A word on Gaza

I make no pretenses about knowing anything at all about the Middle East. I find that the conflicts there are both ridiculously intractable and feel that they probably get more than their fair share of airtime vis-a-vis other nasty, brutal conflicts going on in the world at any given time. This infuriates me. While I believe that Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, I often believe that particular tactics employed by the IDF are simply indefensible, and sometimes constitute breaches of international humanitarian law. Fighting rocks with helicopter gunships or rockets with infantry invasions blows any concept of proportionality to pieces. That said, certain Palestinian actors also need to learn/realize that violence clearly gets them nowhere except bombed back into the stone age. Should either side ever demonstrate the possession of a lick of common sense, I'll pay closer attention. This concludes my oversimplification.

Over the past day or so, I've read a few items that have put the conflict in perspective.

• This post argues that this particular conflict has greater geopolitical implications for the region that will most likely require some sort of new dialogue between the United States and Iran. Worth reading.
• Here we see the idea advanced that Israel's political leaders may lack the brainpower necessary to execute an effective strategy, and may not even have a strategy. They continue to count tactical advances as victories, when is a pretty low threshold of success.
• Then, the IDF's narrative about how/why the UN school in Gaza was bombed earlier this week continues to shift, and in highly dubious ways.
• And finally, let's bear in mind that Gaza has a higher population density than Los Angeles. We need to recognize that an all-out ground and air war is taking place is what is effectively one big city where the inhabitants are forbidden from leaving.

I'm now going to return to things I know a bit more about.

In which I'm mildly worried about humanity

It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that the world simply cannot handle any new humanitarian crises at the moment. We're stretched thin. Response capacity is just about all used up. There are some 18 UN peacekeeping missions at present, with more on the way. Trouble is, there aren't enough troops to staff them. One more disaster and we're stuck wringing our hands in grief.

In class the other day, we were discussing what could be done about Darfur. Obviously, the U.S. is "otherwise engaged" and so can't do much. Someone suggested sending in Europeans. They're skilled and have money and stuff, right? I pointed out that Europe has pretty small military resources compared to the United States, and those resources are basically already committed in Afghanistan and Lebanon. With East Timor getting shaky too, and who knows what might go down in other parts of Southeast Asia, Australia is pretty tied up. China and Russia have big militaries, but are so non-interventionist that they'll be incredibly unlikely to use them. As Victoria Holt points out, there is a serious need to sit down and figure out just how much response capacity the world currently has.

But it's not just military forces that are stretched. The high volume of ongoing crises/rebuilding from crises stretches civilian capacities within governments, international organizations, and NGOs as well. Do we even have the first idea of how these organizations are currently holding up under the strain?

This wouldn't be quite so scary if there weren't already big problems festering and receiving inadequate attention from the international community, even in some cases where there isn't a lack of will, per se (Darfur is probably a decent example here), but the funds and personnel just don't seem to be available to do what needs to be done. Admittedly, Western nations continue to be guilty of grossly underfunding their aid targets, but even if funds were forthcoming, would there be enough people to make use of them? Even if Ban Ki-moon restructures the UN Secretariat to make managing peace operations more efficient, will the organization even have the capacity to meet increasing demands?

All told, this seems like a bad time for human security. I hate to be so pessimistic, and I'm sure that present circumstances are temporary and likely to improve over the long term, but what do we do until then?

Briefly on Darfur

I'm concerned that things still appear to be getting worse in Darfur, and that the international community is still ham-strung over what to do. While New Mexico Governor (and now presidential candidate worth looking at) Bill Richardson managed to get the Khartoum government to accept a ceasefire (of uncertain date or timing) acting only as a representative of U.S. NGOs, official diplomacy seems to be going nowhere, while the military and humanitarian situation continues to decline, to put it mildly.

In his most recent post to his controversial blog, Jan Pronk, who served as UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan until the end of the year, provided rather disturbing information regarding the state of UN-Sudan relations, the recalcitrance of the UN Security Council and Secretariat, as well as an update on the lack of diplomatic initiatives by great power nations. It's worth a read, but it is far from uplifting.

It seems that now more than ever, there needs to be greater activism and advocacy for effective and determined engagement to end this now three year old crisis. Otherwise, the cries of "never again" that followed Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda are proving themselves to be hollow promises. For information on what you can do, I recommend visiting the Save Darfur Coalition.

