Four development paradigms in the abstract

Taken purely in the abstract, here are four leading international development positions, with respect to the question of what, if anything, is the most important factor leading to economic growth in the very poor world.

2. More money, more resources, or, Sachsism. This is roughly the Sachs position, at least as reflected in what it means once translated into UN policy. Sachs' book, The End of Poverty, contains much more nuance and many more qualifications and bows in the direction of other considerations beyond simply pouring in more money. But when it comes to what it means in UN policy, it reduces with astonishing speed to simply a "more money" proposal, a top down set of central planning, bureaucratized five year plans. I was much more impressed with Sachs when I read it in his book. Once I saw what it meant in practice - Sachs to Sachsism, so to speak - it just seemed like more of the same old demand for greater resouces, period. With hefty doses of European moral sanctimony at any questioning of the model, on the one hand, and rent-seeking by international agencies wanting to stick their faces in the trough, making sure they get their cut, on the other. I don't quite understand how Sachs, promoter of post-Soviet era Big Bang privatization, morphed into a Soviet-style central planner at the UN, but there it is.

3. Institutions and governance from the inside-out. Institutions and governance at the national and subnational level to ensure the rule of law, anti-corruption, property rights, political and legal stability, the political space in which to plan long term investments. This is roughly the William Easterly position - one which emphasizes the "capillary" level of development, one institution at a time. What matters, first of all, is governance at the national level, and then reaching down through the subnational levels, and the promotion of stable bourgeois institutions of government to ensure favorable conditions for investment. Not necessarily liberal - but bourgeois. On this view, the Sachs approach pours resources into the "wholesale" level, the "arterial" level, but fails to take account of the fact that the problems lie less at the wholesale level than at the highly retail level, the "capillary" level, of development. This is a slightly different point than the institution-governance point, but they are closely related and in support of each other. And on this model - very different from UN-Sachsism - governance provides the capitalist-bourgeois shelter within which long term private direct investment can take place, to provide employment, jobs, and ultimately raise incomes. Public infrastructure is important, but the engine of growth is ultimately private investment.

I may as well say, if it is not obvious, that I think the institution-governance model is by far the better approach, based on my years doing development work through various organizations. These are the two main models for debate, Sachsism and Institutions/Governance Reform. It has large practical implications. For example, the UN occupies a very particular position in this debate, having embraced Sachsism through the Millennium Development Goals - which amount to a central planning five year plan by any other name, and, as with Soviet style five year plans, in fact no one except for credulous journalists and children ever took it seriously.

The US has mostly taken the institutions-governance view - as have, when it comes to much of the actual work that they do, national European aid agencies - and has therefore wanted to fund things very differently in order to provide incentives to good governance. This produces severe clashes between the US and the UN, and the UN's enablers, the European governments. Any time someone wants to measure global anti-poverty efforts by looking merely at how much money got shoveled out the door, which is to say, anytime anyone wants to attack US policy on development - there you find Sachsism, the UN, most of the World Bank, all agencies public and private looking to extract their transaction costs, and the editorial board of the New York Times, in full-throated scold mode.

(There are many micro-level, rent-seeking connections here just in terms of who staffs the UN agencies, made mildly notorious in the last year by the hiring practices of UNDP - few Americans and relatively more Europeans with the support of their governments for their rent-seeking activities. Part of the reflexive Euro-support for UN-Sachsism is not just ideology, but convoluted personal and national ties within international organizations that facilitate rent-seeking behaviors. Dutch government support for cronyism by Dutch nationals at UNDP in ways that would likely - at least one hopes -not be acceptable in Holland itself is a good example. It is an understudied area, and likely to remain that way.)

It also bears noting that although in practice, when it comes to funding and spending money by countries, there is a relatively clear division between the two paradigms, at the level of ideas and paradigms, it is all pretty mixed up. Sachs says lots of things in support of institutions; Easterly does not deny the importance of public infrastructure. The US supports governance reforms, but spends lots of money and emphasizes public health, universal public education, many other large scale public expenditures quite independent of governance issues. European aid agencies all understand perfectly the governance and institutional issues. The most important document on this subject in recent years is a World Bank paper that monetizes the effect of institutions of social stability and the rule of law, to show the relative differences between countries of the multiplier effect such stability has on the labor of an average individual.

I labelled the above positions (2) and (3), respectively, rather than (1) and (2), because we can usefully add two more positions as "outliers" on either end of the spectrum. If we think of development paradigms as a spectrum, then we can start with something we might call the income transfer paradigm:

(1) International income transfer welfare model. Sachsism asserts that it is about ending poverty, but says that despite the vast amounts of money spent in earlier decades with little discernible effect, massive new resources are needed for that. The other way of looking at this, of course - and one which tacitly holds sway yesterday and today among more people than one might think, if everyone were honest - says, at bottom, that nothing is actually going to end poverty as a matter of development. The best one can hope for is welfare - global welfare, income support. Forget about curing the conditions of poverty; the best you can do is globalize the national welfare state model, and engage in massive income transfers. You would do well politically to call it development or anything else to make it palatable, but in fact it is permanent support on a redistribution model. If particular places do manage to grow themselves out of poverty, great, but we do not actually have a clue how to make that happen or any reason to think that we can make this happen from the outside, so really the best one can do is humanitarian relief on a global scale, and try to create the welfare state on a global scale. In the past, theories of neo-imperialism, in which the poverty of the poor world was seen as being in zero-sum relationship to the wealth of the rich world, this welfare redistribution could be justified on the basis of justice alone. Today, the plight of the world's poorest people is that they are pretty much irrelevant to the world economy - too poor even to bother to exploit - and so the justification for income transfer is one of pure pity and charity (and persuading them, in an era of mobility, not to pick up and come collect their welfare payments in person). (My personal, anecdotal sense is that lots of Europeans really, if they were honest, hold something like this view, and regard the Americans as hopelessly naive for believing that you can actually undertake development as such by improving institutions and governance.)

But there is another outlier view, on the other side, so to speak, of the (3) institutions/ governance paradigm:

(4) Deep culture, or 'embourgeoisization' - and its failure. This is a highly simplifed version of the argument by Gregory Clark in his excellent, highly provocative new book, A Farewell to Alms. It is a highly complicated thesis about Malthusianism, the Industrial Revolution, and the whole sweep of global economic history. But it contains important implications in trying to explain why much of the world has not followed the path of the Industrial Revolution, at least in income gains. The core factor, Clark says, is inefficient use of labor, even among unskilled labor, permitting society to capitalize long term on technological innovation.

Contrary to Ricardo, returns to land have been minimal and declining in places where the Industrial Revolution took hold. Contrary to Marx, returns to capital have been less than the author of Capital might have thought. The returns of the Industrial Revolution have mostly been to labor and, remarkably - given that the engine of growth is technological innovation - most of that to unskilled labor over the whole sweep of the Industrial Revolution, not to skilled labor (although I have questions as to whether that is not changing in our increasingly winner-take-all society).

The concluding chapters of Clark's book are very pessimistic. They identify the inefficient use of labor as being the fundamental reason why some societies have income growth and others do not. Innovation in technology is the driver that brings any society at all out of the Malthusian trap; but innovation spreading worldwide is insufficient to bring all societies out of it, and indeed those that remain are, in fact, worse off than preindustrial Malthusian societies, in both absolute and (of course) relative terms. The reason for that is largely the success of modern medicine, which in a Malthusian world translates increased well being into increased population, not long term increased income.

But the heart of the pessimism does not lie in the fact that Malthusianism remains present in the developing world. It is, rather, that in order to take advantage of innovation to get beyond Malthus requires the efficient use of labor, including unskilled labor. Yet the efficient or inefficient use of labor lies in cultural factors, not in Sachsian resources and only secondarily in Easterly institutional and governance predicates. Institutional and governance failures are part of the problem, of course, but mostly as effects of larger cultural patterns in the efficiency of labor, rather than as causes. If that is so - I simplify 600 pages of text into two sentences - then institutitional and governance reform is not likely to be effective in raising growth and incomes or, more precisely, is not likely to come about because they, too, require a certain underlying, precursor culture.

That culture is more or less what, worldwide, we think of as the bourgeoisie. Moreover, Clark says simply that it is completely unclear from an economist's perspective - rationality and incentives - why some cultures are or become more efficient in the use of labor, and others do not. He means by that efficiencies and inefficiencies that are not attributable to weak institutions and poor governance as causes; he sees them as underlying weak institutions and poor governance, rather than the other way around.

(Bourgeoisie is a difficult term, and it is my interpolation of Clark's text. I mean it here in its 19th century usage, its Marxist usage as a marker of production, rather than its contemporary 'lite' usage denoting merely middle income consumer society found to some extent everywhere in the world. It would be very interesting and valuable to have a Marxist critique of Clark by Robert Brenner or Josh Cohen; the historical antipathy of Marxists to Malthus combined with a thesis that seems highly unsatisfactory for anyone who wants a forward-moving view.)

