It's the demography, stupid - Mark Steyn on Euro-demography

Mark Steyn in the London Spectator, here, November 12, 2005 issue, on demography in Europe, or, the rise of Eurabia. Excerpts:

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It’s the demography, stupid

The Spectator (London)
November 12, 2005

Mark Steyn
New Hampshire

‘What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere, if the furrow continues flowering, if the flash of lightning still inflames the night?’ writes Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister of the French Republic, in his 823-page treatise on poetry. ‘If the poet still consumes himself, he refuses the enclosures of thought, certainties, to camp in the heart of the mystery, in the living spirit of the flame.’

Few people are as camp in the heart of the mystery as the flowery-furrowed M. de Villepin, but after the last two weeks he may be less enthusiastic about all those flashes inflaming the night. Poets, said Anatole France, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But in making one of them an actual acknowledged legislator the French have stretched the thesis beyond breaking point. Few countries are in such desperate need of ‘the enclosures of thought’.

Instead, the Prime Minister has announced ‘a raft of measures’, although, as rafts go, this one doesn’t seem likely to make it to shore. The measures include ‘the creation of an anti-discrimination agency’, ‘20,000 job contracts with local government agencies’ reserved for those in the less fashionable arrondissements, an extra E100 million for ‘associations’ in said neighbourhoods, etc.

In other words, M. de Villepin’s prescribed course of treatment is to inject the patient with a stronger dose of the disease. When you’ve got estranged demographic groups with 50–60 per cent unemployment and an over-regulated economy that restricts social mobility, lavish welfare is nothing more than government-subsidised festering. That doesn’t seem a smart move.
My colleague Rod Liddle writes elsewhere in these pages about the media’s strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting ‘youths’. I’m sure he’s received, as I have, plenty of emails arguing that there’s no Islamist component, they’re not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they’re secular and Westernised and into drugs. It’s the lack of jobs; these riots derive from conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, ‘You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything’s about jihad.’

Well, it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques — and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims — have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.

Just for the record, I don’t think everything’s about jihad. Rather, I think everything’s about demography. It wasn’t a subject I took much interest in pre-9/11. A decade ago, for example, I tended to accept the experts’ line that Japan’s rising sun had gone into eclipse because its economy was riddled with protectionism, cronyism and inefficient special-interest groups. But so what? You could have said the same 30 years ago, when the joint was booming. The only real difference is that Japan’s population was a lot younger back then. What happened in the 1990s was what Yamada Masahiro of Tokyo’s Gakugei University calls the first ‘low birth-rate recession’. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the stupidity, economists — the stupidity of thinking you can buck demography.

Let’s take that evasive media characterisation of the rioters — ‘youths’ — at face value. What is the salient point about youths? They’re youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It’s not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back on your Zimmer frame across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement. Civil disobedience is a young man’s game.

Now go back to that bland statistic you hear a lot these days: ‘about 10 per cent of France’s population is Muslim’. Give or take a million here, a million there, that’s broadly correct, as far as it goes. But the population spread isn’t even. And when it comes to those living in France aged 20 and under, about 30 per cent are said to be Muslim and in the major urban centres about 45 per cent. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, points out, ‘the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one’ — already, right now, in 2005. It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the 8th century, the ‘Islamic world’ stretched from Spain to India, yet its population was only minority Muslim. Nonetheless, by 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they’ll even be on the beach at St Trop, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their ‘grievances’.

Let me give a smaller example. In the Guardian the other day, Maureen Lipman wrote a marvellous rebuke to Clare Short over her claim that American support for Israel is the biggest single factor in global violence — an assertion so deranged it suggests a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Miss Lipman is a longtime Labour luvvie but I doubt that she feels too comfortable with much of the British Left these days. I remembered those British Telecom ads she used to do back in the Eighties, playing a nice Jewish lady who’s proud her grandson has got an ‘ology’ in his A-levels, and I found myself thinking how unlikely it would be for any major business enterprise in Britain today to promote itself on TV with a Jewish-flavoured ad campaign. They’d never spell it out that explicitly, of course. I doubt anyone would even propose it at the most wide-ranging brainstorming session. But in the event of anyone running it up the flagpole nobody would salute. Affectionate Yiddisher stereotypes would not be received so warmly in the Britain of 2005. It’s a small loss, unspoken — a response to changing demographics, but also a reflection of how quickly those demographics have been internalised by the broader culture.

Back in March, Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, wrote to our letters page. ‘Mark Steyn seems obsessed with trying tirelessly to prove that he was right about the “big things”,’ he grumbled, ‘forgetting that he is not the story.’

Au contraire, I am the story. That’s to say, I’d have been happy to recycle for another decade or so the same Clinton blowjob jokes that provided me with a very easy living during the 1990s were it not for the fact that I’ve got three kids under the age of ten, and it seems to me that by the time they’re in young adulthood a lot of the places I know and love — including, believe it or not, France — will be a lot less congenial, if not lost for ever. I’m in this thing for me and mine. I am the story. And so’s Mr Doyle. And so are you. And, if you reckon you’re not, you’d better be a childless centenarian in the late stages of avian flu. Unless you act, you’re going to lose your world.

So the question is: do you think M. de Villepin’s one last shot of failed French statism will do the trick?

Finished laughing yet? OK, on we go. It’s possible that, as Europeans often say, the American century is over, and the hegemonic lardbutt is about to keel over and expire. Anything might happen. Was it Timothy Garton Ash or Will Hutton who suggested that giant space monkeys might suddenly descend and eat Cleveland? Could be. I wouldn’t rule it out. But the point is that, while one can draft all sorts of hypothetical apocalyptic scenarios for the Great Satan, the European catastrophe isn’t hypothetical, but already under way.

Right now, the US produces roughly 25 per cent of global GDP. Most analysts figure that by mid-century it will still be producing 25 per cent, and so will India and China, but Europe will be down to 10 per cent. As National Review’s John O’Sullivan has noticed, the three global heavyweights are all strongly attached to traditional notions of national sovereignty, so European countries which have bet on EU-style ‘transnationalism’ as a way out of their individual weaknesses are likely to find that, far from being the inevitable way of the world, it’s already on the wane.

And that’s the optimistic scenario. More likely, those Continental demographic trends will accelerate, as they did during the decline of the Roman Empire, when the imperial capital’s population fell at one point as low as 500. Some French natives will figure that they don’t have the stomach for the fight and opt for retirement elsewhere. The ones who don’t will increasingly be drawn down the old road to the neo-nationalist strongmen promising to solve the problem. That’s why I call it the ‘Eurabian civil war’. The de Villepin-Chiraquiste tendency will be to accommodate and capitulate, but an unreconstructed minority will not be so obliging and will eventually act. Meanwhile, it will be the Muslims who develop a pan-European identity, if only because many have no particular attachment to France or Belgium or Denmark and they’ll quickly grasp that cross-border parties and lobby groups will further enhance their status. The European Union is already the walking dead, but the Eurabian Union might well be a goer.
It’s remarkable to me how many European commentators cling to the old delusions — mocking Bush for being in thrall to his own Texan version of Osama-like fundamentalism. I look on religion like gun ownership. That’s to say, New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate. You don’t have to own a gun and there are sissy Dartmouth College arms-are-for-hugging types who don’t. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed knuckle-dragging neighbours do. If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world pantywaist’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his $70 TV. That’s the way it is with religion. A hyper-rationalist might dismiss the whole God thing as a lot of apple sauce, but his hyper-rationalism is a lot more vulnerable in a society without a strong Judaeo-Christian culture. American firearms owners have a popular slogan: ‘If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.’ Likewise, if you marginalise religion, only the marginalised will have religion. That’s why France’s impoverished Muslim ghettos display more cultural confidence than the wealthiest enclaves of the capital.

So what can be done? For the political class, the demography’s becoming an insurmountable obstacle. When your electorate’s split between a young implacable ethnic group and elderly French natives unwilling to vote themselves off their unaffordable social programmes, there aren’t a lot of options your average poll-watching pol will be willing to take. And the trouble with the social democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything. At the very least, European citizens should recognise that the governing class has failed, that the conventional wisdom has run its course, and that it is highly unlikely that those culturally confident Muslims will wish to assimilate with anything as shrivelled and barren as contemporary European identity. Donald Rumsfeld, a man confined to the enclosures of thought, likes to say that weakness is a provocation. And for the last two weeks that’s all the French state has projected.

