Month: December 2006

The tragic events that continually unfold in Sudan (like the events in Rwanda a decade since) are, the world must acknowledge, genocidal in their scope, in their intent, in their effect.  For all intents and purposes, the world has acknowledged these facts; and yet the world has stood by, continues to stand by and watch it happen.  One is tempted to observe, bitterly, that genocide has become a spectator sport — but spectator sports garner far more attention, and indeed far more money.

The United Nations decries it; the United States has, through its Department of State, declared the unraveling in Darfur to be genocide; and yet neither can muster the political will — or the military force — to intervene: the former because it is chronically weak, the latter because its forces are bogged down, as it were, in the Central Asian desert, the sand turning marshy as the blood pours recklessly, needlessly, and indiscriminately from invader and indigenous, infidel and faithful.

The world stands by as the people of Darfur are slaughtered.  One is forced to wonder: Is the genocide-ignorer a genocide-enabler?

The United States deplores the events, but the colossus too is impotent.  And one’s thoughts turn to America’s self-inflicted wounds, and the coming bloodbath in Iraq: genocide is in the wind there, too, and we are all but powerless to stop it.  The invasion set it in motion, “Mission Accomplished” assured its emergence, and our continued presence slows its arrival — for now.  And the question arises:  When a power (however inadvertently) create the conditions for genocide, does it thereby undertake a continuing obligation to prevent it?

These are not idle or theoretical questions, by any means: They are central to winding down America’s misadventure Iraq, and they neatly define the quandary of Americans who opposed the invasion of Iraq as unwarranted and now oppose withdrawal as immoral.

The argument runs something like this: Having once created an unstable and untenable situation in Iraq, the United States cannot now walk away from the civil war that has ensued.  Or: We lit the fire, after all; we ought to stick around long enough to put it out.

Alas, this is not a fire that can long be contained, much less extinguished.  Like the wildfires that devastate the American west, this one will (I fear) have to burn itself out.  The cultural animosities infecting the peoples of Iraq have alternately simmered and boiled over for centuries.  Only Saddam’s brutality held the region together as a modern nation-state, as no occupying power — no matter how benign or benevolent — could ever do: the Ottomans had a hard time of it, and the British failed utterly.  Now the United States takes its turn, and by freeing three disparate (and antipathetic) peoples from the tyrant’s grasp has unleashed the ethnic conflict and super-heated it.

For Iraq it hardly matters, at this moment, whether U.S. ground forces stay or go: by staying they forestall the inevitable conflagration; perhaps when it does occur, the other nations of the world will see fit to step in and suppress the violence.  Meanwhile, other corners of the world where the American forces could make a positive difference — Darfur being uppermost at this moment — burn and bleed, because American forces are, as of now, spread too thin.  Multilateral action — the African Union, the United Nations — has been tepid at best; only the United States has the power to take the kind of action, unilaterally, that is required.

And so the giant is twice shamed: for not intervening when it could, and then tying its own hands by intervening where it shouldn’t.

{Civics, Politics, Public Policy}

Additional resources:

“A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” (Samantha Power)

“We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda” (Philip Gourevitch)

“Encyclopedia of Genocide (2 Volumes)” (ABC-Clio Inc)

SaveDarfur.org has a post called “Educate Others” that’s worth checking out…

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have responded to the suffering in Darfur by standing up and demanding that their governments take action to end the crisis. However, many individuals still have not heard about the genocide in Darfur. To build the political will necessary to…

[composed and posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: bush, Civics, Civics, Darfur, diplomacy, genocidal, genocide, holocaust, invasion, iraq, orwell, pentagon, Politics, Politics, Public Policy, Public Policy, Rwanda

With the long-overdue departure of Donald Rumsfeld (not to mention the arrival, come January 4, of some much-needed adult supervision from Congress), perhaps the defense establishment can engage an honest and open debate about Iraq. For the last week the punditocracy and the retired generals on the talking-head circuit have chattered on about the “surge,” the idea being that an additional insertion of 20,000 or so ground forces would turn the tide in Iraq.

That tide went out many, many months ago, and it’s not coming back in. We have two choices: issue an apology and leave; or continue to watch our blood and treasure disappear into the desert sands, never to return.

What is now being called “the surge” is nothing more nor less than Frank Rich, Thomas Friedman, and others have been writing about for some weeks now: it is code for an invasion de novo in Iraq. It is the only way, at this point, to secure the country so that the really critical job of building (and repairing) basic infrastructure can get properly under way.

