrilla warfare the best way they can. They should be afforded protection as prisoners of war. And if they are, they are entitled to, among many other things: "premises [that are]...entirely protected from dampness and adequately heated and lighted"(III, part III, art.25), and "In the event of transfer, prisoners of war shall be officially advised of their departure and of their new postal address" (III, part III, art.48). As Amnesty International reports, some detainees have been held at "a secret prison near Kabul that was know as the 'prison of darkness' because detainees were subjected to darkness and loud music around the clock." If the detainees can be shown to be prisoners of war, this flagrantly violates the Conventions.

Perhaps I'm mistaken. Perhaps the U.S. has stuck to the letter (if certainly not the spirit) of the Conventions. Perhaps a deep Congressional investigation would ultimately vindicate recent U.S. policy and practice. If so, so much the better. But if not, we have to show the members of the current administration, and all future administrations, that ultimately they cannot hide crimes forever. In America, secrets do not stay secret. That is our only defense. It is unfortunate to admit, but the best and perhaps only way to ensure that an investigation of the sort I'm imagining takes place is to elect a president who will direct it on his or her own initiative. In this matter at least, the executive branch is dangerously unchecked. When the Supreme court struck down the legitimacy of the military commissions used to (eventually) try detainees (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 29 June 2006), Bush simply convinced the (still Republican) Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act legalizing them.

We need a president who will not only shut down Guantanamo but will also ensure that everything that's been going on comes wholly to light. Barring this, we need some more radical alternative...

The Case for a Pullout Date

On Thursday, the Senate narrowly passed a spending bill, already passed by the House, that ordered an October 1 pullout of US troops from Iraq. Bush has said he'll veto it. While I think October might be too early, I do think it is time we set a date. Rather than either immediate or indefinite withdrawal, setting a pullout date is the best policy for Iraq. Here's my thinking:

If we set a date, we will force key Iraqis to start worrying. Members of the government, if they wished to keep their jobs, would have to scramble to get security forces trained and functioning bureaucrats in place. It may be naive to imagine that the government can suddenly pull itself together. But it is equally so to think that given more years it eventually will. What the Iraqi government needs is more incentives, or perhaps disincentives.

But more important are the militias. The New York Times quoted Abdul Mehdi Mutairi, one of Moktada al-Sadr's officials, as saying, "In order to drive out the occupation, we need to build up the security forces; then we can have a timetable." Sadr is openly critical of the U.S. He stirs up resentment and, most probably, violence against U.S. forces and interests. But he still relies on the U.S. presence to prevent outright war. These semi-political, semi-organized militias don't want an outright civil war full of foreign influence and with an uncertain outcome. So let's give Sadr what he claims he wants. Let's set a pullout date, an end to the occupation. Sadr and co. would be forced to scramble to set up a stable system to fill the security void. The stability he seeks might not be the stability Bush originally had in mind, but right now any stability will do.

The main argument I've heard against a pullout date is that, given an exact date, the insurgents or the Iranians will simply wait until the U.S. leaves and then attack the fragile system that remains. If this is true, which I doubt (because I bet the insurgency would just continue), I think that would be a great result. First, many insurgents are simply incensed by the U.S. presence, and their anger may well die down after we leave. As for the more sectarian violence, if this really were temporarily halted, it could buy the Iraqis time to set up a functional system. I do admit that there should be some fear of Iranian influence, but hopefully we can count on a revived Iraqi nationalism to counter it.

The other argument against a date is, of course, that we would be admitting defeat. I don't know who is going to do the admitting--certainly not Bush who has already declared victory. But seriously, what were the criteria for victory? We got Sadaam. We ensured there was no WMD. We needn't worry directly about oil: it'll find its way to the market. (Who the money goes to and how they spend it does matter in the long term, however.) So stability is the only remaining goal. If I'm right, U.S. forces are actually standing in the way of stability. By setting a date and sticking to it, we will force the Iraqis to stop merely blaming us and start working while we provide security for the transition period. It's win-win. Neither immediate or indefinite withdrawal has those benefits.


Interesting to note: Lieberman voted with the Republicans, but Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith (R-OR) voted with the Democrats.

Here is the bill: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR1591

North Korea as Linchpin

North Korea is the linchpin of East Asia--the stability of the region rests on Kim Jong-Il's maniacal shoulders. But, paradoxically, all this weight ensures the relative stability of the North Korean regime. No one can afford to have North Korea topple. So, it probably wont. The situation is remarkably clear--there is almost no reason not to deal with Kim, prop him up even. And Bush, who increasingly defines 'threat' as all and only Islamic fundamentalist governments, is increasingly willing to do just that.

I will look at the situation from the perspective of each of the regional players--the parties to the Six Party talks--to show that, for everyone's sake, North Korea must not topple.