As evidence of anti-Europeanism in America, Timothy Garton Ash has quoted on several occasions — and, indeed, preserved in book form — a throwaway line of mine from April 2002: ‘To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France’s Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.’ That may be ‘anti-European’ (though I don’t regard it as such) but so what? What matters is whether the assessment is right, and after the last couple of weeks that prediction looks better than the complaceniks’ view that there’s nothing wrong with the EU that can’t be fixed by more benefits, more regulation, more taxes, more immigration, more unemployment, more crime and more smouldering Citroëns. If you carry on voting for the Euroconsensus, you’re voting for a suicide pact. M. de Villepin put it very well: ‘What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere?’ The Euroconsensus leads nowhere. Time to try elsewhere.

John Bolton chiding slow pace of UN reform initiatives

The Washington Post's excellent UN reporter, Colum Lynch, has a story in today's Friday, November 11, 2005 Washington Post (A16), "Bolton prods U.N. To Act on Spending, Human Rights Issues." Here.

In sum, John Bolton criticizes the fact that in the weeks since the September UN summit, not much has actually taken place to show that the General Assembly or other parts of the UN system are doing anything on reform issues. He also specifically rejects proposals to broaden the Security Council beyond twenty members, as well as proposals to give non SC members broader voice in SC affairs. He stated that if the UN does not act, Congress will itself take action.

People who think Bolton is out to "destroy the UN" have it exactly wrong. If you really, really dislike the UN and all its works and progeny, then the best strategy is that outlined by Mark Steyn in a Spectator article posted earlier on this blog. You do nothing to promote UN reform, but instead simply smile benignly at the voracious rent-seeking behavior - ie, the corruption - of both its individual staff and mission members as well by countries themselves. Let it wallow in its own ineffectual corruption.

Bolton, however, is pursuing a reform agenda, on the assumption that the organization(s) still have some limited utility in the world. There are two aspects to that - one is cleaning up the sheer corruption and patronage, which in theory, though not in fact, everyone should agree should be ended (who will stand up and announce that bribery of UN officials is good?). The other is more difficult, because it involves serious differences between stakeholders in the UN system - countries, missions, UN staff, NGOs, all the players who together constitute what is fondly called "the international community" - as to what the UN should be, as well as serious differences as to how it could get there, even assuming we could agree about what "there" means. Bolton is pushing the first of those on the assumption that everyone at least agrees about that. He is pushing the second in the sense of stating clearly what the US will not accept in the way of ends for the organization - this includes drastic revision of the SC that ultimately will not, in the US view, be effective. The latter is not a matter of corruption or bad faith, but simply a US policy view of what will actually work.

Excerpts from Lynch's article:

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Bolton Prods U.N. To Act on Spending, Human Rights Issues

By Colum LynchWashington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 11, 2005; A16
Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 10 -- U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton said Thursday that inaction by U.N. members is jeopardizing the passage of U.S.- and U.N.-backed initiatives to combat human rights abuses and streamline the agency's bureaucracy.

Bolton, speaking at a luncheon hosted by the Foreign Policy Association, hinted that Congress may retaliate against the United Nations if it failed to take steps toward improving the way it conducts business. He later told the General Assembly that the United States would oppose any effort to expand the Security Council beyond 20 members and would insist that states meet criteria -- including a commitment to democracy and a record of combating terrorism -- to become permanent members.

"The United States supports an expansion of the Security Council that can contribute to its strength and effectiveness," Bolton told the 191-member General Assembly. "We must . . . ensure that new permanent members are supremely qualified to undertake the tremendous duties and responsibilities they will assume."

Together, Bolton's two speeches signaled growing U.S. frustration with the sluggish pace and direction of change in the organization in the weeks since more than 150 world leaders met in New York to discuss proposed changes. In particular, Bolton faulted his counterparts with failing to make progress on two U.S. priorities -- the establishment of a new human rights council that excludes rights abusers and the creation of an independent audit board to monitor U.N. spending.

"We are in jeopardy of not seeing it enacted," he told the luncheon gathering of diplomats, executives and foreign policy specialists at Manhattan's St. Regis Hotel.

In his most critical assessment of the agency since becoming ambassador to the world body, Bolton said the broader U.N. membership has not recognized the urgency of approving administrative changes designed to restore the organization's credibility, which has been tarnished by revelations of corruption in the oil-for-food program and reports of widespread sexual abuse by U.N. peacekeepers.

The scandals "did not arise out of thin air," Bolton said. "The mismanagement and the corruption that we have seen in the program came out of an existing culture on First Avenue," where U.N. headquarters is located. Bolton said "it's hard to have conversations" with his colleagues about the extent of "mismanagement and corruption" uncovered by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, who recently ended an 18-month inquiry into abuses in the United Nations' largest humanitarian program.

Bolton said U.N. members will be confronted with heightened congressional scrutiny if they fail to reform the agency. "When you don't feel a sense of movement and progress toward solving the problem -- if I can say it's an American national characteristic to solve problems and not massage them -- we're going to have increasing difficulties."

In his subsequent address to the General Assembly, Bolton dismissed a new initiative by Switzerland, Singapore, Jordan, Costa Rica and Liechtenstein to change Security Council procedures.

The proposal would grant the wider U.N. membership a greater say in council decisions. It would also call on the council's five permanent members -- the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain -- to agree never to cast a veto in cases where forceful council action could halt genocide or other crimes against humanity.

"We believe that, as clearly stated in the [U.N.] Charter, the Security Council alone will determine its own working methods and procedures," he told the assembly.

Bolton also said the United States would oppose initiatives by the African Union, and by the four governments seeking permanent Security Council membership -- Japan, India, Brazil and Germany -- to renew their bids to expand the group to as many as 24 members. The two groups want the General Assembly to vote on the initiatives.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on foreign law in US constitutional adjudication

Thanks to the finest of our Supreme Court reporters, the Washington Post's Charles Lane, for passing along to me, here, an address by Alberto Gonzales (right), US Attorney General, at the University of Chicago Law School, attacking the use of foreign law in US constitutional adjudication. Although much of the address repeats arguments developed elsewhere, it is striking in at least three aspects.

First, some might be surprised and unhappy that the AG would attack particular justices - Justices Breyer and Kennedy - by name, even given the constant invocations of respect that AG Gonzales uses. The problem is, though, these justices have in effect forced the issue. If it is appropriate for other branches of government, whether the executive or the legislature, to criticize what they see as a constitutionally profoundly flawed methodology of judging - and surely that is appropriate to the political branches - then there is not way to do it without criticizing the justices actually engaged in the practice. At that point, how does one avoid dealing with the methods of particular justices - what does one say, a certain justice (not to be named) once cited the high court of Zimbabwe. If there is a loss of decorum merely in criticizing the practice associated with particular justices, it is because the justices have themselves forced the issue.

Second, this is the first account and criticism of the practice that takes up the issue of what this means for lawyers who must advocate on one side or another - in this case, very appropriately, the lawyers in the Department of Justice. How do you respond when justices take up a method you believe is constitutionally dubious, but which invites you to engage in it? When you want to support, for example, your view favoring parental notification in abortion by minor girls, do you cite to European practice because you can find favorable materials there, even though you think the methodology constitutionally abhorrent? And knowing that the other side, if it finds favorable material, will not fail to cite it? (Much less convincing in the AG's talk is the criticism that the practice creates piles and piles of materials to be absorbed and gone through - although, as Chuck Lane pointed out to me, at some point practicality and principle meet, and because you can't get through the piles and piles, inevitably you cherry pick and, as he says, you cherry pick especially on the basis of the languages you know.)

Third - and this is a point that belongs entirely to the Washington Post's Charles Lane - the speech points to ways in which the Supreme Court justices are engaged not merely in minor excursions into foreign affairs, but developing what amounts to a judicial branch foreign policy. I leave it to Chuck to tell us how and on what basis, but he has made the powerful point that, in this matter of foreign and unratified international law citation, Justices Breyer and Kennedy are, in effect, creating a foreign policy of the Supreme Court. What is it about? Well, take a look at Justice Breyer's new book as well as Anne-Marie Slaughter's A New World Order, and it seems fairly plain that Justice Breyer has in mind an active, global role for the US judiciary in setting the terms of both economic globalization and political globalization, or global governance. To what extent he regards the Supreme Court as a court for the world, one in which to develop global standards as well as discipline the hyperpower within a system of global governance remains, somewhat, to be seen. One trusts that Chief Justice Roberts and perhaps soon-to-be Justice Alito will temper or, better yet, kill the trend.

Rioting about no jobs and discrimination?

I returned from Europe last night just in time to read the Washington Post, among many other mainstream media, informing us on today's editorial page what the French riots are "about" and "not about." They are not about, according to the Post, intifada. They are about lack of jobs and discrimination.

"About" is a slippery term here. So too "cause." While it is true that the lack of jobs and societal discrimination are factors that have led to the riots, it is not the case that the rioters' cause is "about" jobs and anti-discrimination. They are not torching cars and, now, shooting at police in order to protest the lack of jobs and discrimination. Less still are they doing it in order to pressure the French government to give them jobs and combat discrimination.