Why the Orwellian euphemism? Because distortion of language is a lesson this Republican party has learned well; it is Karl Rove’s stock-in-trade. Because in the absence of any real plan or progress, the only alternative — Rumsfeld himself as much as admitted it in his “deathbed” memorandum — is to attempt to redefine (for example) “victory” downward. As so many other things in this sorry war foisted on the world by this sorry administration, this “only alternative” is so only when regarded through the Bush funhouse prism, the one that presents all of the decider’s decisions in stark Manichean terms, as the obvious selection from a set of false choices.

All of which brings us back to those talking generals: some indeed say that a “surge” would secure Baghdad (for example) to better enable the training of Iraqi troops and police and permit the rebuilding to continue apace, without the distraction of open warfare in the streets (and around the power plants). Others, more realistic, perhaps, point out that a surge is another band-aid, a tactical response to a strategic blunder.

The problem with the surge is not that it’s a flawed idea (it isn’t); it is that we haven’t sufficient ground forces nor matériel to accomplish the job. The surge is, rather, a “do-over,” a weak attempt to correct our initial strategic blunder (the invasion) and tactical error (assignment of insufficient resources) by trying, too long after the fact, to “get it right.” We had the men and equipment in 2003, but Rumsfeld insisted we didn’t need them; the results were disastrous. Now that we have created chaos where there was none; terrorists where there were none; and contempt in the wake of admiration; we have squandered our resources and our prestige, and there is no getting them back. Recovery of our national pride will not be had by doubling-down a bad bet, but by a frank and full confession of our error.

The invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, up to the present day and into the foreseeable future under any circumstances, has been one enormous national humiliation. The executive lied, the legislature waffled, and the judiciary is doing its best to turn a blind eye to extra-legal excesses that are more effective at highlighting American hypocrisy than extracting intelligence or “keeping us safe” in any meaningful way. In short, democracy has failed and its true meaning bled away, drop by precious drop.

It would be refreshing if the debate, in Congress and on the opinion pages, included an acknowledgment of the real reason anyone is considering a surge: to forestall admission of “defeat” and thus preserve — for some segment of the voting public — the sense of “honor and dignity” that Bush promised to “restore” (as if it were ever missing). We have already been defeated, as much by our own hubris and want of planning as by any enemy; the only thing that remains, if our national honor is truly to be restored, is to issue an apology and walk away, chastened. It’s time for us to grow up and see ourselves as the world sees us.

{Civics, Politics, Public Policy}

[composed and posted with ecto]

{Civics, Politics, Public Policy}

Technorati Tags: bush, candor, Civics, congress, defeat, diplomacy, humiliation, invasion, iraq, obfuscation, orwell, pentagon, Politics, Public Policy, rumsfeld, truthiness

The debate over electronic votes — as noisy and as intellectually impoverished as it has been — has missed the central point, and the central problem. Many of the technologies being pushed — Diebold’s touch-screens come to mind — make the fatal error of conflating two distinct acts: the casting of votes, and the counting of the votes cast. The focus has been on counting, not casting: with accurate counting as the priority, the “new and improved” process is optimized for the convenience of the county clerk, whose (tedious) job it is to tally ballots.

This focus on counting misses the point of voting in the first place: if the first priority isn’t accurately recording the voter’s intent, accurate counting doesn’t count for much. If we were serious about solving (or at least mitigating) the problems that have made electronic balloting famous (or infamous) of late, we might try examining it as a system — with discrete component parts — rather than as a function. The essential components are, of course:

1. Record the votes: The voter’s choice is accurately recorded, in fixed and tangible form. This means that a paper trail is required: simply displaying the choice on-screen won’t do.
2. Count the votes: The recorded ballots are tallied, and (if necessary) tallied again. For the sake of simplicity, the paper ballots might be scanned, separated, and tallied; for the sake of accuracy, it might be worthwhile to employ multiple methods.

Much has been made of the need for paper trails, but even so the processes of casting and counting, of recording and tallying, coalesce into the single process of “voting.” A paper trail actually serves two distinct purposes: it verifies, to the voter, that the vote recorded is the vote he cast (see 1, above); and it provides a means of counting tangible, physical ballots (refer to 2, supra).

[Update: an editorial in The New York Times stresses the need for a paper trail and calls for Congress to act, after yet another election debacle in Florida.]
The fundamental difficulty, as noted above, is that the purchasing decisions are effectively made by the people who specify the equipment: the county clerks; and those decisions are heavily influenced by the equipment vendors, who often hire retiring clerks as “consultants” who can credibly lobby their former peers. Every interest, in short, is served save one: that of the voter.

What’s wrong with this picture?