A few thoughts on war

I recently watched the film Turtles Can Fly, which is the first film that was produced in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The film centers around children in pre-2003 invasion Kurdistan, who make their living by collecting landmines and sorting mortar casings. And that, I assure you, is the least of the war-time horrors portrayed. Yet there is an odd beauty in the film, but that doesn't make the subject matter any more palatable.

Like most Americans at this point, I am troubled by the war in Iraq. As the civilian death toll is now in the hundreds of thousands and the military death toll is now above that of September 11, I find this war, which I have always viewed as illegal and unjustified, even more repugnant. Cloaking the whole venture in the language of some unwinable War on Terror makes it even more disgusting. Anyone who thinks that destroying a whole country and the subsequent killing of such a massive number of people is acceptable in avenging and/or preventing a terrorist attack that killed 3,000, is sorely mistaken. Not only does this war fly completely in the face of accepted norms of proportionality, it has no clear purpose, no defined goals, and a continually diminishing measure of success.

Yet I am most disturbed by the effects and affects of the war on Iraqis themselves. This past summer, for the first time, I saw first-hand the effects of war among Liberian refugees. In some cases, living with a destroyed economic and political system is the least of concerns. The question of survival perpetually looms large. The psychological effects of the whole affair are particularly destructive. How do children cope with having witnessed their parents violently killed in front of them? How do women deal with children that are the product of rape by armed gangs of militants? What does one do when the entire network of social support, both formal and informal, has been torn from beneath them?

In a political context, the wars in Iraq and Liberia are almost completely dissimilar. But in terms of civilian costs, they aren't that much different. Yet these are exactly the costs that are usually ignored. Even as the world adopts lofty language like the responsibility to protect, the world's superpower, through its hubris, has sparked a huge slaughter of civilians. War is, and should be, an extension of policy. But what if that policy is flawed? What if the policymakers are unwilling to deal with reality? What if the whole war policy was based upon faulty factual and legal assumptions from the outset?

These are just a few thoughts. Don't take them as me diminishing the effect of terror attacks on American soil. Don't take them as assaults on the military - they don't make war, they just implement it. Just understand that this is a little of where I come from, and outlines a few things I'm currently mulling.

UN Security Council and Western nations need a wake-up call

I meant to write this a week or so ago, but personal circumstances prevented me from getting it done. As you are all well aware, this has been a busy summer with regard to "the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression." Israel, the world leader in failing to grasp the concept of a proportional response, went and blew the hell out of Lebanon in a failed effort to rescue two of their captured soldiers. The peace agreement in Darfur has effectively collapsed and only succeeded in creating a shift of alliances on the ground. And yet at the same time, international responses to these and other crises have been half-hearted at best.

On the Lebanon front, the UN Security Council managed to approve a resolution that called for a cease-fire and a 15,000 strong peacekeeping force (sans Chapter VII mandate), but only after weeks of wrangling. Even then, the European countries that had been so adamant about the need for a strong peacekeeping force then initially refused to cough up any respectable number of troops for it. Indeed, getting troop committments from them required an extended period of "intense prodding and pleading" by the UN from Kofi Annan and others.

In Darfur, the situation on the ground continues to detiorate, in spite of the May peace agreement, and possibly because of it. Again, the UN Security Council has authorized a peacekeeping force, this time of 24,000 personnel, but on the contention that the Sudanese government must approve the mission's deployment. Sudan, of course, has said no. After all, they're pursuing a genocidal policy, so why should they agree to letting the world curtail such activities?

There are two main lessons here that the world, especially the wealthy and powerful nations, seem to be missing.

1) All peacekeeping missions have a certain element of risk. Contributing nations (usually developing nations with big militaries) should be aware that some of their soldiers and police may be injured or killed. These peacekeeping operations don't just go anywhere, they deploy in places where there is a genuine need to prevent further violence, and the role of such forces is to basically stand between combatants and then work to consolidate a more durable peace arrangement. For the French (or any) government to assert that the potential loss of even one of its troops is too high a cost for the protection of a substantial group of people is preposterous on any number of levels.

2) The UN General Assembly opening summit in 2005 agreed that all nations have a "responsibility to protect" (R2P) their own civilians from genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that the international community has an obligation to ensure that this responsibility is met both at home and abroad. Clearly, in Darfur, Lebanon and elsewhere, this principle has been violated. Honestly, R2P is a pretty basic concept that should have been adopted well before 2005, but that's beside the point. The fact remains that governments have agreed that this is a core concept of international relations, and thus it needs to be enforced.

