First, do no harm

Fiona Terry, who currently works for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Myanmar, has won the 2006 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The Louisville Courier-Journal has the story that will likely be picked up by Australian papers soon:

Although well-intentioned, humanitarian aid to Rwandan refugees in Zaire became the fuel for more repression and death, Fiona Terry says.

For analyzing how that occurred and urging international aid groups to understand that their actions can have unintended consequences, Terry was awarded the 2006 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order....

Terry, 38, is an Australian who worked for Medicins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) in camps in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

She wrote a book in 2002, "Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action," about that tragedy and similar ones in refugee camps around the world.

"Not enough organizations look into the political side of their aid, what they're contributing to," Terry said. "They turn a blind eye to it."

The award is a $200,000 prize. Terry's book was published by Cornell University Press and is available in paperback.

Dr. Terry provided the newspaper with quite a bit of detail about the Zaire case:

In Zaire, Terry said she saw how the assistance that nations, including the United States, were sending was being diverted to illegitimate purposes.

"The aid was helping the refugees," Terry said, "but the refugees were being controlled completely by the same people who had committed genocide in Rwanda."

The majority Hutus had directed a bloodbath against the minority Tutsis, resulting in up to a million deaths and a mass exodus of Tutsis and moderate Hutus to neighboring countries.

As the Tutsis wrested power from the Hutus in Rwanda, many of those responsible for the mass killings ended up in the camps as well. They "were stealing the food and preventing the refugees from going home," Terry said.

Eventually, the French section of Medicins sans Frontieres, including Terry, pulled out of Zaire.

"We have an obligation to say no sometimes -- 'This is unacceptable,' " Terry said.

The Hutu militia used the camps as bases to attack Rwanda, and in 1996 Rwanda attacked and destroyed the camps.

"Up to 200,000 people went missing from the camps," Terry said. "It was really a slaughter."

Terry also claims that aid to Afghan refugees in Pakistan gave birth to the Taliban.

I'm looking forward to meeting Terry in April when she visits Louisville. Full disclosure: I have been the chair of the Grawemeyer World Order committee for more than a decade.

A Better Case?

Matthew Yglesias, a blogger who writes for The American Prospect, yesterday posted an interesting blog entry titled, "A Better Case." Briefly, Yglesias says that sanctions were causing horrible suffering for innocent Iraqis, US troops were tied up in Saudi Arabia, Iraq was consuming tremendous amounts of US diplomatic capital, and that Iraq would eventually pose a threat to its neighbors (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) if the sanctions regime ended.

While this is a somewhat provocative defense of war, I think it falls well short of an actual justification for attack.

Why?

First, a lot of attention was directed at the sanctions problem over the past decade. Many people favored "smart sanctions" that would minimize the harm to innocents and maximize the containment value (deny military equipment, etc.). Essentially, US policy towards the Soviet Union and its satellites was governed by "smart sanctions" through much of the 1970s detente era. Granted, the Soviet economy was sufficiently large and powerful to build weapons indigenously, but Saddam Hussein's Iraq would have needed trade. It would have been relatively easy to allow food, medicine and even consumer goods, even as weapons and arms-related good were banned.

Second, while 5000 American troops were tied up in Saudi Arabia, about 120,000 are now in Iraq -- and will be there for many years under current Pentagon planning. The war is also diverting important resources from the war on terror -- as I keep mentioning.

The US expended diplomatic capital on Iraq because it considered Iraq one of the worst rogue states in the world, long before 9/11. Even after Iraq was relatively easily defeated, had its weapons programs dismantled, and suffered more than a decade of sanctions, some people still viewed it as part of an "axis of evil." This was threat inflation, pure and simple, and was distracting because the US made it so.

Finally, there is very little reason to believe Iraq would have been a major regional threat. Many international relations theorists viewed Iraq's past "aggression" as mostly defensive. As John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt pointed out in their Foreign Policy article from January/February 2003, Iraq may have had reasonable (and defensive) reasons for attacking both Kuwait and Iran. Kuwait was exceeding OPEC oil quotas and wasn't negotiating a solution to that or to debts related to the long Iran-Iraq war. Iran had been stirring up dissent within Iraq, attempted to kill Saddam, and had even gained territorial concessions.There is also pretty good evidence that deterrence failed in Kuwait because US Ambassador April Glaspie said the following at a July 25, 1990 meeting with Saddam Hussein:

We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

As Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, "The U.S. State Department then reinforced this message by declaring that Washington had 'no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.'”