(I'd note as well that Clark's conclusion, and indeed he nearly says so directly, opens the way for sociological, social theory, and anthropological (and let me add, legal anthropology and critical theory as well, although I'll try to say something about that later) evaluations of globalization and economic growth, because he freely admits that rationalist economics does not seem to be able to answer the fundamentally social question of why some societies efficiently utilize labor to income growth and others do not. It is one of the few relevant openings for such areas as social theory and critical theory in what is otherwise the relentless - because, let's be clear, largely successful - colonization by the economics of rational incentives and rational choice theory. There is a role here for social theory beyond rationalist economics, and it is one of the few places in which it is so, and perhaps more remarkable, that an economist admits this is so. )

The implication of Clark's culture-critique of development is that neither Sachsism nor governance reform will necessarily have much impact on the neo-Malthusian societies of poverty in the world today. As a matter of policy, then, what? One can do nothing, opt for welfarist income transfer on a humanitarian basis, or come up with something else. The question is what that something else might be, which will be the subject of a later post. Clark's concluding chapter, however, does not leave much as a positive development program.

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Seen from the standpoint of a taxonomy of development paradigms, we now have four programmes:

(1) Income transfer-global welfarism
(2) Sachsism
(3) Institutional-governance reform
(4) Bourgeois culture and its development - or failure

The 'outer' two, one and four, could be seen as skeptical-of-development paradigms; it might be better to call this the two-and-two taxonomy.

We could add many more, of course, some of which - like autarky - have been broadly discredited, or theories of neo-imperialism, which always seem to live to see another day, mostly because they always provide an avenue for blaming the rich world for the poverty of the poor world. I'll try to add some of those later.

But it seems to me that these four - the two interior paradigms seeing the way forward for actual growth, and the two exterior paradigms skeptically questioning whether or how much - capture the main debate today.

(ps. There is a good collection of essays by leading economists, development experts, etc., over at the Templeton Foundation website on directions for international development today. They are all far less pessmistic than Clark's analysis would suggest.)

(pps. Robert Samuelson has a column that does a reasonably good job of summing up Clark's complicated book, in the Washington Post, here. I note it provoked a irritated letter to the editor from an anthropologist protesting that all the bourgeois virtues of income growth can be found in all sorts of different places in the world. Possibly this is so; you would be hesitant to think that a demonstrated factual statement given the a priori ideological vehemence of the letter writer. But this is one of the problems with anthropology today. True of course that anthropology of yesterday was notable for celebrating white European cultural superiority; today's equally ideological anthropology engages much of the time in either showing that, when it comes to good things, all cultures are equally filled with them or, alternatively, that the West is filled with bad things. None of this is going to do much, however, to convince those of who stand outside anthropology's sternly engage political and social prior commitments of the value of its supposed empiricism. Many works of anthropology I read today are either political tracts or else little more than development work, committed to a paradigm in development work, whereas what we need is empirical research into the connections between forms of development work and its actual function and results in different cultures and societies; anthropology dwindled into engagement in development loses much ability to help see a picture beyond a particular development paradigm.)

ASIL discussion with Martin Scheinin, UN HRC special rapporteur on human rights & counterterrorism

The American Society of International Law (ASIL) hosted a lunch discussion today in which Martin Scheinin, the Finnish human rights scholar, and UN HRC special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, presented the recent findings of his mission to the United States. I'll post up the links later on. I was the commentator, and found it to be a useful discussion - I hope he did as well. ASIL has been doing an increasing number of these under its new executive director Elizabeth Andersen, and I think they are a successful and useful format for discussion. A number of old friends were there - Edwin Williamson, Roy Gutman, Cristina Cerna, Michael Noone, numbers of people from DOS - the audience had many good questions. I'll post something later on this post about the substance; I'm about to fall over asleep.

Feeling guilty about going to bed while my daughter is still doing homework at 11:30 pm

I feel like going to bed. It's past eleven pm, on a Wednesday night, I have to teach classes tomorrow morning, and anyway, I'm tired. But I am sitting here still working away because my kid is still slaving away down at her desk in the basement. I feel like there's something wrong with my quitting work before she does. Especially when she gets up earlier than I do. Call it my expression of solidarity. Actually, it's just guilt. Should I feel guilty about knocking off before she does?

Oh well, it has enabled me to make much more progress on my UN-US relations manuscript. And I'm about a thousand words into a short, just-the-facts review of Judge Posner's three books for Rowman and Littlefield on counterterrorism - I'm going to see if the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence would like to run it at 1200 words.

And here's the current draft table of contents for my very short UN essay book (25-30,000 words) in the same Rowman and Littlefield series as Judge Posner's (all very much subject to revision, as it's very possible I might change my mind about this whole structure and do something more conventional) (also, if someone could tell me the Latin for perpetual immobility, that would be useful):

The Two Faces of Multilateralism:
United States-United Nations Relations after the Bush Administration

Contents

1
After the Bush administration

2
The UN of Multilateralism

3
The UN of Insecurity and Perpetue Inmobile

4
The UN of Anti-Americanism

5
The UN of Values and Anti-Values

6
The UN of Incompetence, Rent-seeking, Theft, and Anti-Reform

7
The Leveraged Buyout of the UN of Competence

8
The UN of Thankless Tasks

9
The UN of Global Governance

10
A reversion to the multilateral mean?

Notes
Appendices
Acknowledgements
Index

My new Fordham International Law Journal speech-essay, US Counterterrorism Policy and Superpower Compliance with International Human Rights Norms

My speech/essay, US Counterterrorism Policy and Superpower Compliance With International Human Rights Norms, has just appeared in 30 Fordham International Law Journal 455 (February 2007).

I have posted a copy to SSRN, and it can be downloaded (free), here.

The piece has some copyediting mistakes in it - most significant is where William Wilberforce appears instead as Wilbur Luce, ouch! and Ben Wittes' name is misspelled, ouch ouch! - but those problems are my doing, not the journal editors, as I was unconscionably late getting them final handmarked changes and there was not time for me to review final proofs. It is a speech and deliberately left as a speech in essay format, not reworked as an article, so it is quite informal and perhaps quite unjustifiably provocative. It is also sweeping in its scope - I wanted to take in the big picture, the grand picture in a short space.

Earlier I posted some lengthy excerpts from the piece below as blog entries. I'm now deleting those entries, as they are distractingly long, and anyone who wants to read it can download the pdf from SSRN at the link above.

***
One short note about what is in this speech-essay. I call for Guantanamo to be closed in this piece. But I make it conditional on very specific and frankly unlikely events - viz., the legislative creation of a special counterterrorism/national security system that, while 'civilianized', does not put everyone into the regular US court system. We need a system of civilian administrative detention with processes for regular review, and we need a system for trying terrorist offenses, narrowly defined as a matter of substance and not applicable outside of terrorism thus narrowly defined (ie, no using the Patriot Act to prosecute (unrelated crimes of, say) child pornography - but which has its own set of more permissive procedural and evidentiary rules. If you can get that, then moving away from the miltiary tribunal system, closing Guantanamo and moving those not released to the US, etc., makes good sense. If not, well, then not.

People need to be clear that not everyone at Guantanamo - even beyond the undisputed "high value detainees" - is merely the innocent shepherd sold by the Northern Alliance. Hamdan was not, on his own admissions. Guantanamo contains people who were detained for regular war crimes on ordinary Afghan battlefields - including the murder of US military personnel - under circumstances which have always warranted military justice. Pure political expediency, not justice, argues for letting them go - and moreover, we already know that released detainees have returned to the battlefield, and more would do so if released - the people they will kill, however, are more likely to be Afghans, or people in Asia, than Americans.

Looking to the future, merely closing Guantanamo does not change the fact that we will pick up people whom we will want to detain for potentially years and yet will not be able to try in a regular court under regular domestic court rules. Either we find conditions of administrative detention, or ... well, what? We might find that we have thereby created an incentive not to detain, but instead to engage in assassination. Or we might look to sponsor proxy forces - eg Ethiopia in Somalia - somewhat in the way that Reagan policy used proxies and surrogates in Central America. Or we might rely on the French and Spaniards and other European countries and the fact that, despite the Western European human rights protection, structurally Continental legal systems provide nowhere near the legal protections of the US constitution in criminal investigation and prosecution, as a structural feature of an inquisitorial, rather than adversarial, system. Or perhaps we simply won't do much of anything at all - caught in stasis between clashes of different policies and different legal standards and different decisionmakers, frozen and immobile - the disaggregated state unable to be proactive in the protection of its citizenry - and so make a very different kind of bet about our safety.

It is easy for the Democrats and Congress to pretend that it is all otherwise and that we can just go back to Sept 10 criminal law paradigms, with some modest increases in homeland security, with targets that won't complain about discrimination - inanimate cargo containers, for example. Possibly the Democratic party would even enact that preference if in charge of the presidency and Congress. But I doubt it. We live at this moment in a period of Republican-facilitated Democratic kibbbutzing - facilitated and enabled by the Cheney policy of pure executive power - sniping without having to take proactive responsibilty and ownership of what protecting against terrorist attacks should mean as a going-forward policy of the United States. That condition is unlikely to last forever and, at the end of the day (if for no other reason than the fact of a new attack), the electorate will know where their leaders stand on counterterrorism and the legal regime shaping it, the necessary and inevitable tradeoffs between security and liberties that define counterterrorism in a liberal democracy.