Japan hates North Korea. Japan has a bloody colonial history in Korea--Koreans hate Japan back. Some in the South even feel some satisfaction every time the North puts a scare into the Japanese. So Japan might be a target for a nuke. It is useless at this point to say that Kim will not fire one off because of the threat of retaliation--the country is already devastated. Still, the possibility is more likely the less stable the regime gets. We should not assume that Kim or any of his generals will act for mere revenge, but if they decide that a major attack is necessary in order to establish their bargaining position, they may choose Tokyo or Osaka over Seoul. There's a lot of history over here. Japan, therefore, has incentive to keep N. Korea stable and less likely to start an international war. (By the way, some in Japan are pushing to get their own nukes, as a counter to the North).

China, for its part, doesn't mind the current situation at all, and would be terrified of a violent shake up. China is North Korea's largest trading partner--somewhat covertly developing mines and importing coal and iron ore. (Yes, North Korea does have foreign trade: $4.4 billion in 2005, especially "fish, clothing, coal, electrical appliances, and iron ore in that order" according to this article: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/24/bloomberg/sxore.php.) Given China's economic involvement in the country, and the complete lack of U.S. involvement, China is the likely winner after a collapse, establishing, perhaps, a more overt sphere of influence. (This sphere could encompass the South as well, whose largest trading partner is also China. The FTA with the U.S. could help to forestall this, which is another reason why we should support it.) Still, what could China do without Kim that they cannot do with him? China is able to deal with the North on an almost exclusive basis already. What interest would they have in opening the country up to other powers? Moreover, the collapse itself could be difficult. Millions of refugees, underfed, desperate, and vicious, would flood across the boarder. And China would have to get involved in the clean up, wasting valuable time and missing truck loads of resources. Can't this wait at least until after 2008?

Even though many people say they want it, South Korea is afraid of reunification. Because North Korea is full of weapons and starving criminals, the reunification itself would be devastating in terms of lives and property. South Korean rhetoric of late has emphasized the oneness of the Korean people, and some Koreans believe they would simply be joining hands with their brothers. But do not assume that the Northerners have been getting the same rosy view of the South. Some there, who still take the time to think about it, may view the South as imperially compromised, greedy capitalists whose property deserves to be plundered.

But even after the looting quiets down, or if it is managed properly, the cost of integrating the two societies, i.e. bringing the North up to a livable economic level, would be incredibly great. West Germany's economy was crippled for years after reunification, but East Germany was far more advanced that North Korea is today, and the West was, at the time, one of the most powerful economies in the world.

The U.S. has two obvious interests here: the safety and stability of South Korea and Japan, our biggest allies in the region, and the containment of Kim's WMD. Economic development of the North, while Kim is in power, serves neither of these goals. Every dollar north of the DMZ goes to the military. But, as we have seen, collapse also serves neither goal. South Korea's economic stability, at least, depends on maintaining the partition. And Japan may well be at risk if the regime dissolves. And all control over WMD would be lost, just as was the case with the dissolution of Soviet states. Some commentators have suggested that Kim could have been destroyed much earlier, and that the longer we wait, the worse the effects of his collapse. This may be true; but the damage would never have been zero. It always proved better to avoid any damage to the South or Japan, and to keep track of WMD, than to risk it. The U.S., therefore, is stuck with the track they have so far taken: keep Kim on his last legs perpetually.

Russia might be the only country that would not much mind a collapse--because of the damage it would do to the U.S. and China. But Russia does share a border with North Korea, and would have to deal with some refuges. And, suppose the U.S. or China somehow manages to effectively stabilize the country. Then this is just another example of a former Soviet client state that slipped through Putin's fingers.

After the nuke test on October 8, Philip Bowring pointed out that "The business pages record scant market reaction, even in South Korea where the share index has fallen less than 2 percent" because, he says, the markets agree with Kim's assessment that the U.S. would not attack because "his neighbors have far more interest in a stable northeast Asia than in risking chaos on the peninsula". This seems to be have been the right assessment.

And so, the status quo persists. For everyone's sake, North Korea must not topple...everyone that is except the North Korean people.

[A lot of my information came from this article: "When North Korea Falls" by Robert Kaplan.]

North Korea, from a Foreign Policy Perspective

Here's another something I wrote for Shannon's ADP site. It was originally posted on February 20.

The US has been reluctant to really deal with North Korea since the fall of the Soviet Union on the assumption that it would, at each crucial stage, soon collapse. It has not collapsed. As Richard Bernstein notes here, if Clinton had followed up on the 1994 Agreed Framework, we could have an embassy in Pyongyang today. Instead, he calculated that the Kim regime would soon collapse anyway, and so as long as there was no immediate nuclear threat, there was no reason to deal with it.

