En route to Riyadh, the New York Timesreports that President Obama told a French reporter "United States also could be considered as 'one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.'"
Predicably, this has set off a flury of controversy. Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch, for example, asks "what planet is he on?"
I'm guessing "earth." Because according to the Pew Research Center, there are an estimated 2.35 million Muslims in Amerca. This means that if the United States were a member of the 57 nation Organization of the Islamic Conferences it would rank, in terms of Muslim population, above Albania, Kuwait, Brunei, Benin, Togo, Djbouti, Suriname, Gabon, Gambia, Guyana, Guinea-Bissau, Comoros, Qatar, Lebanon, and the Maldives.
UPDATE: It is also probably worth noting that most Muslims in the United States are not Arab -- and most Arabs in the United States are not Muslim.
I was a child when this image of a lone man standing up to an entire war machine left first beamed across the globe. It remains one of the most powerful symbols of raw human courage that I have ever seen. I get chills everytime I watch this. What is not courageous is blocking access to Twitter. The "Great Firewall of China" burns on.
Greg Scoblete at RealClearWorld highlights the following from a speech on foreign policy from Mitt Romney that, to use Greg's rather charitable words, "doesn't add up." Comparing the U.S. military to that of Russia and China, Romney makes this claim:
And then consider all the things we expect from our military that they do not expect from theirs. We respond to humanitarian crises, protect world shipping and energy lanes, deter terrorism, prevent genocide, and lead peace-keeping missions. [emphasis mine]
I'm finding it hard to recall American troops rushing in to prevent genocide in Rwanda or Darfur...and a quick check of the numbers reveals that the United States currently contributes a whopping 96 personnel (75 of whom are police, and only 10 of whom are troops) to the 90,000-plus involved in UN peacekeeping missions around the world . Not exactly leading the way. Russia, by the way, has contributed almost four times that many, and China has contributed over 2,000 personnel. Though at least the U.S. is on track to pay its full bill for peacekeeping this time around...
(image of a Chinese peacekeeper -- a particularly musically inclined one -- in DR Congo, from UN Photo)
Esteemed foreign policy commentators like Dan Drezner, Stephen Walt, Fred Kaplan, and Michael Tomasky have already plied their film knowledge in listing the top international relations movies. I'll try to pick up what Matt started earlier today and start an internet meme about the cartoons with the most interesting implications for foreign policy and geopolitics.
I'm tempted to draw a lesson about hubris, paranoia, the place of cold and calculating intelligence in world politics, and the futility of global domination from -- where else? -- "Pinky and the Brain." But I don't think neoconservatism needs any further rebukes. Instead I'd nominate Scooby Doo.
Consider the Scooby Doo villains as rudimentary terrorists. They dress up as scary monsters, terrify the local population, and chase Shaggy and Scooby through endless halls and mismatched doorways. That they wear masks, and often are after financial gain, may make them seem to resemble old-school bank robbers, but the crux of their power is the terror they invoke in residents.
The mysteries are inevitably solved by the members of the team -- Fred, Daphne, and Velma -- who remain relatively calm and treat the monsters as criminals -- not, say, "enemy combatants" of the beleaguered town. This is despite the fact that they are impersonating what is, in terms of fear-inducing presence, essentially a child's equivalent of a bomb-laden terrorist.
But no lockdowns are conducted, there is no torture for information on the monster's identity, and no pre-emptive strikes. (The only "operations" are limited to Rube Goldberg-esque traps that are conducted only once the team has accumulated enough evidence to identify the villain, who, naturally, "would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for you lousy kids!") The culprit is then arrested by the local police, and, instead of bundling him in the Mystery Machine and sending him/her to Guantanamo, s/he is presumably headed for a normal civilian jail.