So by all means let us avoid a police state - although what numbers of my colleagues in the legal academy seem to regard as the police state we supposedly already have seems to me a dangerous case of boy-crying-wolf - but let us also strive to avoid piles of body parts in American cities. The truism that there are necessarily trade-offs between these two is increasingly something denied by a significant part of elite opinion. The academics act as the high-intellectual end of a narrative that an increasing part of the electorate is eager to hear and absorb - there is no real terrorism danger, it stems from our own policies and attitudes, the problem is not terrorism but the invasion of civil liberties, talking about terrorism is simply a way of justifying the police state. Terrorism is not therefore the issue; counterterrorism is. 'They' are not the issue, 'we' are - and ignoring 'them' and focusing on 'us' promises a way back to the blessed land of nostalgia, a way of going back to live in the time of lovely ignorance, otherwise known as September 10, the quiet life, the morally unstrenous time of Before-Bush.

The intellectuals' attitude is not explainable, it seems to me, except on the assumption - which I wearily hear repeated without dissent at many, many academic conferences - that really there is no terrorism problem, except the one that the Bush administration created by invading Iraq or - the more intellectually grand alternative - the one that the West created for itself by being so intolerant of Muslims and Islam and, of course, Israel. But anyway, on either narrative, the problem turns out miraculously not to be terrorism, but instead our own viciously overreactive counterterrorism, which simultaneously creates a police state and promotes a cycle of Muslim radicalization.

Terrorism, on this account, is merely a second order problem. But it's not.

Sebastian Mallaby on the World Bank and Wolfowitz

Sebastian Mallaby is very smart, and there are few people on the outside more knowledgeable about the World Bank than he, so this column from the Washington Post, Monday, May 14, 2007, A14, is must-reading. As is his 2004 book, The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Mallaby is a hard-headed, tough-minded journalist and policy analyst in the area of development and global poverty reduction, one of the smartest and best informed outsiders.

Sebastian - I know him a little bit - appears to have been reacting in his WP column to this George F. Will column, also in the Washington Post. Will is not an expert on the Bank or international development; his column appears to have been written after some discussion with one or more of the Bank's critics. Mallaby appears to be out to marshall a lot of facts about the Bank and its work that Will and his readers are not likely to know much, if anything, about.

In taking down Will's column, however, Mallaby sacrifices a lot of legitimate criticism and the possibility of radically rethinking the Bank - radical criticism that he himself is much more willing to consider in his book. I understand that an 800 word column does not allow much room for subtlety. Still, that acknowledged, I don't quite think the column admits what Mallaby himself otherwise would say about the shortcomings in the Bank's business model. I fear that in this column, Mallaby is, alas, simply channeling the Bank.

(I leave aside as unserious the column's opening argument that one can look at the Bank simply like any other company and therefore the board of directors should fire Wolfowitz for having lost their confidence and having lowered share price. The remainder of the column, after all, is one long argument as to why the Bank cannot be treated merely as any private company. If it were a private company, after all, well, it wouldn't exist. As to the bizarre analogy to falling share price, it is inapposite not just because the Bank doesn't have one - rather, the larger point of the remainder of the article is that the Bank cannot, by definition, be measured according to such criteria. It is nearly as idle as the analogy sometimes bandied that US voters are "shareholders" who should fire Bush as "company president.")

Mallaby points out that approximately half of the Bank's outflows last year went to poor(er) countries if one includes, as properly one must, the Bank's soft loans and grants programs - these being the general evolutionary trend of the Bank. This is his main point of attack against the Will column; the (almost certainly correct) dangling implication is that Will has no idea about this. There is, in other words, a story beyond the statistic Will cites that 27 middle income countries received 90% of the regular lending of the Bank.

Fair enough. But one might conclude that this is precisely this statistic that should cause one to wonder why the Bank exists as a bank. Sebastian defends the middle income lending - which, after all, still amounts to over half the Bank's outflows - with the throwaway line that much of it goes to countries like China or Brazil that have many, many poor people. Sure, but how that regular lending really, genuinely, measurably affects outcomes for those very poor people is very murky - perhaps someone more expert than I can explain it, but I haven't seen measurable data to that effect - in large part because of the question of what role it plays in countries that do indeed have access to private capital that far exceeds the capital flows of the Bank.

It is far from clear, at least to me, that such regular lending to middle income countries has positive longterm impacts for the very poor of those countries. In part this is because money is fungible. In order to demonstrate that these funds make a difference to these poor people, it is not enough to show that it increased aggregate capital flows. It is not even enough to show that it was, in the first instance, specifically targeted toward those poor people - because, after all, the inflow of Bank funds, might simply have allowed other funds to be siphoned away. Anyway, the incentives from a financial statement point of view for the Bank to want to make loans to those safe middle income countries is a strong reason at least to wonder what the economic benefit is for the very poor in Bank lending to middle income countries and to want to see strong, reliable evidence for it. Perhaps it is there and, although I do tend to follow this literature, perhaps I have simply missed it - and Sebastian knows this literature, I'm sure, as well or better than anyone, so I would be happy to be pointed toward the papers on SSRN or elsewhere.

But assume for a moment, arguendo, that the criticism I make above about middle income lending is so. In that case, Mallaby's argument falls back on the fact that slightly less than half of the Bank's outflows come in the form of soft loans and grants. But that fact is lukewarm at best and really cuts both ways. The argument radical reformers of the Bank make is that there is little reason why the Bank should not be reorganized to give up the private capital market-intermediation-subsidized lending to middle income countries altogether, and focus entirely on the soft loan-grant programs, to the poorest countries. Of course private capital markets cannot do everything, as Mallaby says - but that is not the argument that the radical reformers make and is surely a straw man.

The problem of the Bank qua bank is that it seeks to intermediate private capital markets (with a subsidy), to try and do precisely what Mallaby suggests private capital markets cannot do because capital markets cannot solve all of poverty's problems. The reformers would suggest that the subsidy in the case of the Bank's ordinary lending to middle income countries is not really enough to compete with the functioning of the private markets; the Bank's lending really is a fifth wheel, and it should give that up in favor of activities for which it is not merely a fifth wheel. (As for crisis lending to middle income countries that Mallaby mentions, well, what is the IMF for? And - I don't know the answer to this - how great was the role of the World Bank in liquidity terms in the Asian crisis compared to the Fed?)

In the case of the poorest countries, however, lack of capital is genuinely an issue. So is the ability to repay any loan. So is technical assistance, and so is any improvement in governance. Why not cause the Bank, therefore, reorganize without the middle-income country intermediation-banking function, and focus solely on soft loans/grants and, let us not forget, technical assistance and governance advising. And focus on countries, societies, that are the poorest. Why endorse half measures?

For if that's what the real value added is, it is far from clear why anyone needs the Bank's goldplated operations -they cost what they cost in part because they are designed to interface with the private capital markets, and to pay the people who do those functions a respectable civil servant salary commensurate with financial professionals in the public sector. In my experience, it is not what one would pay program officers in a foundation dealing with local poverty matters on a grant-making basis, who do not have and do not need the banking credentials on which the Bank prides itself. There are comparably serious skill sets that these anti-poverty program officers need, yes, but frankly they can be obtained at a lower cost, in part because they are not so readily placeable in the private sector. Why not reorganize at a cheaper cost along the lines of far more efficient, far more locally oriented (because less capital markets oriented), far cheaper in terms of transaction costs European aid agencies? (I do not suggest under any circumstances modelling anything on US AID, which is a waste of oxygen.)

If these functions were being carried out by the Dutch, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Swiss, through their national development aid agencies, how would they do it and what would they pay? Would they pay for a whole banking staff when in fact the operation is aimed at grantmaking anyway, and the money would come from governments in any case, not from the capital markets and relent at a subsidized interest rate? They would - they do - engage in a certain amount of on-lending in which they really do expect to get repaid, but that is far from being the core, let alone over half, of their work.

Why, in other words, should the World Bank continue simply for historical reasons as a bank, a bank designed in cost structure, skill sets, etc., to interface with private capital markets? Why share the pleasure Mallaby takes in noting that slightly under half the bank's outlays went to soft loans and grants - why not think those things should essentially be the whole thing? Why take pride in half-measures that continue precisely the sins that Sebastian correctly sees in thinking that it all can all be done by capital markets? Why not sever the relationship to the capital markets altogether and concentrate on poverty reduction as such?

(ps. The column also mentions in passing that Bank salaries, once you take into the account the tax adjustment and long summer vacations, are comparable to academic salaries. I'm told there is a link to a paper by an economics professor in the online version, which I will look up. But as someone who is a college professor, and who is married to someone who used to work in an international organization with similar salary structures and arrangements and who, hence, paid very close attention to comparative salary issues - well, at least if you were not an American and not subject to tax on your salary, it was a very favorable deal. The tax break was amazing for non-Americans. I simply don't understand what Mallaby is suggesting here - it is not our experience at all. As for summer vacations - every dean and professor I know understand perfectly that summer vacation is simply the research semester, it's not vacation, at least if you plan on getting tenure, getting a promotion, getting a raise. It's a 12 month job like any other. And now I have to get back to it.)