Rather, the causal link between jobs and discrimination - a less PC, less multi-culti, and more accurate description would be "failure to integrate" - is better understood as key causal elements in creating a social dystopia in which the rioting young men have been left unsocialized - uncivilized - by society. They are not rioting because they lack jobs and want them - they are rioting because they have grown up in a social (dis)order in which schools, jobs, families, the obligations of supporting a family are absent. Those social forces all act as disciplining constraints which anchor young men within social hierarchies.

The failure of French society has been to preserve at all cost the privileges of aging indigenous French men and women because, when it comes down to it, the young, the immigrant young, are not theirs. Fools like Jeremy Rifkind - who devotes a bare handful of pages to Muslim immigration in his five hundred page paen to Europe and its social model - call it Europe's socially superior welfare state. A better description would be a society that eats its seed corn, leaving little invested in the next generation, because its elders failed to reproduce and the young newcomers are not their children, so why should they care? Spend it on me before I die, impose the costs as taxes and debt burdens on the generation after I'm dead - the young ones are not mine.

Well, one reason the aging European indigenes should care is social order. Eliminate the social hierarchies of work, jobs, the regularity and discipline of labor and reward for labor and - crucially - the possibility of climbing in material wealth and social prestige within society's hierarchies, and you eliminate a large amount of the constraints we call civilization. It is not precisely that when such constraints are weakened or even eliminated, then people - more specifically, young men - riot. It is, rather, that if they do, there are few if any costs to them.

Moreover, as every stable society figures out in some measure, if you do not provide young men, in particular, with constrained, hierarchical, yet sufficiently open social structures within which to climb and exercise their ambitions - the conditions lacking in the French welfare state today - then they will only apparently sit there do nothing. Some of them will always do nothing. But a significant number, the ambitious ones, the ones with energy, will indeed do something. One thing they will do is undertake crime, in more and less organized ways. Others will find spiritual fulfilment and social prestige in radical religion. And places in which crime and disorder reign because of the failure by larger society to assert its own hierarchies will discover that radical religion will appeal to many who do not otherwise care about the radicalism, if only because if provides a certain order - the Taliban, for example, taking over Afghanistan from the warlords after the Soviets left.

The gender element is unavoidable, however politically incorrect. So too the hierarchical element; the equality of persons is a wonderful achievement, but one thing established hierarchies can do is reduce social conflict - but there are hierarchies in society that help stabilize it and ones that don't.

It is astonishing that something as commonplace as this even bears stating; it is a testament to political correctness among us that it never enters the disquisitions of the editorial writers.

The problem with confusing cause in the sense of "indirect social cause" with "fighting under the banner of" cause is that it invites - quite deliberately, in the case of our paleo-multiculturalists -the conclusion that if the state provides jobs and finds ways to to combat discrimination, then things will then sort themselves out and all will be well. I suppose that might be true, perhaps, in a couple of generations, over the very long term. Social capital destroyed in a short time takes a much longer time to mend, if at all, as we Burkeans understand. Maybe.

But in the more immediate run of this generation - the next couple of decades - France and Europe and, if it is not careful, the United States, will confront cohorts of unsocialized men with a radical religious ideology to match. They will not at that point care about jobs, for example, because they are so far outside of the disciplinary matrix of jobs and the regularity of work that the rest of society shares that they will never be able to come back inside. Who would employ them - ever? It's not merely a question of skills - it's a question of an underclass that, as men, are damaged goods. Combine that with the pathology of radical islamic jihadism, and that is a potent social force.

Young men will do something with their lives, for good or for ill. Is that so very surprising? And the fact that young Muslim women in France and Europe are seen as much more employable than their men - good employees, regarded as hardworking and reliable in a way that their confrere males, seen as unreliable, resentful, resistant to discipline and the demands of work, are not, tightens the gender conflict within the community and increases the reasons why men opt for the radicalized mosque as a place of asserting themselves. What they will assert is their resentment; what they will ideologize will be resentment, and of course Western cultural theory, multiculturalism, stands ready to provide the theory, the terms, the revolutionary response.

There is, in other words, a form of European Islam already. And it is this form of Islam, curiously and disturbingly that, even more than Saudi Wahhabism, is spreading insidiously throughout the Muslim world. This Euro-Islam is genuinely syncretic, a mixture of traditional Islam and Western ideology - we might call it the 'Islam of resentment'. That is the element incohoately driving the rioters, and it is the coherent expression of resentment that threatens to turn rioting into genuine intifada.

Becuase it is not yet an intifada. The Post is right about that, so far. Mark Steyn is jumping the gun, although quite possibly not by much - and he makes the point so carefully avoided by so many that the French rioters have been rehearsing this particular drama for years against Jewish targets in France. But the Post does not seem to understand why it is not yet intifada. it says that the rioters are not being directed by radical imams and therefore it is not intifada. But the Palestinian intifada was not always directed by imams. Much of it was secular, much of it was simply violence for its own sake, and much of the violence was coopted by radical preachers once the intifada started. Radical preachers are not a necessary element of intifada, although certainly they help a lot.

What is missing from these riots as far as intifada is concerned is not per se religion, but the broad sense within the community of underclass French Muslims that these young men really are fighting and resisting on their behalf. That element is not yet there, at least not as a coherently framed revolutionary ideology. But it could easily emerge - along with radical preachers to give the violence revolutionary, jihadist, islamofacist coherence. And at that point, it becomes far more threatening, because it then achieves precisely the communal discipline, hierarchy, and focus that are what French society at large has so conspicuously failed to provide among the immigrant populations.

(The best American writer on these issues, as I've said before, is the Weekly Standard's Christopher Caldwell.)

Mark Steyn on the French riots

(Update, Tuesday, November 8, 2005. Also Mark Steyn, from the Daily Telegraph, here.)

Mark Steyn on the French riots, here. Excerpts:

***

Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands

November 6, 2005 Chicago Sun Times

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''
''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ''Perhaps,'' wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'' There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was ''an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.''

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.

Compendium of national security links

I just ran across this extremely useful site with several hundred links on national security, here. Maintained by someone at North Carolina Wesleyan College - thanks!

Kofi Annan on why the UN is not a threat to the internet

I can´t say I agree with the Secretary General - it seems to me the UN and the current conference on internet governance present a huge risk to the open nature of the internet. But hereś the SGś argument, such as it is, from the Washington Post, Saturday, November 5, 2005, at A19, Kofi A. Annan, "The U.N. Isn´t a Threat to the Net." Here.

Background from a Foreign Affairs article by Kenneth Neil Kukier, here. Even generally liberal media in the US reject the idea of UN control, eg this editorial from the Boston Globe, here.

In the media forum in Prague from which I am currently blogging, with 150 or so journalists from all sorts of media in the developing world here, the general sense is to want publicly to support a shift to the UN from the US, while privately expressing relief that it won´t actually happen. A certain form of wanting your cake and eating it, too.

Excerpts from the Annan WP piece:

The main objective of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held this month in Tunisia is to ensure that poor countries get the full benefits that new information and communication technologies -- including the Internet -- can bring to economic and social development. But as the meeting draws nearer, there is a growing chorus of misinformation about it.

One mistaken notion is that the United Nations wants to "take over," police or otherwise control the Internet. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United Nations wants only to ensure the Internet's global reach, and that effort is at the heart of this summit.

Strong feelings about protecting the Internet are to be expected. In its short life, the Internet has become an agent of revolutionary change in health, education, journalism and politics, among other areas. In the United Nations' own work for development, we have glimpsed only the beginning of the benefits it can provide: for victims of disaster, quicker, better-coordinated relief; for poor people in remote areas, lifesaving medical information; and, for people trapped under repressive governments, access to uncensored information as well as an outlet to air their grievances and appeal for help.

There are also legitimate concerns about the use of the Internet to incite terrorism or help terrorists, disseminate pornography, facilitate illegal activities or glorify Nazism and other hateful ideologies. But censoring cyberspace, compromising its technical underpinnings or submitting it to stringent governmental oversight would mean turning our backs on one of today's greatest instruments of progress. To defend the Internet is to defend freedom itself.
Governance of matters related to the Internet, such as spam and cybercrime, is being dealt with in a dispersed and fragmented manner, while the Internet's infrastructure has been managed in an informal but effective collaboration among private businesses, civil society and the academic and technical communities. But developing countries find it difficult to follow all these processes and feel left out of Internet governance structures.

The United States deserves our thanks for having developed the Internet and made it available to the world. For historical reasons, the United States has the ultimate authority over some of the Internet's core resources. It is an authority that many say should be shared with the international community. The United States, which has exercised its oversight responsibilities fairly and honorably, recognizes that other governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns, and that efforts to make the governance arrangements more international should continue.