I'm not trying to defend Iraq's past behavior, and Saddam was certainly a very bad man, but that does not mean the US should default to war to attack and topple bad regimes headed by horrible tyrants. President Bush himself opposed war in Rwanda, even when asked during the 2000 campaign if it would have been worth saving 600,000 lives.

Since 9/11, the US has focused tremendous attention on the problems of transnational terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The war in Iraq did very little to address either of those problems, ticked off key American allies, diverted resources, angered millions of Muslims (thus, potentially increasing the pool of terrorists), and undercut the rule of international law (necessary for fighting terror and criminalizing proliferation of WMD).

The above is not an especially thorough critique of the Yglesias case. For more on Iraq specifically, I would recommend reading the writings of David Cortright, George Lopez, Eric Herring, and Marc Lynch. All these scholars worked on Iraq sanctions and threats for many years before the US went to war in March 2003. None liked the sanctions regime and all saw legitimate alternative policies that were not pursued.

The alternative policy to the WMD/al Qaeda justification for war was not simply a "better case" for attack.

Still more hypocrisy

My connection was disrupted and I lost a post that I had been writing. Ugh.

Rather than rewrite the entire thing, let me summarize:

Bush, Rice, Powell and others in the administration have been arguing that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in Iraq, partly because he was such a brutal dictator. Cynically, one might say that they are using this argument because of the lack of evidence about Iraqi WMD and because of few Iraqi connections to al Qaeda (and none to 9/11).

Then again, as I've previously noted, candidate Bush said in a 2000 debate that he would not have intervened in Rwanda to save 600,000 people.

In any case, administration officials virtually never acknowledge that the US is in bed with a lot of brutal regimes in the war on terror. Consider, for example, Uzbekistan, one of the members of the "coalition fo the willing."

Chris at SeeWhy? noted a recent story in The Guardian about US/UK hypocrisy towards Uzbekistan and Iraq. The link was dead, but based on his comments, I think this is the story. And it is well worth reading.

Basically, Britain recalled Ambassador Craig Murray for being too outspoken against the regime. The US may have played a role in his recall. After all, Murray pointed out that the Uzbek government boils its political opponents.

Here are some other key paragraphs from the story (some omitted)

Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet police state on the strategically important border with Afghanistan, was another potential political minefield. Uzbek security services use "torture as a routine investigation technique", according to the US State Department. But Washington's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led them to finance much of the regime's security apparatus. In exchange the US gets a military base in Khanabad as a centre for operations in Afghanistan. Last year Washington gave the government $500m (£298m) in aid, $79m of which was specifically for the same "law enforcement and security services" they accused of routine torture.

He [Mr Murray] said: "We believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 people in detention whom we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. No government has the right to use the war against terrorism as an excuse for the persecution of those with a deep personal commitment to the Islamic religion, and who pursue their views by peaceful means."

Mr Murray sent numerous reports to London about human rights abuses, and his dispatches became increasingly heated during the build-up to the Iraqi invasion. He argued Uzbekistan's human rights abuses were as bad as those being used as ammunition against Baghdad. Yet Washington was financing Uzbekistan, rather than invading it, he said.

Justifiably, Chris at SeeWhy? is pretty upset about US/UK hypocrisy:

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

If the administration keeps using human rights as the post facto justification for war in Iraq, I'm going to report more of these stories.

Catching up on Assorted Topics

In some ways, the "Plame Affair" (as Mrs. Wilson's outing as a covert CIA operative is being called) is distracting much of the press corps from some other major stories. Let's go quickly around the horn, shall we?

1. As everyone knows by now, David Kay didn't find any WMD in Iraq and apparently concludes that he's not likely to find evidence of an active program at this point. As Abu Aardvark points out, this means that arms control worked, in the form of UN weapons inspectors.

Think about that for a second, because the Bush administration keeps bringing up Iran's alleged WMD and so far, the IAEA inspectors are still actively inspecting Iranian facilities. The Khatami regime is still cooperating. Reuters has a brief mention of this today, in fact.

The yahoo story AA notes has some additional interesting information:

The "mobile biological facilities" that Colin Powell played up on ABC TV just this past weekend "were not ideally suited for biological warfare production." Maybe next week one of the chat shows can get Kay to debate Powell and Cheney?