(pps. Or consider this short op ed by AEI resident scholar Desmond Lachman, here. It argues for a World Bank that gives up the middle income lending function altogether, along with the proliferating mandates at the Bank that increase its unaccountability.)

The US under the next administration as 'meek multilateralist'?

This is from the conclusion of a new essay - remarks, really, prepared for a conference at which I was unfortunately unable to appear, and then revised for a seminar on human rights at NYU - appearing in Fordham International Law Review one of these days. It will be substantially edited from this form, but the point is still basically the same - the US in a new administration as 'meek multilateralist' - and why that is not an unalloyed good, even for those who would prefer the US to loom less large upon the world.

***
The conventional wisdom seems to be that the US has quite exhausted itself with war – perhaps not unlike its exhaustion with war following Vietnam. Not everyone shares that view, but conventional wisdom says no more wars for a good while.[1] From the European point of view, that does not make the US security guarantee any less good – better even – because for Europe, US counterterrorism wars simply stir up Islamist terrorists in its own cities, places that can’t be attacked by the 82nd Airborne. What it most likely leads to is a return to the early Clinton era, perhaps with an added air, in a Democratic administration at least, of contrition for the wicked Bush years, and expressed as ‘meek multilateralism’.

But recall what that meek multilateralism served in those early Clinton years. It was a get along, go along foreign policy not really interested in anything foreign other than trade. It was willing, most of the time, to say all the right multilateralist things. It was always willing to feel everyone’s pain for anything out in the world. But it was much less willing to act. It wanted to be multilateralist precisely in order (partly, but only partly, through its lip service compliance with all those international norms), to try and be just another power in the multilateral gaggle of nation-states, whose compliance is partly lip service, too.

Being 'just one of the guys', so to speak, doesn’t work for the United States, of course, and it doesn’t work for the rest of the world either. What, rely, really rely, on the promise of collective security through the UN? Who are we kidding? Within a few years the Clinton administration was in a different mode – but it wasn’t willingly and it wasn’t for lack of desire to loom small on the world stage. We therefore face, under either a Democratic or Republican administration, the possibility of a return to a form of meek multilateralism by the United States. It might actually be more compliant with international law norms. It might be much more respectful of international law as the international law professors see it. It would almost certainly be more soothing to the sensitivities, so offended by the Bush administration, of the international community. One might wish that the US would essentially submit its power to supervision and control by its allies and friends and take instruction from them, but that seems unlikely. (One reason is that although the United States is fully capable of moral and legal mistakes, submitting one’s power to the supervision even of one’s friends invites – quite apart from its preposterousness from a strictly realist standpoint – the “give a mouse a cookie” problem, the inevitable tendency to demand more and more of the superpower as a condition of continuing to like it.)[2]

The actual choice is much more likely this. On the one hand, a meek multilateralism that masks a deep desire to ignore, at least for some quite possibly critical years, the responsibilities and obligations of the superpower, in order not to be seen to be exercising its privileges, and also frankly to lick its wounds. Or, on the other hand, the robust assertion of American exceptionalism, even to the point of special privilege, arrogant as that always in fact is, and infuriating to the rest of the US’s friends and allies, as that always is, and less compliant and respectful of others’ views of international law and the international system, such as it is.

The latter choice may not rise, in a new administration, to the Bush administration’s specially calibrated levels of bellicosity, but it would not be a return to the early 1990s, either. Think carefully upon which you prefer.

Notes:

[1] For example, Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, two prominent foreign policy analysts of the center left and right, respectively, are releasing a joint paper arguing that the United States will be no less bellicose in a new administration than under Bush. See Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, “America and the Use of Force,” Stanley Foundation Project, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, forthcoming 2007.

[2] I leave aside here, as too large a topic for these remarks, the currently popular idea of a “caucus of the democracies” that might provide a robust yet less evidently insincere forum in which the United States could argue its views, find greater grounds of agreement, and generally have a place among those who share its fundamental values against which to check its own behavior and achieve some agreement and coordination with others.

***
Let me add this column from Mark Steyn.
***
Fortress America's gate is open

(http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/382787,CST-EDT-steyn13.article)
May 13, 2007
Chicago Suntimes

MARK STEYN

Most terrorists seem like bumbling losers if they're caught before the act: That's certainly true of the Fort Dix jihadists who took their terrorist training DVD to the local audio store to be copied. It was also true of the Islamists arrested in Toronto last year for plotting to behead the prime minister, one of whose cell members had a bride who wanted him to sign a prenup committing him to jihad. The Heathrow plotters arrested while planning to blow up U.S.-bound airliners included a Muslim convert who'd started out as the son of a British Conservative Party official with a P. G. Wodehouse double-barreled name and a sister who was a Victoria's Secret model and ex-wife of tennis champ Yanick Noah.

But then Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 gang would have seemed pretty funny if you'd run into them in that lap-dance club they went to before the big day where the girls remembered them only as very small tippers. Most terrorists are jokes until the bomb goes off.

So, when we're fortunate enough to catch them in advance, it's worth pausing to consider what they tell us about the broader threat we face. According to genius New York Times headline writers, "Religion Guided Three Held In Fort Dix Plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?

Well, the trio were Muslims, but Albanian Muslims -- i.e., they weren't Arabs and didn't have names like Mohammed and Abdullah (though their accomplices did). Even if Amer- ica were minded to profile, it's harder to profile against chaps with names like "Shain Duka" (Fort Dix) or "Rich- ard Reid" (the shoebomber) or "Jer- maine Lindsay" (a July 7 Tube bomb- er) or "Muriel Degauque" (a Belgian lady who self-detonated in a suicide attack on U.S. forces in Iraq) or "Jack Roche" (an Australian arrested for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra).

Second, the young Duka brothers are "radical Muslim" sons in a family of otherwise "moderate Muslim" oldsters. That, too, fits a pattern of de-assimilation, of young Western Muslims far more implacable and hostile than their parents and grandparents. The London bombers were British subjects born and bred, radicalized in the vacuum of contemporary multiculturalism. One of the Toronto plotters had a father-in-law who was the pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base. The Princess Pats have done sterling work in Afghanistan, and pop supports their mission. But his daughter doesn't, and she named his grandchild after a Chechen terrorist killed by the Russians.

Third, what then radicalized so many Western Muslims? Answer: in many cases, the Balkans. When Yugoslavia collapsed 15 years ago, Jacques Poos told the Americans to butt out: "The hour of Europe has come!" he declared confidently. Poos was the foreign minister of Luxembourg, a country as big as your hot tub, but he chanced to be holding the European Union's rotating "presidency" at the time and, as it happened, the Americans were very happy to butt out. "We don't have a dog in this fight," said then-secretary of state, James Baker.

Well, the hour of Europe came and went, and a couple of hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too happy for Americans to butt back in again. So NATO bombed Christian Serbs in defense of Albanian Muslims, and a fat lot of good it did if the Duka brothers are any indication.
In theory, Baker was right. But out there in the Balkans, if you're one of the dogs in the fight, great-power evenhandedness can seem pretty one-handed by the time you hear about it. Don't take my word for it. Here's Osama bin Laden: "The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed."

Whoa, hold up there: How come a list of imperial interventions wound up with a bit of non-imperial non-intervention? Because, for serious nations, even not taking sides is seen as, in effect, taking sides. What was the single biggest factor in the radicalization of British Muslims? Omar Sheikh, convicted in Karachi for the kidnapping and beheading of Daniel Pearl, is British -- a Westernized non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking London School of Economics student, until he was fired up by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims. And, while Europe dithered as the mountain of corpses piled up, Saudi money poured in, transforming the relatively mild Balkan Islam into something far more virulent. Look at the change in Muslim architecture in the region over the last 15 years: They build Wahhabist mosques now. Unlike the State Department complaceniks, the Islamists understand there is no stability.

Tough, you say. So what? Washington still has no dog in these fights. It's time to hunker down in Fortress America. Which brings me to the fourth lesson: What fortress? The three Duka brothers were (if you'll forgive the expression) illegal immigrants. They're not meant to be here. Yet they graduated from a New Jersey high school and they operated two roofing companies and a pizzeria. Think of how often you have to produce your driver's license or Social Security number. But, five years after 9/11, this is still one of the easiest countries in the world in which to establish a functioning but fraudulent identity.

Consider, for example, the post-9/11 ritual of airline security. You have to produce government-issued picture ID to the TSA official. Does that make you feel safer? On that Tuesday morning in September, four of the killers got on board by using picture ID they'd acquired through the "undocumented worker" network in Falls Church, Va. Half the jurisdictions in the United States issue picture ID to people who shouldn't even be in the country, and they issue it as a matter of policy. The Fort Dix boys were pulled over for 19 traffic violations, but because they were in "sanctuary cities," any cop who suspected they were illegals was unable to report them to immigration authorities. Again, as a matter of policy.