The need for change is a reflection of the future, when Internet growth will be most dramatic in developing countries. What we are seeing is the beginning of a dialogue between two different cultures: the nongovernmental Internet community, with its traditions of informal, bottom-up decision making, and the more formal, structured world of governments and intergovernmental organizations.

The Internet has become so important for almost every country's economy and administration that it would be naive to expect governments not to take an interest, especially since public service applications in areas such as education and health care will become even more widespread. They need to be able to get their Internet policies "right," and to coordinate with each other and with the Internet community. But governments alone cannot set the rules. They must learn to work with non-state stakeholders. They, after all, are the ones that have played critical roles in building and coordinating the Internet, and they will remain the driving force of further expansion and innovation.

At the summit two years ago in Geneva, discussions on Internet governance reached a stalemate. So the U.N. member states asked me to establish a group to examine the issue further. This Working Group on Internet Governance presented its findings in a report that reflects the views of its members, but not of the United Nations. It proposed creation of a "new space for dialogue" -- a forum that would bring all stakeholders together to share information and best practices and discuss difficult issues, but that would not have decision-making power.
The group also offered several options for oversight arrangements, with varying degrees of government involvement and relationship to the United Nations. None says that the United Nations should take over from the technical bodies now running the Internet; none proposes to create a new U.N. agency; and some suggest no U.N. role at all. All say that the day-to-day management of the Internet should be left to technical institutions, not least to shield it from the heat of day-to-day politics. These and other suggestions are being considered by U.N. member states.

Everyone acknowledges the need for more international participation in discussions of Internet governance. The disagreement is over how to achieve it. So let's set aside fears of U.N. "designs" on the Internet. Much as some would like to open up another front of attack on the United Nations, this dog of an argument won't bark. I urge all stakeholders to come to Tunis ready to bridge the digital divide and ready to build an open, inclusive information society that enriches and empowers all people.

The writer is secretary general of the United Nations.

Welcome Peter Gonzalez!!

Peter Gonzalez has posted a very important comment on the Paris riots on my post below. Peter is an old and dear friend from my home town of Claremont, California - we were in high school together, his younger brother Nicholas my very close friend in those years, and his sister Rebecca my girlfriend for years and years. Peter I knew least of all - he was a couple of years older - until I ran into him by complete accident on the campus of Harvard Law School, where, as it turned out, he was also a student. We became good friends and then housemates, where I got a chance to know his lovely French wife, Isabelle. After law school, Peter took the plunge and moved to Paris, where he practices law. We lost track until Peter looked me up somehow on google or something and sent me an email. A lot of complicated extended family things intervened, and somehow I have not responded to Peter, for which I apologize publicly, as he is one of my favorite people. So, Peter, I am so glad you've persisted in reaching out to me, and I will send you an email as soon as I get out of this conference, which I am supposed to be liveblogging ... thanks for keeping after me to get back in touch, it's been far, far too long. And a kiss to your wonderful wife. More to follow by email. Ken

Are US MSM slow to cover French riots?

Sitting in Europe, I have been awakened to the fact of the on-going riots in Paris (see Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard, November 14, 2005, here). I wondered why I was not more aware of them - in full throttle for well over a week now - from the US MSM. Curious, I went back and looked over US newspaper coverage from the point when the riots began.

Perhaps I am overly suspicious of venues like the NYT or Washington Post, but it seems to me, at least, that both papers were very slow to pick up on the gathering violence and neither has given it the attention it deserves, even in comparison with the ever-present tendency to trash the war in Iraq and anything else available even remotely to lay at the feet of the present administration. Both papers, it seems to me, have gone out of their way in their coverage to favor criticism of the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose politically incorrect, un-multicultural stance seems to have the slightest whiff of, well, Bushism about it. Part of what I, at least, see as slow, buried, and gently biased coverage by the US press is due to not wanting to criticize Western Europe because it bears the torch against the wicked Bush administration. Part of it also is that it is does not want to show Europe's multiculturally politically incorrect response because that gives succor to anti-multiculturalism (look, even the Europeans don't buy the multi-culti line, except in international meetings of their elites trashing the Americans), which, of course, is weird because Europe has far greater problems with integration of immigrants than the US does (although, to be fair, Western Europe's immigration problems, in terms of culture, religion, etc., are far more difficult than America's).

Part of the reporting weakness, too, is that venues like the NY Times simply have the wrong kind of reporters covering the place for what it has become today - they are often reporters with little interest and less grasp of the economic and business matters that allow Europe its good life, little or no grasp of the immigration issues, and are frankly people who prefer soft cultural issues, Europe as a style-fashion beat - the kind of reporters who, faced, for example, with Merkel, can't think beyond doing a story on how she is ... female.

(The best coverage in US journalism of Western Europe continues to be, by a wide margin, Christopher Caldwell.)

Conference on "The Limits of International Law"

Last weekend, I went to the University of Georgia law school, in Athens Georgia, for a conference on Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner's new and provocative book, The Limits of International Law. It was put on by Peter Spiro and Dan Bodansky of the UGA international law faculty, and my great thanks to them and to Laura Tate Kagel, who did the logistics and organization. It was a fabulous meeting - the fact that it was small allowed participants to talk directly and engage with the book and its authors, both of whom were there. Great meeting, and my thanks.

The major claim of The Limits of International Law is that states fundamentally act from their interests - however they define them - and that what they regard as international law and how they interpret it reflects that fact. It makes some strong subclaims, perhaps the most important being that customary international law, even within international law generally, simply doesn't exist beyond what states do in pursuit of their interests. It also makes strong claims on the methdological front, applying a simple rational choice-game theory model to model state behavior in relation to international law. The political consequence of these claims is to argue that international law is of only limited effect influencing, let alone constraining, state behavior - the views of the older generation of Henkin, Koh, and others notwithstanding.

Nearly all the participants had strong criticisms of the book - unsurprisingly, since the claims are so strongly put. I think some of the claims are overstated - for example, I think that as the game theory and rational choice models become more sophisticated over time, some of the claims that the book makes will turn out to be wrong. But in general, I think its rationalist take is correct as far as it goes. Something like its descriptive account of international law is right, although it won't turn out to be precisely what the book says it is.

I'll have more to say about this as I prepare my own paper for publication in the special issue of the school's international law review. In the meantime, my thanks to Peter, Dan, and Laura for arranging this splendid meeting.

The Bush administration internal debate on detainee policy, again

I was delighted and surprised to have my last post on detainee policy picked up by the TNR blog, the Plank, the AmericanScene blog, and the National Review's The Corner blog. Reading over what they picked up, it made me think I should be clear about a couple of things:

• Although I am sharply critical of the realist Cheney camp within the Bush administration on this matter of detainees, no one should confuse that with a basic disagreement over the war on terror, or the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. I do think that in crucial respects, there is a war on terror, and I am an entirely unrepentant supporter of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think the Cheney, et al., position on how to treat detainees is wrong - profoundly wrong - but it is not a general disagreement about the thrust of a war policy. My view of the war against jihadist terrorism is approximately that of Christopher Hitchens - I have referenced several of his columns here on this blog, and with respect to the "realist" debate, strongly recommend this one from Slate - and I tend to agree also with the views of Mark Steyn and the Hoover Institution´s Victor Davis Hanson (eg this recent City Journal article by Hanson, here, or this National Review online article, here).
• Support for using the language of common article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as policy in detainee policy should not be confused with a belief that everyone picked up in the war on terror is entitled to Geneva Convention III POW treatment. Too much of the left critics of the Bush administration seem to believe that this debate is about whether the Geneva Conventions are applicable in full to detainees in the war on terror. So let me be clear. My position, and as I understand it, the position of internal administration people calling for the use of common article 3 language, is not that detainees determined to be part of terrorist organizations are entitled to treatment as POWs under GC III. They are not; they are unprivileged belligerents who are not entitled to GC III treatment.
• As for the level of procedure to which a detainee is entitled to determine whether he or she is properly classified as part of a terrorist organization, my view is that as a matter of both policy and also as the best (but not legally required) reading of the Geneva Conventions III, article 5, which provides for hearings to determine status of detainees, hearings should be provided. Those hearings should be held per the 1997 DOD regulations for a three officer hearing (although because those hearings were not held in the first place, it became inevitable that when hearings finally were held, they provided more elaborate procedure than would have been necessary had the DOD regulations implementing Article 5 in the first place). I do not at all believe that there is a basis under the history or practice of Article 5 hearings for anything more elaborate, although under current circumstances some form of review is appropriate. Article 5 is not a justification for providing a full hearing with counsel, civilian trials, or the full range of hearing privleges available to a bona fide POW. I have written extensively on the Article 5 issue elsewhere on this blog. (In general, although not in every particular, I agree with John Yoo's view on terror suspects and the Geneva Conventions, from a short op-ed piece in USA Today, here.)
• So, yes, the Geneva Conventions apply to the war on terror, but that does not mean what many people seem to think it means or what they would like it to mean - viz., that every detainee is entitled to POW treatment. And I do not understand anyone in the Bush administration, Matthew Waxman or anyone else, to believe or be arguing for that. The issue is far more circumscribed - should administration policy on treatment of detainees use the language of common article 3 as a floor on treatment of detainees.
• Let me emphasize also that those in the Bush administration arguing for the use of common article 3 language do not mean that the US should use it because that shows the US is a team player in the international community, or that the US should be "big enough" to do what everyone else wants, etc. It is, on the contrary, an argument that the US should influence the content of international law by being willing to use the language of international law and, through its state practice and official statements, make a case for what the content of those words mean. I do not believe that the US should be a "team player" in the international community - when it does so, it usually means it is being played for a fool. The argument is not one of going along with what others want because they want it - for the simple reason that on publicly inflamed issues such as detainees, what others want is to show that they can constrain the United States, constraint for its own sake, to show that they have influence in the world. Whereas the US ought to be throwing its weight around in establishing international law and what it means - using its strength to announce its own view of what the meaning of such terms as "humane treatment" and "abuse" is, as a matter of its view of international law. This will not make the international community happy - on the contrary, it will anger the international community, because it will look like exactly what it is, a superpower demanding that its view of international law be given commensurate weight. It is the superpower asserting that its views of international law, while not flatly determinative, carry very great weight. It is the superpower asserting some level of ownership over the content of international law. Since the rest of the international community sees international law as its special playground, it is a recipe for greater conflict, not less conflict.
• The Cheney position, by contrast, arises from a perception of weakness and a belief that the US should avoid talking the language of international law because it is assumed that it "belongs" to someone else - NGOs or international virtuecrats or middle-sized powers seeking to punch above their weight by invoking moralist language. The Cheney position essentially concedes all that. It is true that under some circumstances, I have recommended that the US not engage in negotiations over international law issues, for the reason that the existence of negotiations is solely in order to reach a foreordained result that cannot possibly - and everyone knows in advance cannot possibly - be in US interests. That is not, however, an argument for refusing to assert one's view of international law and the content and interpretation of its terms.
• At an even more general level, the US failure to assert its views of international law, and to announce, regularly and formally in a variety of venues, that its state practice represents, as a matter of opinio juris, its view of the content of international law, costs the US immensely in a world in which, like it or not, the ideology of international law matters. Why has the United States not responded in an official and comprehensive way to 1977 Protocol I, when it has so many justifiable disagreements with it (even the NY Times editorialized against Protocol I in Reagan administration days)? Why is no response likely to come to the new ICRC study on customary international law of war? While many seem to think it proceeds from an arrogant sense of strength, to my mind it actually reflects a deeply dangerous view of American weakness, that it cannot assert any ownership over the content of international law.
• On the general question of detainee policy - indeed, the general war on terror - I have come slowly to the view that it is time for a legislative framework to establish the terms of a war on terror that necessarily involves elements of regular war, elements of policework, and elements of what might be called an intelligence war - something that is neither war nor policework. Leaving aside the McCain bill - what I mean here is something far more comprehensive, far beyond simply detainee treatment - I think it is time for a comprehensive legislative framework. This is anathema to the Bush administration, partly for substantive fears that a legislative framework would undercut the ability of the administration to act and partly for reasons of the preservation of executive power. But it is time for the Bush administration to look for what will remain of the war on terror after its tenure is done. Unless it is institutionalized in a way that incorporates the legislature, the next admininstration, Democrat or Republican, is likely to repudiate or merely ignore the war on terror, feeding on a public hope that it ended with the administration that had to respond to 9-11. That is a natural feeling on the part of the public, but of course terror does not obey American electoral cycles. The war on terror, like the Cold War, needs an institutional base, and that can only come about, a this point, by enshrining it in a legislative framework. (Tod Lindberg, of the Hoover Institution's Policy Review, and I are considering a conference on this topic in DC in the spring.)

Media Development Loan Fund Meetings in Prague

I am in Prague for meetings of the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) (photo of the managing director, Sasa Vucinic, speaking in Malaysia last year).

MDLF is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support independent media worldwide. By independent media, MDLF aims at assisting newspapers, radio, TV, internet, in the developing world and formerly communist world that present objective, factually based information. I am on the board of the organization – I have been chairing the board for the past few years.

There are a number of organizations that assist media and journalism worldwide – many of them work with journalists to improve their skills and product. MDLF is different because it focuses on the business side of media, in the belief that independent media requires financial stability as a business to stay in business. It provides financing in the form of loans and equity investments – some grants, but quite limited – and acts like a nonprofit venture fund, a private equity fund, investing in a portfolio of media companies in places ranging from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (this is where we started) to Latin America and Asia and Africa today. Our portfolio has gone from zero to about US$ 25 million today; we have invested over that time about US$ 55 million.

Our original funder was George Soros and the Open Society Institute – since the first days we have broadened our funding base to include many of the European aid agencies, among others (you can see all about the funding on the website).

We have a board meeting here in Prague on Sunday. During these two days, Friday and Saturday, however, we are holding a special tenth anniversary celebration. We have invited our clients, our funders – all sorts of folks have gathered here in Prague to discuss what it means to be independent media. Some of the sessions are conceptually oriented – what does citizen journalism mean? What should be journalist ethics in new media such as blogging? But in keeping with MDLF’s focus on the business of media, we will spend much of our time discussing how genuinely independent media – not owned by the government, the political parties, the local mafia – can stay financially sustainable.

I’m blogging (offline) from the meetings – Dan Gillmore, the former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and now guru of blogging and citizen journalism, has delivered a talk on what participatory journalism means. One of our Malaysian clients, a sophisticated young man who runs a leading online news service there, Steven Gan of Malaysiakini, is responding to him. And Kostek Geberty, one of the great journalists of the samizdat journalism of Poland, and now part time on the MDLF staff, is raising questions about the limits of citizen-journalism, the stories that it can’t really cover. And the editor of Noseweek, in South Africa, is responding to him.

Not everyone here is thrilled with blogging and citizen journalism by any means. Kostek and most of the commentators are sharply challenging Gillmore and criticizing the new internet publishing, blogging and the rest, as merely opinion, often uninformed, rather than factual reporting in any depth. Yet part of this difference reflects a divide between regular journalism that happens to be online, for reasons of government pressure, financial pressures that make online publication much more efficient than actual paper publication, and blogging which is really just opinion.

I wish we had James Boyle and Glenn Reynolds here.

The journalists and media people here represent the best of the developing world media - many of them face enormous pressures. Some of them are financial and business pressures. Some of them face serious risks, personal risks. In Guatemala, our client Jose Ruben Zamora has to deal with thugs beating him up, threatening his family, trashing his offices - at the same time facing the financial pressures of how to ensure that he continues to have a printing press willing to print his newspaper, El Periodico. Our clients in Indonesia have to worry about radical imans stirring up trouble against them. Others, in the Russian provinces, have to deal with the local mafia, often controlling the local municipality, demanding bribes and extorting money. Not everyone faces those kinds of physical threats, but many do.

These are very thoughtful, smart people, and this is frankly the most important meeting of developing world journalists of the whole year. Yet MDLF remains virtually an unknown organization – for nearly all our ten year existence, we have deliberately remained under the radar screen, wanting the focus to be on our clients. In addition, we found that we were better able to assist our clients in places with difficult governments when we presented ourselves not as a political advocacy organization, but instead as a business-motivated investor. Over time, we have seen a need to become better known within the world of development agencies – which have gradually been realizing the importance of the free and transparent flow of information as a means of improving government and improving markets and improving the flow of goods and services in society to the poor people – within the world of funders and international NGOs. So we are seeking greater visibility.

Update, November 4, 2005. The next session today is on anonymous sources for investigative journalism - the discussion in so much of the media has been about Watergate's Deep Throat, on the one hand, and the Valerie Plame affair, on the other - our discussion, however, is about the use of anonymous sources by a variety of journalistic enterprises in places very different from the United States. The panel consists of Jose Ruben Zamora, editor of El Periodico in Guatemala, Yuri Fedutinov of Echo Moscow, Ljubica Markovic (Beta Press in Croatia), and Martin Welz (Noseweek, South Africa). Their issues with anonymous sources are far different from what it means in Washington DC or New York. Although the basic questions of reliability, corroboration, and whether you are being spun by the source remain the same.

NYT story on detainee policy power struggle within Bush administration

(Update, April 20, 2007, see middle of post, here.)