Seriously, when is the administration going to start talking about the actual evidence, rather than repeating and repeating the fantasies from last October, or January? Powell is virtually no better than Cheney in this respect. Of course, Powell knows that his personal credibility is on the hook -- and he's apparently having a hard time dealing with the facts.

Another notable point from the story is a quote from Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, who said, "I'm not pleased by what I heard today."

That is an incredibly partisan statement. Since the failure to find evidence makes the administration look like lying, smirking chimps, I guess Roberts is unhappy about the domestic political consequences.

However, isn't it actually very good news that Iraq didn't have WMD? They were almost surely unable to threaten the US -- and could not have passed nasty weapons along to terrorists?

Can't we admit that some fears are overstated?

Yahoo sandbags this quote until last:

Multiple sources have told the team that "Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW (chemical warfare) program after 1991," Kay said. And information found so far suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce and fill new chemical warfare weapons was "reduced -- if not entirely destroyed."

2. The UN and Iraq: Only about 30 UN personnel remain in Iraq, out of about 600 that were once posted there. Clearly, until the situation on the ground is safer, the UN people do not want to be in this US-occupied country.

At the same time, Kofi Annan, plus Security Council representatives from France, Germany, and Russia are strongly signalling (according to Reuters) that the latest US draft doesn't go far enough in ending the occupation in a timely manner. They are especially concerned about the political side, no one is really debating the need for US troops.

The safety and political occupation issues are related. Once Iraq gains a measure of sovereignty, which requires an end to "the occupation," I suspect the situation on the ground will become much more secure. Resistance is aimed at foreign occupiers -- namely, the US. If a legitimate government (i.e., one that gains the acceptance of Iraqis) wanted US troops to provide security, then then US troops would be much less likely to be targets.

As I've said before, the US is going to have to relent on this point.

3. OK, I'll say a couple of words about the Plame affair. So far, the Bush administration is acting fairly sensibly, claiming they want to know who leaked classified information. However, they do have one not-so-small problem.

While spokesperson McClellan emphasizes that the newspapers are merely filled with allegations, it is undeniable that someone leaked Plame's name. That single fact is going to hang out there until someone is identified as a source.

All day, I felt badly about mentioning Lewis ("Scooter") Libby by name yesterday, but Salon has a piece about his emergence as suspect #1. Pat Buchanan mentioned his name on MSNBC, the NY Daily News noted his status, etc. And this was in Tuesday's Washington Post:

An article that appeared on the Time magazine Web site the same week Novak's column was published said that "some government officials have noted to Time in interviews . . . that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." The same article quoted from an interview with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, saying that Cheney did not know about Wilson's mission "until this year when it became public in the last month or so."

The story is co-authored by Mike Allen, who did the big front-page Sunday piece, and the paragraph is really awkward.

Libby, by the way, supposedly went with Cheney to CIA headquarters on a number of occasions to lean on analysts who weren't producing the Iraq conclusions they wanted.

It's all unpleasant, really.

4. Finally, to go back to my first point about the absence of WMD, what's the justification for the war this week? Condi Rice said Sunday that everyone is glad the horrible, brutal Hussein regime is gone. Obviously, it is good that he's gone, but I have a hard time seeing the Bush people justifying the use of American armed forces in the name of humanitarian intervention. They were clearly against the so-called "Clinton Doctrine" in 2000.

Here's the transcript from the Wake Forest debate, October 12, 2000:

LEHRER: But the reverse side of the question, Governor, that Vice President Gore mentioned -- for instance, 600,000 people died in Rwanda in 1994. There was no U.S. intervention. There was no intervention from the outside world. Was that a mistake not to intervene?

BUSH: I think the administration did the right thing in that case, I do. It was a horrible situation. No one liked to see it on our -- you know, on our TV screens. But it's a case where we need to make sure we've got a, you know, kind of an early warning system in place in places where there could be ethnic cleansing and genocide the way we saw it there in Rwanda.

And that's a case where we need to, you know, use our influence to have countries in Africa come together and help deal with the situation. The administration -- it seems like we're having a great love fest now -- but the administration made the right decision on training Nigerian troops for situations just such as this in Rwanda. And so I thought they made the right decision not to send U.S. troops into Rwanda.