On one hand, America creates a vast federal security bureaucracy to prevent another 9/11. On the other hand, American politicians and bureaucrats create a parallel system of education and welfare and health care entitlements, main- taining and expanding a vast network of fraudulent identity that cor- rupts the integrity of almost all state databases. And though it played a part in the killing of 3,000 Americans, leaders of both parties insist nothing can be done to stop it. All we can do is give the Duka brothers "a fast track to citizenship."

The Iranians already are operating in South America's Tri-Border area. Is it the nothing-can-be-done crowd's assumption that the fellows who run armies of the "undocumented" from Mexico into America are just kindhearted human smugglers who'd have nothing to do with jihad even if the price was right? If you don't have borders, you won't have a nation -- and you may find "the jobs Americans won't do" covers a multitude of sins.

Sam Rich's assessment of Jeffrey Sachs' millennium village project, and in support of Wolfowitz

Sam Rich has an assessment of Jeffrey Sachs' Millennium Village Project in the new Wilson Quarterly, although it does not seem to be online - available, anyway, in most college bookstores or libraries. I've read it and found it very sensible - I also recommend highly Tyler Cowen's summary of it at Marginal Revolution, here. I think Cowen somewhat overstates things in his formulation "wonderful but oversold" - the weaknesses in the model are more than just the fact that it is not readily scalable, as Rich's article makes clear.

I have favorably commented on Sachs' general approach to poverty reduction in the past couple of years on this blog. With the process of UN reform in 2005, however, I found myself much more focused on the Millennium Development Goals and what Sachs really means by them, once attached to his own targets and numbers and so on. When all this is translated into real policy, it looks a lot less attractive and a lot more like simply another Potemkin Village-Five Year Plan at which the UN already excels, to no point whatsoever. I am increasingly persuaded that William Easterly, who operates as Sachs' general critic, is right in emphasizing that poverty reduction in the world is essentially a retail, tactical, bit by by effort. Sachs, by contrast, seems to think that it can be solved at the grand strategic global level. The problem, however, seems to be a radical disconnect between plans at the strategic level and the ability to implement them at the tactical level. For his pains - because it runs counter to the command-and-control, left over central planning that the UN continues to love so much in its bureaucratic bones - Easterly is isolated within official circles as a curmudeonly dissenter, while Sachs is lionized. But the cold reality is that Sachs' grand plans have little to show for themselves except as plans - leaving the Millennium quota defenders to fall back inevitably on the claim that failure was due not to the plans being flawed, but by the failure of funders to hand over sufficient money. At bottom, this is Sachs' big claim, and Easterly's big skepticism.

That, and the fundamental question of political stability, the rule of law, property rights, transparency, decreasing corruption, and reducing rent seeking by government officials standing in the way of private direct investment in reducing poverty. Paul Wolfowitz has been smeared by his underlings and by European grandees, abetted by the media, and in particular in this country by the New York Times and Washington Post, whose reporting seems to consist not of actually reading underlying documents, but reproducing the whispering campaign against Wolfowitz.

For quite a while, I was too busy and distracted to do anything other than follow the stories as the NYT and WP issued them, and assumed that Wolfowitz had screwed up and put himself in this position. Then I went back and looked at the actual documentary history - and it suddenly looked really, really, really different. I can't see whereas Wolfowitz has anything to apologize for, and I hope the White House finds a little backbone and holds firm. Wolfowitz is right on the substance of the reforms he is pushing on an arrogant and recalcitrant World Bank, and hasn't done anything that he wasn't essentially told to do by the Bank's own ethics committee. This is a political smear, aided in no small part by media hacks at the Times and Washington Post who, so far as I can tell, can't read.

Ruth Wedgwood has it right, in an op ed originally appearing in the Los Angeles Times, but also running in the Dallas News. And she is especially right to point out how anti-professional-women the whole contrived scandal is - not that you would know it, once again, reading the Times and the Post. Excerpts:

***
Ruth Wedgwood: A bum rap at the World Bank

Wolfowitz and his partner had been rightly cleared before

Dallas News
09:08 AM CDT on Thursday, April 19, 2007

On taking office, World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz set two priorities for the world's premier development institution. He asked for a focus on Africa's persistent poverty, and he targeted corruption that diverts aid dollars from the poor.

African leaders endorsed this vision, but not all bank bureaucrats were thrilled by Mr. Wolfowitz or his policies. Still, any friend of the bank's work should be dismayed by the disruption caused by a manufactured scandal at a time when the bank needs to replenish its coffers. The imbroglio rattling the World Bank during its spring meeting of finance ministers is a rehash of its clumsy attempt to resolve the status of Shaha Ali Riza, a veteran bank professional and Mr. Wolfowitz's longtime romantic partner.

The authors of this acrid affair have nakedly forgotten the standards of fairness and due process owed Ms. Riza, who is a member of the bank staff association and entitled to its fiduciary protections. And the scandalmongers have recklessly ignored a written record of bank documents that serves not to condemn but to exculpate Mr. Wolfowitz.

Moreover, the case reveals the bank's executive board and its ethics committee as organs of haphazard judgment. In 2005, the ethics committee surprisingly denied Mr. Wolfowitz's written request that he be allowed to recuse himself from all decisions touching on Ms. Riza's status because of their relationship. Then it disqualified her from remaining at the bank yet insisted that she be compensated for this disruption to her career. Next, it insisted that Mr. Wolfowitz re-enter the chain of command to execute its advice concerning Ms. Riza. And now, board members apparently have criticized Mr. Wolfowitz for doing exactly what the ethics panel directed.

To be sure, news stories about Ms. Riza have revealed that the pay of World Bank staff far exceed what comparable professionals would earn elsewhere. The public rightly might be dismayed to learn that Ms. Riza and other World Bank "lead" professionals can earn from $132,000 to $232,000.

But this does not excuse a mob mentality that abuses the reputation of a particular female professional, much less a bank president. The internal documents released last week – at Mr. Wolfowitz's request – show that this slow-moving institution had no protocol for figuring out how to accommodate the career of a professional woman when her spouse or partner came to work in the same chain of command. This is becoming a more serious problem in today's workplace.

Ms. Riza was a veteran of the bank, working as a senior communications officer in the Middle East/North African public outreach program before Mr. Wolfowitz was picked as bank president in 2005. With more than 15 years' experience in the field, able to speak Arabic, English and French, she was short-listed for a senior-level job. The bank's ethics committee in July 2005 gave "informal" advice that Ms. Riza had to give up her eligibility for promotion and leave the bank. It acknowledged that this step would disrupt Ms. Riza's career for a substantial period. For a 52-year-old bank employee facing mandatory retirement at age 62, losing a promotion and a long period of service is not trivial. The ethics committee thus reasonably concluded that Ms. Riza should receive some compensation for her forced transfer.

According to the documents on the bank's Web site, it was the ethics committee's own idea to give Ms. Riza a promotion as she was being moved out for four years. She was transferred to the U.S. State Department to work on a grassroots democracy project that has been praised by Secretary Condoleezza Rice. She was given the mid-range salary for her new level.
It was certainly not a corrupt favor to a girlfriend.

All the facts were reviewed for a second time by the World Bank ethics committee last year, and again it found nothing wrong. The chairman of the ethics committee pronounced in a Feb. 28, 2006, letter that "the ethics committee decided that the allegations ... do not appear to pose ethical issues." It is hard to square the record with the entertaining claim that the World Bank's president somehow concocted a do-nothing job for his girlfriend. It's a bum rap, and one that female professionals in dual-career families might worry about.

Ruth Wedgwood is professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies.

Paul Kennedy on Security Council reform and Kofi Annan's successor

Paul Kennedy in the Guardian on UN Security Council reform and the race to become Kofi Annan's successor, here. Professor Kennedy is the Yale history professor who authored the new book on the UN, Parliament of Man; the problems with that book and its take on the UN have been ably noted in the review by Rosemary Richter in the Times Literary Supplement, here.

Kennedy's Guardian op-ed appears upon the occasion of this year's opening of the UN General Assembly - the annual pilgrimage to New York in which heads of state gather to deliver mostly windy speeches, listen to the Secretary General note with satisfaction UN reforms that in fact have barely taken place if at all, while announcing new ones that will never really come about, and engage in a peculiarly internationalist form of hand-wringing and self-congratulation. This year has a particular focus, however, as Kofi Annan's term comes to an end at the end of the year, and the race is on to become his successor:

The question acquired an urgency this week as heads of states and governments around the world made their way to New York, to deliver their addresses to the UN general assembly and to elect a successor to Kofi Annan as secretary general. The latter task has immediately focused attention on the political horse-trading that takes place inside the security council.

While the foreign minister of South Korea, Ban Ki-Moon, emerged as the frontrunner in the race for the secretary generalship, member states gathering for the UN 61st annual assembly were promised a package of reform proposals. These schemes, designed to improve the way the UN works, include measures to cut waste, bureaucracy and the possibility of corruption, streamlining of procedures, and plans for an overhaul of the body's shaky finances. All of which is important, but none of it excites the general public - or is even a priority for those governments most likely vote for such changes. The only topic guaranteed to grab the attention is the one that has stirred member states ever since the UN was established in San Francisco in 1945: the demand for reform of the security council itself.