(Update, Nov 2, 2005. Changed Matt to Matthew. And thanks to TNR blog and AmericanScene blog and National Review's The Corner blog for picking this up.)

The New York Times has a front page story today on the struggle within the Bush administration over detainee policy - detention, interrogation, what constitutes okay and not okay treatment, etc. It is by Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt, here.

I will try to comment later, but I am on my way to Prague today for a board meeting. However, I did want to note that the article discusses my good friend Matthew Waxman, getting beat up by Cheney's people. Matt has been pushing a revision of detainee policy that would adopt, as a matter of policy but not law, basic language and principles from Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Common Article 3 by its terms covers wars "not of an international" character, meaning internal or civil wars. In that sense, it doesn't have much to do with the war on terror, which is not an internal or civil war. On the other hand, it is a good place from which to draw standards because (a) it does deal with fighters who are non state actors, since rebels in a civil war are non state actors and (b) it was drafted as a kind of bottom-line set of standards, applicable in anything that rises to the level of an "armed conflict."

So although I take the Cheney people's point that the war on terror is not an internal armed conflict, and although I agree that Article 3 doesn't apply as a legal matter in any case as a set of standards, it is the right place from which to draw a statement of minimum treatment standards. Common article 3 does not treat illegal combatants entitled to Geneva III protections, nor does it place any restriction on the ability of a government to try, including under military commission or non-civilian courts, unprivileged belligerents such as Al-Qaeda suspects. It does use language about cruel and inhumane treatment, and outrages upon personal dignity, which apparently the Cheney folks think could be used, for example, to argue that a female US interrogator merely asking questions of a Muslim male could constitute outrages against personal dignity. Leaving aside that the "outrages" language historically was a euphemism for sexual assault, the real issue here is how the US defines its practices in relation to the language.

Given, however, that the Bush administration engaged in the utter foolishness of taking a bunch of religious fanatics and giving them solely a Koran for reading material, rather than loading them up on decadent Western entertainment and thought, thus reinforcing their sense of martydom and heroically self-referential world view, it seems a little late for arguing about these issues. The US has done more to reinforce anti-American Muslim resentment, paradoxically, by kow-towing so stupidly to supposed Muslim mores, in ways that no Muslim country would do in war or conflict. But if you announce in advance that you are going to make Muslims happy, then you in effect reward further Muslim resentment as a way of getting more reward, and that has been the sole result of all the goofy politically correct multi-culti way in which so much of the cultural side of the war on terror has been run. It was and is a foolish strategy, exemplified at this moment by a person truly out of her depth, Karen Hughes, and by those who dreamed up a strategy in the first place of trying to show the world that the US would be nice to Muslims, even ones trying to kill the infidel. They artificially set the bar for behavior at a level that angels in heaven itself could not meet, and then seemed surprised when the response from the Muslim world was not, look how humane they are, but rather, what have you done for us lately?

When it comes to establishing standards, then, the US simply must define for itself what is okay and not, and say what it thinks fits. It should look to its own moral sense first and foremost, rather than acting as though it had no internal moral standards but instead was nervously looking to the rest of the world for approval because it had no internal sense of right and wrong in these cases, no sense of how to balance security interests and humane treatment. The rest of the world will object in any case - it will withhold its approval because, frankly, that is the only way for it to stay in the game of being an interlocutor with the superpower. The task is to define in a commonsense way, within a straightforwardly American sensibility, what those terms mean and tell it to the rest of the world. Those who were going to object will do so in any case, but the US public, at least, will understand and accept it, in a way that it does not now. And yet, within that debate, the words of common article 3 are the best standard, as a matter of policy and not law, in part because it uses the language that should be used in these cases because it recognizes the global and universal interest in balancing security and humane treatment.

But the US also has another reason, a much more strategically important one, for using the language of common article 3 - and this is something that the Cheney people seem not to have considered. It is because the US has an enormous interest in shaping, through its state practice and its opinio juris, the legal meanings of those terms in international law of war over time. This latter possibility seems not to have occurred to the Cheney people, to judge by the NYT article - the issue is not, as the Times piece attributes to Cheney's staff, whether others in the world, the human rights groups, other countries, etc., will denounce US interpretations of what the words of common article 3 mean. Of course they will, because they are trying to shape the future interpretations of those words amd because they correctly perceive that objecting to US policy is a way of showing that one is a player in the world But frankly so what?

What the US should be doing is not refraining from ever using those words for fear that someone might denounce the US interpretation - thus leaving their interpretation and meaning always and forever in the hands of other countries and outside NGO groups - but instead vigorously asserting through state practice and constant reiteration and argument that the US is right in its use of those words and itnerpretations and that a state as large, important, and assertive as the US on the meaning of those terms cannot be ignored in what those terms mean. The US has to assert some level of ownership over the debate of the meaning of the law of war, which it cannot do by refusing ever to use its language.

Matthew Waxman is right and Addington et al. are wrong - and curiously, Matthew Waxman is right not because he is encouraging the US to give in to international pressure because it is weak, but instead because he understands that the US must, over the long haul, exercise its power to shape the future meanings of those terms to conform to US standards. It is an argument from strength and the willingness to assert it. Whereas the Cheny, Addington, et al. position is really an argument to avoid ever using the language of article 3 or international law generally because of a perception that the US is weak and cannot, through the vigorous assertion of state practice and opinio juris, shape the international law meanings of those terms.

This is not in the least an argument that the US should give in to those who would tell the US what those standards have to be - the argument that well intentioned liberals often give for giving in to the international community, "we're big enough to give in on this," which is to say, we're big enough to be weak and not use our power because being big and powerful is really unfair to the rest of the world. It is, rather, an argument that the US can and should forcefully throw its weight around on the world stage to define those standards, as international standards - its way. Waxman argues for an assertion of US strength, Cheney et al. counsel avoidance from a fundamental belief in US weakness.

And if Cheney et al. win on this point, then, naturally, the perception of weakness will indeed form the future reality.

Excerpts from the Times piece:

***
November 2, 2005

Detainee Policy Sharply Divides Bush Officials

By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT, NYT

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 - The Bush administration is embroiled in a sharp internal debate over whether a new set of Defense Department standards for handling terror suspects should adopt language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting "cruel," "humiliating" and "degrading" treatment, administration officials say.

Advocates of that approach, who include some Defense and State Department officials and senior military lawyers, contend that moving the military's detention policies closer to international law would prevent further abuses and build support overseas for the fight against Islamic extremists, officials said.

Their opponents, who include aides to Vice President Dick Cheney and some senior Pentagon officials, have argued strongly that the proposed language is vague, would tie the government's hands in combating terrorists and still would not satisfy America's critics, officials said.
The debate has delayed the publication of a second major Pentagon directive on interrogations, along with a new Army interrogations manual that was largely completed months ago, military officials said. It also underscores a broader struggle among senior officials over whether to scale back detention policies that have drawn strong opposition even from close American allies.
Since Mr. Bush's second term began, several officials said, factions within the administration have clashed over the revision of rules for the military tribunals to be held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the transfer of some prisoners held there, and aspects of the United States' detention operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"It goes back to the question of how you want to fight the war on terror," said a senior administration official who has advocated changes but, like others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on the condition of anonymity. "We think you do that most successfully by creating alliances."

The document under discussion, known as Department of Defense Directive 23.10, would provide broad guidance from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; while it would not spell out specific detention and interrogation techniques, officials said, those procedures would have to conform to its standards. It would not cover the treatment of detainees held by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The behind-the-scenes debate over the Pentagon directive comes more than three years after President Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the fight against terrorism. It mirrors a public battle between the Bush administration and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is pressing a separate legislative effort to ban the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any detainee in United States custody.

After a 90-to-9 vote in the Senate last month in favor of Mr. McCain's amendment to a $445 billion defense spending bill, the White House moved to exempt clandestine C.I.A. activities from the provision. A House-Senate conference committee is expected to consider the issue this week.

Mr. Cheney and some of his aides have spearheaded the administration's opposition to Senator McCain's amendment; they were also quick to oppose a draft of the detention directive, which began to circulate in the Pentagon in mid-September, officials said.

A central player in the fight over the directive is David S. Addington, who was the vice president's counsel until he was named on Monday to succeed I. Lewis Libby Jr. as Mr. Cheney's chief of staff. According to several officials, Mr. Addington verbally assailed a Pentagon aide who was called to brief him and Mr. Libby on the draft, objecting to its use of language drawn from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

"He left bruised and bloody," one Defense Department official said of the Pentagon aide, Matthew C. Waxman, Mr. Rumsfeld's chief adviser on detainee issues. "He tried to champion Article 3, and Addington just ate him for lunch."