To be perfectly honest, I'm tired of sitting around and waiting for the world to respond to the various crises that pop up each year. I'm tired of Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh being the biggest peacekeeping troop contributing countries. If the Western world has all these wonderful values about protecting civilians and ensuring international peace -- the U.S., after all, essentially wrote the UN Charter -- then they should step up and do something about these conflicts. To fail to act smacks of everything from irresponsibility to racism. Yet to claim these lofty values from some higher level of morality while refusing to stand up for them simply reaks of the most arrogant hypocrisy. We need to not only reform the United Nations. We must also reform the way our leaders here in the West act and think.

That whole Darfur thing...

As someone who follows African conflicts basically all the damn time, I feel obliged to weigh in on the Darfur issue right off the bat.

The conflict is Darfur is absolutely miserable. There are multiple factions, multiple agendas, multiple interpretations of history and the present, and multiple attempts to either end or ignore the conflict itself. I'm one of those that believes that genocide is in fact taking place, and that this has been the case for at least two years now. Finally, a peace deal was signed late last week between the Khartoum government and the largest rebel faction, the SLM/A. Even though this has allegedly opened the door for UN peacekeepers, I'm still not terribly hopeful about the situation.

My primary concern is that the peace deal was signed by only one of three major factions. See, for things like ceasefires to work, you kinda have to get all sides to cease firing. Further, I have absolutely no confidence in the Khartoum government. Even though it has been relatively faithful to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that it signed with forces that had been fighting in Southern Sudan, there is still evidence that President Bashir and his cronies still try to sidestep the South, while taking in part of its oil money.

But part of my concern lies with the rest of the world too. Thanks for your protest last week. That was important. But it was a little late, no? Where were you two years ago? What kind of world is it that genocide takes two years to get a response?

Oh wait, we're talking about Africans being slaughtered. See the Rwanda example.

Why the Western interest now? We realized there might be oil in them there desert hills.

I'm not trying to be overly cynical. There are, in fact, boatloads of people who have expressed their concern over Darfur from the very beginning. I applaud those people, and I wish that I had been more vocal myself. But what we haven't seen in two years is real international action.

The African Union stepped up when nobody else did or would. They have fielded a peacekeeping operation in Darfur since 2004, although that mission is too small and lacks key equipment and essential funding. The mission should and now likely will be replaced by a UN operation. Yet this won't be any ordinary UN peacekeeping mission.

A peacekeeping operation in Darfur must be massive. After all, we're talking about a place the size of France. It took 21,000 peacekeepers in Sierra Leone to secure a peace that was more stable and in a country far smaller. It took 17,000 in Liberia. There are 17,000 more in Democratic Republic of Congo, and they can only cover about a third of that vast country. There are 10,000 coming to Southern Sudan, but again, that peace is more stable. In Southern Sudan, the war had raged for 20 years and it ended as much out of exhaustion as it did a real desire for some sort of peace.

So what should a UN mission in Darfur look like? Personally, I think you need at least 50,000 troops, complete with tanks and lots of helicopters. Those fighting in Darfur have not shown signs of exhaustion and don't seem terribly keen on this peace deal. This will be more peace enforcement than peacekeeping. It will be the biggest thing the UN has ever done. It will be ridiculously expensive. It will require huge logistical support. And it is entirely necessary. One of my former co-workers half-jokingly referred to this as "the invasion option." I don't think that's quite accurate. We don't need to conquer anything, we just have to stop the massive bloodshed. The whole original concept behind peacekeeping was to simply stand between two parties and refuse to let them kill each other.

A gentleman I met with tonight suggested that we first needed to buy off some of the parties in Darfur. However, with the discovery of oil wealth in the region, it will be impossible to buy off the spoilers unless they are promised a cut of the revenues. But wealth and power sharing can also be ensured by expanding the Government of National Unity to include Darfur representatives, and in short, some sort of political voice for the disenfranchised. It won't be perfect, but it's a start.

The fact of the matter is that Sudan is crumbling. In five years, the South will likely exercise its secession option. I think those in Darfur would like a similar option. There is also brewing conflict in Eastern Sudan that will likely lead to calls for independence, or at least autonomy. That leaves the Khartoum dominated center, which, by the way, has no resources at its disposal.
Thus the best we can do is make the disintegration a relatively calm one. Bashir and company are going to fight tooth and nail to stop it, and thus must be contained. The situation therefore requires a tremendous show of international resolve if we are to prevent further slaughter.