The process of electing a new secretary general throws into sharp relief the intrinsic imbalance of the security council's composition. Mr Ban was reported to have won the support of 14 of the council's 15 members in the latest ballot, putting him comfortably ahead of his closest rival, India's candidate, Shashi Tharoor. Only one thing may now block Mr Ban's selection by the security council for the endorsement of the general assembly - and that would be if the one contrary vote had come from one of the permanent five members with veto powers, (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the US).

Thus selection of the new SG is tied intimately to the question of Security Council reform. Kennedy correctly says that Security Council reform is the only issue of UN reform that actually grabs the imaginations of UN member states - corruption, finances, the abuse of the human rights mechanisms by human rights abuser states, patronage and nepotism, rape and sexual abuse by UN personnel and peacekeeping troops, and so on. No, the only one that actually grabs attention for UN member states is "reform" of the Security Council, which is to say, a dilution of its veto powers and the dispersal of its powers. And the attention to it is not merely a matter of third world states seeking to make the General Assembly the seat of power - it is driven, actually, by Japan, Germany, Brazil, and India (and sometimes Nigeria and Indonesia), particularly, seeking power for themselves.

None of this is going anywhere, of course. And it is not merely or even especially the United States that prevents it. It is, more precisely, the smaller and less powerful Security Council states that have the most to lose by Security Council reform. France's claim to a place in the security affairs of the world is premised almost entirely on its permanent SC seat. None of the permanent five especially wants to see the veto either diluted or expanded to include new players, but they have quite different reasons. For France, Russia, China, and somewhat Britain, the issue is preserving international power that does not actually reflect global reach and power - the Security Council permanent seat and veto are a means from a left-over history of WWII that allows you to punch above your weight.

For the United States, on the other hand, which does have global reach and power, even if stretched at this point, the issue is more the effectiveness of the Council itself - for the United States, the issue is that even granting the "justice," as it were, of expanding the Council to make it more "representative" of today's world (although, in fact, the design of the Council was never intended, from 1945 onwards, to be "representative," but instead deliberately a confab of the Great Powers), that could only come at the expense of the limited effectiveness of the Council as it stands today. Add more members and, in particular, add more vetoes, and you guarantee even greater gridlock and hold-up premiums than you have already.

Moreover, each of the proposed new big members that would supposedly make the Council more globally "representative" raises big regional concerns - Japan/China, Germany/another EU vote with France and Britain?, Brazil/the rest of Latin America, India/Pakistan, etc. Nigeria/possibility of civil war and break-up. Moreover, it is not clear what security assets usable globally these players bring to the Security Council table - and their military use regionally in many cases would raise unacceptable hackles among their neighbors. We already see a China that uses its veto not merely for plainly security matters of self-interest, but - in the case of Sudan, for example - effectively rents it out for commercial purposes.

So what does Professor Kennedy have to say? Nothing, really, that hasn't already been said extensively in the discussions last year that preceded the fan-fare, followed by bust, of Annan's big package of UN reforms that have since largely disappeared into thin air. It's a standard, reasonably useful discussion - although his failure to note the difference between the US position and that of other Security Council members on Security Council reform is noteworthy - the US position is only partly that of the other council members. His conclusion is the one that pretty much everyone else reaches:

So the UN will limp along, caught between the ambitiousness of its original design and the blunt fact that the world order remains one in which egotistical great powers still play a disproportionate role, especially in protecting their own interests. This was ever so. The best that can be hoped is that the veto-bearing members will see the need for working together.

Laurence Douglas on global law in the TLS online

While I'm at it mentioning reviews in the TLS, this review available online in the TLS, here, is well worth reading. Laurence R. Douglas, "Interpreting Global Law," TLS, May 10, 2006, reviewing Philippe Sands, Lawless World, and John Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace.

I have met Philippe at a couple of conferences and think he is a terrific guy. But I must demur from the tears that, in effect, he sheds for the Saddam regime - as Douglas puts it, ironically I assume in his case, but not ironically in Sands' case, referring to the United States, "no one likes to see the bully break the rules with impunity." Surely this carries the mania for global law a bit far? What, one wonders, of Saddam - no bully there, eh? It is of a piece with the current nostalgia of the new liberal-realists for Saddam, suddenly forgetting the vicious history of that regime in order to tout the new liberal-realist virtues of containment of and accommodation to murderous dictators. And forgetting about his if anything even crazier (happily now dead) sons.

As for John Yoo - I like John as well, and I think that his arguments get far shorter shrift than they deserve. All you have to do to write off his book is say the word "torture," and that's that. I don't pretend to be a con law scholar, but Yoo's actual arguments seem far more intellectually powerful, even if one does not finally accept them, than his too-quickly dismissive critics give credit.

My own view is split - in the purely intellectual space of my attic study, I think Yoo makes a powerful academic case for his view of executive power. Does he persuade me? I have on days and off days. Mostly, though, I don't reach that question. In the real world, as the political world stands today, the fact is that one has to choose between an abstract view of executive discretion and pursuing the war on terror is just how it is. The Bush administration should mark well that "what lives by executive discretion also dies by executive discretion."

The Bush administration, that is, having gone to a great deal of trouble to persuade me that the war on terror is real and will be long, should not leave it as a discretionary activity of some future administration. It should go to Congress and institutionalize it as policy of the US as a whole, not merely of a, or any, presidential administration. If I have to choose - as I think we today have to do - between an abstract theory of presidential power and actually, practically pressing forward the war on terror, I'll pick the latter, each and every time.

Rosemary Richter on the United Nations in the TLS online

Many of the reviews in the Times Literary Supplement are not available online, not even to subscribers, although they eventually show up in the subscriber archive. I recommend subscribing to the TLS. It's expensive but worth it.

This essay by Rosemary Richter on the United Nations, reviewing Paul Kennedy's new history and assessment of the UN, Parliament of Man, is available publicly online at the TLS. Hooray. It is well worth reading. (Rosemary Richter, "What Use the UN?", here.) Richter is an editor at the London Times; I've made several critical comments in passing on this blog about Kennedy's book and maybe I'll review it somewhere, but Richter's review is really the conclusive take.

Conclusion from the review (my emphasis added, and it is a zinger):

The trouble with books that start from the premiss that the UN is unquestionably a force for the good is that they tend to wrap their theme in a bubble of conventional cant. Paul Kennedy makes many shrewd observations in The Parliament of Man, but the bubble remains, as he intends, intact.

Paul Kennedy on the UN as the world's scapegoat

Paul Kennedy, whose new book on the UN, Parliament of Man, I passingly trashed in a post below, has an op ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2006, titled "United Nations - The World's Scapegoat." Here. I am afaid that I do not find this op-ed very consistent with the overall theme and tone of Kennedy's book. Or very persuasive in the tears of sympathy it sheds for the poor UN senior executives and their impossible task - like the book in this regard, the op ed tends to sound like talking points handed out by the oliagenous Mark Malloch Brown and transmitted uncritically by Kennedy.

And anyway, Kennedy does what Annan does in pretty much every situation where someone takes the UN to task - retreats to the position that it is merely a member state organization, and he merely a ministerial executor of the will of the member states.

The problem, as Kennedy surely knows, is that Annan and the UN aristocracy in actual fact want it both ways - the ability to seek greater power, authority, and legitimacy for the organization and its senior executives, while always being able to escape criticism by retreating to the "humble servants of the member states" mumbo jumble that Kennedy endorses. Sorry, Professor Kennedy, you don't get it both ways.

Claudia Rosett on Kofi Annan and Hezbollah, and brief note on Paul Kennedy's UN hagiography, Parliament of Man

Claudia Rosett reviews the history behind the latest mission by the UN to bless and protect Hezbollah, here. But of course this would not matter so much if Israel had not so thoroughly botched its war, as Lenny Ben-David notes here in a dismaying review of corruption and unpreparedness in Israeli society, from the Jerusalem Post.

It is frankly just bizarre, by the way, to read Clauda Rosett's stream of articles, and have sat through the many interviews and discussions I did while working on the US Institute of Peace's UN reform task force, and then simultaneously be reading Paul Kennedy's hagiographic account of the rise of the UN, Parliament of Man. I guess the kindest thing one can say of Kennedy's account is that he has a thorougly Whiggish view of history. His lack of knowledge of the actual organization, as distinguished from the one sketched at the level of Platonic forms that he offers - weirdly, through a historical approach - means that he cannot even begin to give an account of why it (a) doesn't work and (b) is so astoundingly corrup at both the official and personal level. It may be that the historical approach allows him to ignore the sordid realities of the organization - again, the Whiggish view of history allows him to see it in a progressive and progressing light in which the unpleasantness of the present means very little in historical trajectory.

And of course Kennedy is careful to dismiss any such criticism in advance - all of it is simply cast as ideological.