Bush almost certainly added N. Korea to the axis in 2002 because he needed a third for rhetorical value, and hating N. Korea is a politically neutral position in the US. The North's response was to resume building nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them. It took a full nuclear test for Bush to start taking directly to Kim. (The US prefers to deal with N. Korea from within the Six Party Talks--in order to, I think, force China and S. Korea to express their disapproval of the North.) As usual, we ignore N. Korea until they do something nuclear.

Richard Armitage (deputy Secretary of State from 2001-2005) and Joseph Nye just authored a report at CSIS titled "The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Getting Asia Right Through 2020". Their assessment of N. Korea is the same old story: Reunification will happen, with "high probability" by 2020, and it will happen because of "instability in North Korea". They write off the possibility of development with this: "Our bottom-line assessment is that Pyongyang's behavior since 1990 strongly suggests that it is trapped in its own political and economic system...Our conclusion is that the Kim regime would prefer to muddle through, despite the dim future for 21 million North Koreans, than to take the risk of opening up à la Deng Xiaoping."

Yet again the US concludes that there is no reason to deal with N. Korea because it will just collapse anyway, and Kim is too greedy and short-sighted to attempt to develop his country. We think that he thinks opening up is a "risk" despite the fact that the Communist party in China has had no problems holding on to power after reforming the economy.

I think we should consider changing our approach in North Korea. What if we could allow Kim to stay in power while developing the economy. This is the approach that China and the South have been taking, with rather limited success. We could get it off the ground. One problem with this is that we really don't know what Kim will do--does he still fancy taking control of the South, or is he just hoping to insulate his power at home? Would he take all profits from international trade for himself and his crew, or would he allow his people to develop their own economy? Still, we often accuse Kim of being stuck in the cold war, still seeing his situation as a fight against the capitalist, colonialist West. But if we refuse to deal with Kim simply because we have bad history with him and his father, we are the ones stuck in the cold war. I think our best move in almost any international situation is to use our economy as a bargaining tool. Lets open up our markets and our consumers. We can get more of the world in sync with our foreign policy if we get it in sync with our economy. Economic power is our biggest weapon, and we consistently fail to use it. This could be a strategy in Iran as well. China, and countries like Venezuela, have already figured this out, and are signing FTAs and using economic leverage wherever they can.

Osama as Gavrilo Princip

I might as well post this too. I wrote this in February, but it is still interesting, if probably completely wrong. Let me know what you think...

In 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, setting off the powder keg of ethnic conflict that was Eastern Europe. While I don't mean to suggest that bin Laden was directly responsible for the Iraq invasion (any more, really, than Gavrilo Princip was responsible for German trenches in France), I think we can tag him as the man who set off the powder keg of ethnic conflict that is the Middle East today. I'm not trying to place blame here. My point is this: bin Laden is a flash in the pan. The real threat, and the real story for the history books, is going to be the (World?) war kindled by the collapse of nation states and the dissolution of American influence in the Mid East. International terrorism is not the problem for the U.S. We should be much more concerned about an old-fashioned conventional war fought throughout the entire oil-producing, militant, ethnically diverse region. And there's no way for us to avoid it--they way we avoid, say, Darfur--now that we've set it off. We would be caught in the middle, as our troops are already there. And we have real interests, like the survival of Israel and access to Saudi oil.
I think we have little more to fear from bin Laden. But that is not to say he failed. Like Princip, he was hoping to bring down an Empire by striking a match. He doesn't want to destroy New York; he wanted to get the U.S. involved in a war we can't win and thereby drive us out of the region. We should, I think, forget about terrorism and start figuring out how to fight and win a real war in the Mid East. But first we have to figure out what winning would really mean. Democracy in Iraq is a daydream. Stability must be the goal.

In fact, the only circumstance in which we might be again in danger of being attacked is if we pull out of Iraq now. Bin Laden's strategy was to bleed the giant. He watched us go into Somalia with big guns, run into trouble, and eventually leave without having stabilized the country or achieved any of our objectives. It took some time, but the vacuum we left was eventually filled by a fundamentalist Islamic government. (A government which has recently been ousted by Ethiopian troops--on our suggestion. This could be a much more effective way for us to fight wars in the future...) If we leave Iraq now, we will have followed his game plan almost to the letter. Look for another attack in the U.S. almost as soon as our troops are safely home, in order to provoke us to come out again. We are vulnerable out in the open--not so much our soldiers, who are well trained, or our military, which is improving daily, but our political clout in the region and around the world.

So, my point is either we get mixed up in a war now--and bin Laden and co. are out of the picture--or we go home and risk a second major attack. Either way, the idea that we must be involved in a global war on terror, with Osama as the mastermind adversary, is not at all helpful.