Despite his vehemence, Mr. Addington did not necessarily win the argument, officials said. They predicted that it would be settled by Mr. Rumsfeld after consultation with other agencies.
But while advocates of change within the administration have prevailed in a few skirmishes, some of those officials acknowledged privately that proponents of the status quo still dominate the issue - partly because of the bureaucratic difficulty of overturning policies that have been in place for several years and, in some cases, were either approved by Justice Department lawyers or upheld by the federal courts.

"A lot of the decisions that have been made are now difficult to get out of," one senior administration official said.

A spokesman for the vice president, Stephen E. Schmidt, said Mr. Addington would have no comment on his reported role in the policy debates. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, also would not discuss Mr. Waxman's role except to say it was "certainly an exaggeration" to characterize him as having been bloodied by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Whitman confirmed that the Pentagon officials were revising four major documents - including the two high-level directives on detention operations and interrogations and the Army interrogations manual - as part of its response to the 12 major investigations and policy reviews that followed the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

The four documents "are nearing completion or are either undergoing final editing or are in some stage of final coordination," Mr. Whitman said. But he would not comment on their contents or on the internal discussions, beyond saying it was important "to allow and encourage a wide variety of views to come to the surface."

The administration's policies for the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects have long been a source of friction within the government.
Even some supporters of those policies have acknowledged that the tensions stem in part from the way they were pushed through after the Sept. 11 attacks, by a handful of administration lawyers who circumvented international-law experts, military lawyers and even some cabinet-level officials who might have objected.

Many officials said Mr. Addington, who helped create the legal framework after 9/11, remains a bulwark in support of those policies, deftly blocking or weakening proposed changes. Nonetheless, the internal politics of those issues have begun to shift in Mr. Bush's second term.
Several architects of the original policies have left the government. Some other senior officials, who had challenged aspects of the policy with limited success, have gained stronger voices in new posts.

Condoleezza Rice, who occasionally questioned the Pentagon's management of Guantánamo when she was national security adviser, has called more forcefully for a reconsideration of some detention policies as secretary of state, a stance generally backed by her successor at the White House, Stephen J. Hadley, administration officials said. The new deputy defense secretary, Gordon R. England, has also been an influential advocate for reviewing the detention policies within the Pentagon, officials said.

"The results may not be very different, but the discussions have changed," a senior military lawyer said. "And there are more discussions."

Since President Bush's decision in February 2002 to set aside the Geneva Conventions in fighting terrorists, government lawyers have debated what legal framework should apply to combatants in a struggle that the administration argues does not fit into the categories of international violence contemplated by the 1949 conventions.

Lawyers at the State Department raised the issue repeatedly, officials said. But because the department opposed the president's original decision to put aside the conventions, the efforts of its lawyers were largely dismissed as attempts to revive a question that had already been decided, they added.

Beginning late last year, Defense Department lawyers took up the issue as they revised Directive 23.10, the "DoD Program for Enemy Prisoners of War and Other Detainees." A roughly 12-page draft of the directive, which began circulating in the Pentagon in mid-September, received strong support from lawyers for the armed services, the military vice chiefs and some civilian defense officials, several officials said.

"The uniformed service lawyers are behind the rewrite because it brings the policy into line with Geneva," one senior defense official said. "Their concern was that we were losing our standing with allies as well as the moral high ground with the rest of the world."

Following one of the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, the draft, written by officials in Mr. Waxman's office and military lawyers, lifted directly from Article 3 of the Geneva accords in setting out new rules for the treatment of terrorism suspects, three officials who have reviewed the document said.

Common Article 3, as the provision is known, sets out minimum standards for the treatment of captured fighters and others in "armed conflicts not of an international character." Although President Bush determined in February 2002 that the article was not relevant to Al Qaeda or the Taliban because of its international focus, the Sept. 11 panel noted that it "was specifically designed for those cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply."

The draft Pentagon directive adopted the language of Common Article 3 "as a matter of policy rather than law," one defense official said. Even so, the Geneva reference was opposed by two senior Pentagon officials, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, and, William J. Haynes, the department's general counsel, defense officials said.

Mr. Addington, who has been a close bureaucratic ally of both defense officials, soon called Mr. Waxman to the Old Executive Office Building to brief him and Mr. Libby on the directive. Two defense officials who were told about the meeting said Mr. Addington objected to phrases taken from Article 3 - which proscribes "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, humiliating and degrading treatment" - as problematically vague.

"We may know what they mean in the United States," one senior administration official familiar with the debate said of the Geneva terms. "But views around the world may differ from ours. Having a female interrogator even asking questions of a male might be humiliating to some parts of the Muslim faith."

Another official said Mr. Addington and others also argued that Mr. Bush had specifically rejected the Article 3 standard in 2002, setting out a different one when he ordered that military detainees "be treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.

Only when the dispute is resolved, defense officials said, would the Pentagon conclude the drafting of the second directive, known as 31.15, on the interrogation of prisoners including terrorism suspects. That document, in turn, would make possible the publication of a roughly 200-page Army manual for interrogations that was virtually completed last spring, officials said.
"If we don't resolve this soon," one defense official said, referring to the overlapping debate over Senator McCain's proposal, "Congress is going to do it for us."

The Saddam trial

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I went to Iraqi Kurdistan as the team leader of a joint Human Rights Watch-Physicians for Human Rights forensic anthropology mission to excavate several mass grave sites in Kurdistan. I am a lawyer, not a forensic anthropologist, and my job was to deal with logistics as well as to take testimony from survivors while the forensic experts, led by Dr. Clyde Snow, undertook the exhumations and physical investigations. (Jemera Rone, still of Human Rights Watch, in fact handled most of the logistical matters such as housing and food - all very difficult in those days - and did a far better job at it than I would have been able to do.)

The team excavated massacre sites that dated from the infamous 1988 Anfal campaign, which HRW concluded was an attempted genocide. (My guess, given the general relaxation of the conditions for concluding genocide, is - absent the diffuse desire by human rights organizations to avoid giving any ideological aid or comfort to the US invasion - Anfal would be counted as a genocide today as much as Bosnia, for example, was.)

We worked on one site that involved men and boys lined up and shot, then buried in a mass grave; we also excavated the graves of several villagers in another location who had died from chemical weapons attacks. The team brought back samples from the bombs that were positively identified as having degradation products unique to sarin gas.

This was all written up in a report, authored by me, called The Destruction of Koreme. I see that it occasionally pops up on web sites dealing with Kurdish issues, although it is very important to know that while the accounts at the particular villages are correct, later investigations by Human Rights Watch showed that some of its descriptions and details of the larger political situation of Anfal, outside the villages we were investigating at the level of Iraqi Kurdistan as a whole, although the best information at the time, were not correct. The definitive work on the Anfal campaign was and is the extraordinary book-length report for Human Rights Watch by George Black (now of Human Rights First). All those reports are available at the Human Rights Watch website, here.

As someone who has worked for Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups, and who is, at one and the same time, both sympathetic and critical today of the role of NGOs in human rights, I have not tended to say too much on the issues I investigated on behalf of these organizations. I would not want anyone, on the one hand, to think that I speak for organizations that in fact I sometimes have sharply criticized (as in this Weekly Standard article) and, on the other, I would also would not want anyone to think that such criticisms are more than they are.

Human Rights Watch and other international human rights monitors have nonetheless indicated their grave unhappiness with the current arrangements for trying Saddam Hussein, whose trial opened today (and was immediately postponed). The objections come down to four things:

• The death penalty. All these groups oppose the death penalty on moral grounds. Fair enough; the question is whether, however, that is grounds to refuse to provide the kind of information routinely offered, for example, in Milosevic's trial. The anti-death penalty stance is offered as an instance, sometimes, of the human rights groups commitment to justice. Well, I too am opposed to the death penalty in ordinary domestic society such as that of the United States. Still, I question whether the human rights groups' insistence that their view of law and justice must prevail is in fact a commitment to justice, in the case of an obvious mass murderer of historic proportions, such as Saddam, or instead to some other principle - such as rubbing home the point that political communities that have traditionally had the death penalty must bow to the sensibilities of human rights elites. Given the monumental proportions of Saddam's slaughter, I would say that there is something deeply unjust and hard-hearted, a certain indifference to justice, in insisting that the standards of Western European elites on the death penalty are the only ones that deserve adherence.
• An a priori view that only "international" venues are suitable for justice in mass human rights cases, not national ones. The international human rights movement has committed itself to the cause of internationalism, largely because it conflates internationalism with universalism, and assumes that only international venues, such as international tribunals, can meet the requirements of law and justice, because being international is the only truly persuasive evidence of being universal, impartial, and so on. Unfortunately, it seems rarely to be noticed that international elites, organizations, tribunals, and so on - while seemingly universal because disconnected from particular geographies - in fact have their own partialities, preferences, interests, and all the rest. They do not exist in some impartial place in space - internationalism is not universalism. It was a mistake for the human rights movement to sign onto the quite separate agenda of internationalism, although the tendency of international elite organizations (ever hoping to use international organs to deliver diktats of international law to "merely" parochial nation-states) to adopt this questionable equation is plain.
• An objection to any venues of justice that don't carry the NGO seal of approval, coupled with an unwillingness to do anything noteworthy that might speak positively of the Bush administration or, more broadly, the United States. One should never underestimate the independent driving force of an NGO movement that feels slighted because it has not had a central seat at the table in designing instruments of justice. And one should never underestimate the comforting, group-hug, warmth-giving, group-bonding feeling that comes in international circles from the shared assumptions of anti-Americanism. It provides an automatic point of connection, of shared values, of shared goodness.
• Concern for a procedurally fair trial. As a certain amount of criticism has been raised on the above points, it is this last that has been the increasingly public focus of human rights groups' complaints. Unfortunately, the reality is that no procedure that could lead to the death penalty, or which did not involve the blessings of the United Nations, or the deep involvement of the human rights organizations, or the deep non-involvement of the Bush administration could ever hope to satisfy the human rights movement as being fair. It indeed ought to stand on its own as a question of fair presentation of evidence, the chance to rebut, all the usual things. Yet when a group such as Human Rights Watch invokes it in this instance, it is essentially impossible to separate out those issues of fairness - which, for example, someone willing to allow the death penalty might still agree with - from the brutal, a prior view that any procedure that allows the death penalty, is conducted by something other than an international tribunal, etc., is by definition procedurally unfair. In the hands of the human rights movement, objections on procedural fairness grounds are simply code for disagreement with the substance of the trial itself.

The impossibility of ever satisfying the critics is, as usual, evident in the New York Times editorial on the Saddam trial today. It takes the US and Iraqi authorities to task for starting with a simple, easy to prove, but admittedly non-representative case of killings, rather than starting with undoubtably true, but much more difficult to prove, charges of genocide in the Anfal campaign. Does anyone really doubt that had the tribunal started with the larger issues of genocide, the New York Times, goaded by Human Rights Watch and all the rest, would then be complaining about vague charges in a capital case, with vague standards of proof? No matter what you do, it will always be wrong - simply because you're doing it.

It is this pure reactiveness, knee jerk, if he's for, i'm agin', view that so characterizes elite liberal groups such as the Times or Human Rights Watch or the ACLU on so many issues these days, far beyond the Saddam trial. Why bother to pay any attention to their reasoning or conclusions when it is so painfully evident that had you done the opposite, the opposite set of complaints would be made? Which is a very bad thing. Because it puts people who care about procedural fairness in this trial in the position of having to judge it entirely by themselves - there is no point in paying attention to what Human Rights Watch, et al., have to say on the subject because you could never possibly satisfy them because, at bottom, well, you know, you're the Bush administration. That's not a good thing, because this trial does need to be monitored. But it needs to be monitored by people who - even if they object to the death penalty, the lack of Security Council blessing, and so on - can bracket those issues and make them separate from pure issues of procedural fairness. That is not currently the leading international human rights organizations.

(Update, Wednesday, October 19, 2005. The best single-stop place for information on the Saddam trial is Grotian Moment, staffed by a very impressive group of contributors and containing law, news, and many other links about the trial.)

The al-Zawahiri letter of July 9, 2005

Here is the text of the letter of July 9, 2005 from al-Zawahiri, number 2 under bin Laden, to al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The unwillingness of so many Westerners to take bin Laden, et al. at their word - to accept that they mean what they say, no matter how crazy or historically weird it may seem to outsiders - is baffling to me. Al-Qaeda and its emulators have been altogether clear, in letters, statements, websites, and innumerable sermons delivered at the mosques of Europe, the Middle East, and even the United States by radicalized preachers of jihad, exactly what they intend. The failure to accept that they mean the strategy they describe and that we are somehow better positioned than they to describe their strategy - the idea that we merely have to reimagine their strategy so as to fit our pacific and nonconfrontational desires - ranks among the most foolish of historical errors. But the road to appeasement was ever thus.

(Update, Wednesday, October 12, 2005. Austin Bay's analysis, here, (thanks Instapundit).)

Sebastian Mallaby on DDT and malaria in Africa

I cannot overstate how astonished and angered I have long been at the way in which African lives are lost to malaria because of the refusal of the rich West, the US but particularly the EU, to contemplate the use of DDT. As Sebastian Mallaby puts it with his customary incisiveness today in the Washington Post, here:

***
Look Who's Ignoring Science Now

By Sebastian Mallaby

Monday October 10, 2005; A19, Washington Post

The flip side of Bush cronyism is hostility toward experts -- toward people who care about what's what rather than who's who. Economists have depressingly little influence on the Bush economic policy. Climate scientists are incidental to the Bush climate-change policy. Health experts seldom decide issues like the provision of clean needles to HIV-vulnerable drug addicts or poor countries' access to generic AIDS drugs. But it's not just the Bush administration that spurns data and evidence. Consider the case of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, on which the Bush administration is marginally better than the European Union.

DDT, to give that chemical its more familiar name, works miracles against diseases that are spread by insects. During the Second World War, vast quantities of the stuff were dusted over troops and concentration-camp survivors to kill the body lice that spread typhus. Later, DDT was used widely in Latin America to beat back dengue and yellow fever. But the chemical's noblest calling is to combat malarial mosquitoes. In the early 20th century, Dunklin County, Missouri, had a higher rate of malarial mortality than Freetown, Sierra Leone. Between 1947 and 1949, DDT was sprayed on the internal walls of nearly 5 million American houses, and at the end of that process malaria had ceased to pose a significant threat in the United States.

DDT also helped to eliminate malaria in Europe and parts of Asia, and in 1970 the National Academy of Sciences estimated that the chemical had prevented 500 million deaths. And yet, despite that astounding number, DDT has all but disappeared from the malaria arsenal. Some 500 million people still get the disease annually, and at least 1 million die, but the World Health Organization refuses to recommend DDT spraying. The U.S. government's development programs don't purchase any of the chemical. In June President Bush made a great show of announcing a new five-year push against malaria; DDT appears to play no part in his plans.

But the worst culprit is the European Union. It not only refuses to fund DDT spraying: In the case of at least one country, it has also threatened to punish DDT use with import restrictions.

That country is Uganda, which suffered a crippling 12 million cases of malaria in a population of 27 million in 2003. The Ugandans know perfectly well that DDT can help them: As Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute recently testified to Congress, DDT spraying in one part of the country in 1959 and 1960 reduced the prevalence of malaria from 22 percent to less than 1 percent. Ugandans also know the record in South Africa, where the cessation of DDT spraying in 1996 allowed the number of malaria cases to multiply tenfold and where the resumption of spraying in 2000 helped to bring the caseload down by almost 80 percent.

So the Ugandans, not unreasonably, would like to use DDT. But in February the European Union waved an anti-scientific flag at them. The Europeans said Uganda might need to institute a new food monitoring program to assuage the health concerns of their consumers, even though hundreds of millions have been exposed to DDT without generating any solid evidence that the chemical harms people. The E.U. proposal might constitute an impossible administrative burden on a poor country. Anti-malaria campaigners say that other African governments are wary of even considering DDT, having seen what Uganda has gone through.

Why does Europe impede Uganda's fight against malaria? The standard answer starts with "Silent Spring," the book that helped launch the environmental movement in the 1960s and that painted a scary picture of DDT's potential impact on the food chain. But this is only half right. The book's overblown claims led to the banning of DDT in the United States in 1972 and its disappearance from aid-funded programs thereafter. But "Silent Spring" was really about the dangers of large-scale agricultural use of DDT, not the limited spraying of houses. Today mainstream environmental groups concede that in the context of malarial countries, the certain health benefits of anti-malarial spraying may outweigh the speculative environmental risks.
So the sin of the environmental movement -- at least of its more responsible exponents -- is not that it's flat wrong on this issue. Instead, it is more subtle. Environmentalists think it's their responsibility to campaign against the damage done by toxic substances, but not to campaign against the damage done by the over-regulation of substances that actually aren't very toxic. Of course, the environmentalists' credibility in calling for necessary regulation would be enhanced if they were willing to denounce unnecessary regulation. But you don't hear them yelling about the European Union's absurd position on Uganda.

The result is that there's no counterweight to consumers' food-safety paranoia, and politicians refuse to countenance DDT spraying "just to be on the safe side." This cowardice is no different from the Bush administration's indifference to scientific sense on climate change, though you won't catch the environmentalists saying that. And the consequences are rather more immediate. Think what being on the "safe side" means to malaria's victims.

mallabys@washpost.com