Claudia Rosett in NRO on the UN's problems in defining terrorism

The indispensable Claudia Rosett has this article in National Review Online discussing the UN's problems in defining terrorism. Here. I have written at length on this blog about the difficulties in defining terrorism, and I conducted a very interesting seminar session at Harvard with Jack Goldsmith and Ryan Goodman and their class this past spring.

My concerns were principally with the definition of terrorism - the proposed universal definition that Rosett discusses - that was contained in the UN reform report from the High Level Panel and endorsed in admirably ringing language by Kofi Anan in his own UN reform proposal. The core of the proposed universal definition was that it would essentially take the concept of targeting civilians or noncombatants from the law of war and establish it in non-war concepts - in effect, any time you target civilians, it is terrorism (plus some other stuff about seeking to influence a government to act in some way). The core idea being that, as in the law of jus in bello, your cause doesn't matter - if you act a certain way, targeting civilians, no matter what the cause, it is criminal and terrorism.

My problem was that limiting terrorism to civilians was too narrow - it would not cover, for example, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. On the other hand, many people have told me that even if not ideal, it would be such an important advance to have a definition of terrorism independent of political cause, one which put civilians clearly out of bounds, that the limitations would be worth it. Maybe.

Anyway, that has not turned out to be a very interesting argument at this point, because, along with pretty much everything else of any importance in the way of UN reform, the terrorism definition did not get adopted. Rosett details what derailed it - no one will be surprised to find out that it was the Islamic Conference, led by Egypt and Pakistan, their gazillions of US aid money notwithstanding.

Which leaves where we are today in defining terrorism in some neutral way - nowhere. (Note in what follows the role of the indefatigable Mark Malloch Brown.)

***

August 8, 2006
National Review Online

Terrorism? What's That?
The U.N. has a deeply dangerous definitional problem.

By Claudia Rosett

Among the many reasons to beware the United Nations as a vehicle for peace in Israel, Lebanon, or any other part of the globe now threatened by Islamic terrorists, there is one item so obvious that in the current debate over “ceasefires” and Security Council resolutions it has almost entirely escaped notice. Quite simply, while terrorism may be the defining security threat of our time, the U.N. has failed — literally — to define it.

If that sounds like a minor semantic lapse, far removed from the bloody conflict in Israel and Lebanon, it is anything but. The free world faces a war in which victory — if one may be allowed such a blunt word these days — starts with understanding the real nature and tactics of our enemies. So, with top U.N. officials calling for instant peace that would effectively equate “both sides” in the war launched out of Lebanon last month by Hezbollah against Israel, I e-mailed the U.N. Secretary-General’s office recently to ask: Does the U.N. consider Hezbollah a terrorist group?

Back from one of Kofi Annan’s spokesmen came the answer: “The designation of ‘terrorist’ would require a definition of what terrorism entails.”

Let us note that in the case of Hezbollah, the group has entailed enough atrocities to have earned it the nickname, “the A-Team of Terrorism,” even before Hezbollah on July 12 launched its killing-kidnapping-and- rocket-firing assault on Israel. Hezbollah’s prior record entails well over two decades of kidnappings, hijackings, suicide bombings, massacres, and collateral carnage worldwide, in countries including Lebanon, Israel, Spain, Denmark, Germany, France, and Argentina. Created by the totalitarian ayatollahs of Iran just after their 1979 Islamic revolution; trained and bankrolled by Iran; supported by Syria; seasoned in extortion and smuggling operations reaching as far as South America, Canada, and the U.S.; open to alliances with other terrorist groups; peddling terrorist propaganda internationally on its Al-Manar TV station; dedicated to the destruction of Israel and seeking ultimately to supplant the workings of free societies with its Iran-spawned creed and practice of terror… Hezbollah among its butcheries to date has murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group except al Qaeda.

But because the United Nations has not defined “terrorism,” the U.N. does not regard Hezbollah as a terrorist group.The U.N. does, of course, have a stack of “counter-terrorism” resolutions, and bestrides a dozen or so “international counter-terrorism conventions.” But without a clear definition of what terrorism entails, U.N. member states — including the liveliest terror sponsors — pay no penalty for interpreting these measures in any warped way they might choose, or effectively ignoring them altogether. The result is that even the U.N. resolutions passed a few years ago sanctioning a highly abbreviated list of a few hundred Taliban and al Qaeda affiliates worldwide have been at best erratically enforced. Back in late 2003, a group of terrorism experts employed by the U.N. to monitor member-states’ compliance with these sanctions became bold enough to report publicly and in detail some of the gross delinquencies of specific nations. The U.N. dissolved the group of experts, and replaced it with one more easily muffled.

A former member of the now-defunct, outspoken U.N. counterterrorism-monitoring group, Victor Comras, explained to me in a phone interview last week that achieving a serious international definition of terrorism is a “huge issue.” Once an objective criterion for terrorism exists, said Comras, “At least you have the foundation for asking that concrete actions be taken.

”Without that definition, as Comras wrote this past March, “countries remain free to define for themselves which groups are terrorists and which are ‘freedom fighters.’” Comras observed that “Saudi Arabia uses this distinction, for example, to get away with funding Hamas, while Iran and Syria use it to provide funds and support to Hezbollah.” Beyond that, he noted, “Many other countries have also used it to avoid taking steps to freeze funds or take other civil or criminal action against those individuals or groups which they support.”

The U.N. failure on this score is no accident. It is a direct result of what the U.N. is, and how it works — a collective, saddled with procedures that tend to favor despots over democrats. In the matter of coming up with a global definition of terrorism, the job falls to the General Assembly’s legal committee — the so-called Sixth Committee— which includes all 192 member states, and operates in practice by consensus. In that setting, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) — whose 57 members include such terror-linked states as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran — has for years insisted that any definition of terrorism exempt the OIC’s pet terrorists. These the OIC would prefer to define — notes Comras — as “engaged in so-called ‘struggles against colonial domination and foreign occupation.’”

At the same time, the OIC and assorted “unaligned” states have been demanding that regular armed forces of sovereign states, already subject to other international rules of engagement, be subject to U.N. rules concerning terrorism. That would clear the way to officially invert reality to the extent that by U.N. lights, Islamic terrorists would qualify as liberators, and democratic states trying to defend themselves could be treated as terrorists.

Wisely, the U.S. and some of our allies have refused to sign on to this Big Brother universe (though on some issues, such as the affable view of Palestinian terrorism, and chronic condemnations of democratic Israel, the U.N. seems to dwell there already). Under pressure from the U.S. last year, Kofi Annan departed from U.N. habit long enough to propose a genuine definition of terrorism — only to have it shot down by the U.N. committee-consensus process.

And there the matter sits. While terrorism looms ever larger as an Islamic-fascist tactic and threat to the free world — which the U.N. was originally meant to protect — the task of defining terrorism remains bottled up in the U.N. legal committee.

This gridlock goes far to explain why Annan, apparently forgetting his reform pitch of last year, has been calling with the regularity of a cuckoo clock for an immediate “ceasefire” in the current conflict. In doing so, he ignores the desperately lopsided setup of any deal in which Israel would be constrained by U.N. words on paper while the terrorists — by definition, if only the U.N. had one — can be reliably stopped only at gunpoint. That asymmetry is pretty much the arrangement that incubated this war in the first place. Israel complied with U.N. rules and withdrew six years ago from Lebanon. Hezbollah violated the rules, expanding its protection rackets and stockpiling illicit weapons under the terror-neutral gaze of U.N. “peacekeepers,” until it was ready to strike.

The gap in the U.N. lexicon also helps explain why, when Annan’s deputy-secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown sat down for an interview last week with the Financial Times, he felt free to deliver the Orwellian line: “It is not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism.”

Wallowing instead in the jargon of peace in our time, Malloch Brown went on to suggest that for Israel’s attackers, Hezbollah, there must concessions, and eventually “a settlement which addresses the political issues of their cause as well as the military ones.” These bland words mask the terrorist nitty-gritty that Hezbollah’s “cause” includes the takeover of Lebanon and the extinction of Israel. Musing that Hezbollah does have its wayward aspects, and in its rocket assaults on Israel “is making no effort to hit military targets; it’s just a broadside against civilian targets,” Malloch Brown arrived at the I’m-O.K.-You’re-O.K. conclusion that “It’s all very challenging.”

And as the Bush administration has increasingly turned to the United Nations in this crisis, the U.N. fog has been seeping into America’s political discourse. Instead of talking about killing, capturing, and defeating the terrorists of Hezbollah, or moving immediately to hold to account Hezbollah’s backers in Baathist Damascus and nuclear-bomb-building Teheran, our own political leaders are now maneuvering via the U.N. for a “cessation of hostilities.” This has produced a peculiar delicacy of phrase even from President Bush. The U.S. government, with good reason, includes Hezbollah in its list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” But in a press conference Monday, Bush skirted this category, instead labeling Hezbollah “a political party with a militia that is armed by foreign nations.” Sorry, but Hezbollah is not at core a political party. It is an Iranian-Syrian-backed terrorist militia with a Lebanese political front.

There is a deeply dangerous reluctance in the democratic world to face up to the extent of the war already declared and being waged against us — manifest in terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Bombay, and beyond, and especially against Israel, which is fighting right now on the front lines. These terrorists, and their sponsors, watch and learn from each other. In the battles ahead, if the U.S. takes its cues from a U.N. unable even to define terrorism, let alone defy it, the result will be that terrorists — protected by their patrons at the U.N. itself — will continue in graphic and ruinous terms to define it for us.

— Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

UN Human Rights Council - what happened?

So, the General Assembly passed the compromise UN Human Rights Council "reform" - with four opposing votes - the United States, Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands voting against. The US then announced that it will support the new Council and continue funding per usual. Opinio Juris has a good roundup, here and here. Another good site for continuing information is UNWatch.org. I have put here stories from the WP, NYT, and an editorial from the WSJ.

My views continue to be those expressed in the opinion piece by George Mitchell and Newt Gingrich in the International Herald Tribune, in yesterday's post.

The Washington Post's Colum Lynch has a page one story on it in today's paper, March 16, 2006, here. Excerpts:

***
U.N. Votes To Replace Rights Panel
U.S. Has Objections But Will Aid Agency

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 16, 2006; A01

UNITED NATIONS, March 15 -- The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to create a human rights agency to monitor and expose abuses by governments, replacing a discredited body despite objections by the United States that nations with a history of human rights violations could still join the new panel.

The assembly's action will effectively abolish the United Nations' main human rights body, which has been derided in recent years for allowing some of the world's worst rights abusers to participate. It will be replaced in June by a new Human Rights Council, which advocates and most nations hope will exclude brutal dictatorships and do a better job of confronting governments that abuse their own people.

The measure creating the 43-member rights body was passed by a vote of 170 to 4, with the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voting against it. Belarus, Iran and Venezuela abstained, citing a concern that the council would become a tool for powerful Western countries to punish poor nations.

In a shift in U.S. policy, the Bush administration agreed Wednesday to help fund the rights council and has begun an internal discussion over possible U.S. membership. John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a staunch critic of the new council, said that though Washington opposed it, the United States will pledge support for making it "as strong and effective as it can be."

"We remain committed to support the U.N.'s historic mission to promote and protect the basic human rights of all the world's citizens," Bolton said. "The real test will be the quality of membership that emerges on this council and whether it takes effective action to address serious human rights abuse cases like Sudan, Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Burma."
The debate over the new human rights agency had put the United States in a difficult position. Under President Bush, Washington has been urging a reform of U.N. management of a variety of programs. But in this case, it opposed the rules drawn up to determine which nations could serve on the panel and cast a vote.

Wednesday's action follows a nearly year-long campaign by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to create a human rights organization to replace the Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights. Annan said the 60-year-old agency, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, currently suffers from "declining credibility and professionalism" and has cast "a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole."

Members of the current human rights panel include Zimbabwe, Sudan, Cuba, China and Saudi Arabia, all of which have long records of human rights violations. Rights abusers such as China have used their positions on the commission to block criticism of their human rights records.
Annan had proposed setting high membership standards, including a requirement that council members obtain votes from at least two-thirds of the U.N. membership to join. But he concluded that a compromise proposal, which required only an absolute majority of 96 votes for membership, was still worth supporting.

General Assembly President Jan Eliasson, who led negotiations on the council, said the resolution adopted Wednesday would strengthen the U.N. capacity to confront rights abusers and make it more difficult for them to join. "The true test of the council's credibility will be the use that member states make of it," Annan said.

Bolton said Wednesday that Washington opposed the council for several reasons, but he highlighted the proponents' failure to secure the two-thirds vote requirement for membership. "It would have helped to prevent the election of countries that only seek to undermine the new body from within," he said.

But other delegates and human rights advocates questioned the U.S. commitment to creating a strong human rights panel, saying that Bolton rarely participated in the months of negotiations aimed at forging a new council. When he did weigh in -- for instance, by asserting in December that the five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council should have permanent seats on the rights panel -- he complicated the deliberations, according to diplomats and rights advocates.

In a thinly veiled attack on the United States, Peter Maurer, the Swiss ambassador, lashed out at those "who want to make us believe that they are the only ones fighting for an ambitious human rights machinery," saying: "All too often, too high-minded ambitions are coverups for less noble ambitions and are aimed not at improving the United Nations but at weakening it."
Senior U.N. officials and delegates said Bolton barely highlighted the importance of the two-thirds membership vote at a critical meeting this month with Eliasson, leading the General Assembly president to believe that the United States could accept the compromise. Eliasson declined to discuss the conversation.

"I really feel that this is a matter I can't go into, but you're right that the emphasis was not so strongly on two-thirds," he said.

Bolton insisted that he forcefully raised the issue with Eliasson and said suggestions that the United States was not fully engaged in the negotiations are "ridiculous."

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights groups praised the General Assembly's decision. But they cautioned that U.N. members will have to ensure that governments with poor rights records do not win election to the new council.

***
And here is Warren Hoge in the New York Times, March 16, 2006:

March 16, 2006
New York Times

As U.S. Dissents, U.N. Approves a New Council on Rights Abuse

By WARREN HOGE

UNITED NATIONS, March 15 — With the United States in virtually lone opposition, the United Nations overwhelmingly approved a new Human Rights Council on Wednesday to replace the widely discredited Human Rights Commission.

The vote in the General Assembly was 170 to 4 with 3 abstentions. Joining the United States were Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Belarus, Iran and Venezuela abstained.

Secretary General Kofi Annan, who first proposed the council a year ago, hailed the decision, saying, "This gives the United Nations the chance — a much needed chance — to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world."

But John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, said the proposed council was "not sufficiently improved" over the commission, which has been faulted for permitting notorious rights abusers to join.

"We must not let the victims of human rights abuses throughout the world think that U.N. member states were willing to settle for 'good enough,' " Mr. Bolton said in a statement after the vote. "We must not let history remember us as the architects of a council that was a 'compromise' and merely 'the best we could do' rather than one that ensured doing 'all we could do' to promote human rights."

He said the United States would "work cooperatively" to strengthen the council, but he did not say whether the United States would be a candidate to serve on it.

That decision, a critical consideration for the panel's future, is still "under discussion," said a senior administration official in Washington who requested anonymity because he was discussing unsettled policy.

The resolution calls for the election of new council members on May 9 and a first meeting of the council on June 19. The commission, which is beginning its annual session in Geneva next week, will be abolished on June 16.

The council will have 47 members, as opposed to the commission's 53; the means to make timely interventions in crises; and a year-round presence, with three meetings a year at its Geneva base lasting a total of at least 10 weeks. The commission has traditionally met for six weeks, once a year.

Under terms meant to restrict rights abusers from membership, candidates for the council will be voted on individually rather than as a regional group, their rights records will be subject to mandatory periodic review and countries found guilty of abuses can be suspended.

But the final text had a weakened version of the crucial membership restriction in Mr. Annan's original plan, which required new members to be elected by two-thirds of those voting. Instead, council members will be elected by an absolute majority of member states, meaning 96 votes.

Major rights organizations and a number of American allies in the United Nations — which had all lobbied Washington to reconsider its opposition — argued that the terms were far better than existing ones and would keep major abusers off the council.

***
And then the Wall Street Journal editorial page:


REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Second Time as Farce

Wall Street Journal editorial
March 16, 2006; Page A12

So the United Nations votes 170-4 to create a new Human Rights Council, and the U.S. -- one of four dissenters with Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands -- now promises to support the Council and pony up 22% of its operating expenses.

Back when the Bush Administration knew what it was doing, it chose to invest political capital in a quest for U.N. reform, pushing for Paul Volcker's Oil for Food probe and appointing bulldog diplomat John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador. Yet when Mr. Volcker's final report demonstrated pervasive corruption and incompetence at the highest levels, the Administration failed to demand Kofi Annan's resignation, apparently believing it wasn't worth the effort and that a politically beholden Secretary General could help advance U.S. aims.

Well, for months Mr. Bolton has been making the case that the proposed Human Rights Council failed to remedy the basic problems that had made its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, the most visible emblem of U.N. fecklessness and hypocrisy. Among its problems: no formal bar to miscreant countries and an unhappy ratio of dictatorships to democracies. This should have been the easiest reform for the U.N. to get right.

Instead, the Administration has borrowed from John Kerry's playbook, voting against the Council before voting for it. "We have very high standards for human rights at the United Nations," Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns told the Washington Post by way of explaining the U.S. "no" vote. He then added that "We also want to see the U.N. succeed, and so we hope the Human Rights Council can be strengthened over time so that they can deal effectively with real world problems such as Darfur and Burma."

Good luck with that, Mr. Burns. The Oil for Food scandal gave the U.N. a once-in-a-decade opportunity to adopt meaningful reforms, which is now being squandered. But instead of exacting a meaningful price for those failures, the U.S. is still agreeing to foot the bill for an outfit that actually gives the likes of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia a voice on human rights. So we are left with the political baggage of a costly diplomatic fight and a purely symbolic losing vote -- and a million-dollar U.S. taxpayer price tag for a morally bankrupt Council.

URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114248326041599856.html