As a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, Ralph Fiennes -- who takes a turn at playing evil as He Who Must Not Be Named in the Harry Potter films -- has focused on the decidedly UN-evil cause of calling attention to the plight of child soldiers. His trip to eastern Chad, for example, occurred alongside -- and most probably generated the media coverage of -- a UN operation to release and demobilize more than 80 child soldiers in the region. This is a great work, but, as this illuminating Foreign Policy story makes clear, reintegrating former child soldiers into society is anything but easy -- and there are over 300,000 around the world, creating a far more prevalent and destabilizing phenomenon than is commonly understood.
We think we know what a child soldier looks like: the AK-toting, drugged-out boy "with anger burning in his eyes." But that isn't necessarily the case. To dispel the myths about child soldiering, read the whole piece. This is what hit me hardest:
Sending children home via disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs is another favorite method of post-conflict planners. These programs are meant to get children and adolescents out of armies and back where they belong -- in schools or in jobs. But here again, results are mixed. Many organizers make the mistake of excluding girls from their programs. They often fail to understand the local economy and therefore train children for the wrong professions. In Liberia, for example, too many ex-combatants were educated as carpenters and hairdressers. Nor do the programs target the roots of intergenerational violence that will long outlast the active fighting. DDR initiatives are often too short term to do much more than superficial training, as even officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development will admit. [emphasis mine]
Forgive the crude example, then, but Voldemort himself could renounce evil and free his child Death Eaters, but if the DDR process isn't done right, or followed up with rigorous attention to development concerns, then they will still not be able to return to society, or, worse, will be prone to returning to combat. DDR is one of the hardest of peacekeepers' tasks: convincing former partisans and killers to give up their arms, rejoin the nation they were fighting against, and live amongst their former enemies. With children who have been traumatized in myriad ways, abused and exploited, raised on a diet of economic, sexual, and military conscription, the process is even harder. And it's discouraging to think that it may not be working that well.
Contrary to popular perception, the International Criminal Court does not have universal jurisdiction over war crimes. Rather, it operates under a unique legal principal called "complementarity" which stipulates that the ICC will only investigate crimes if national courts are unable or unwilling to do so. The idea is to preference trials at the local level, and in so doing make the ICC only a "court of last resort."
The principal of complementarity had been generally untested since the court's founding in 2002. That is, until yesterday--when defendant Germain Katanga, a Congolese war lord, filed a motion to challenge the ICC's jurisdiction in his trial for crimes against humanity.
Katanga's counsel argues that complementarity was too narrowly applied and that the ICC should have left his case to Congolese authorities. Actually, it's slightly more complicated than that. Bec Hamilton, who has been twittering from the proceedings, explains in plain English.
In essence it comes down to a fight over the meaning of the word "case." In this morning's hearing I expect we will see the Prosecution argue that the case against Katanga was not being investigated or prosecuted by the DRC, and they will do so using the definition of the word "case" that Pre-Trial Chamber I established several years ago in Lubanga - Namely that a case involves the same person and same conduct: ". . . for a case arising from an investigation of a situation to be inadmissible, national proceedings must encompass both the person and the conduct which is the subject of the case before the court." (Decision of Pre-Trial Chamber I, 24 Feb. 2006, para 37). Therefore, the fact that the DRC were investigating Katanaga is not, in and of itself, enough to make the case inadmissible. It would only be inadmissible if they were also investigating him for the same conduct as in the ICC case.
By contrast, the Defense has argued in its submissions that this interpretation of the word "case" is too narrow. They also argue that the DRC authorities would have started looking at the conduct the ICC is now looking at if the ICC had not begun its investigation.
In short, the guiding jurisdictional principal of the ICC is being tested. How the judges rule on this motion will have a profound impact on the whole edifice of international criminal justice and international humanitarian law. For all you international legal eagles this is certainly something to keep an eye on.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that human rights lawyers Geoffrey Nice and Pedro Nikken make in this Washington Post op-ed: that interest in Burma should go beyond the legitimate calls for Aung San Suu Kyi's freedom; that grave human rights abuses, probably amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity, have been going on unchecked for a long time in the country; and that the international community, including the United Nations, have long known about these travesties. But I find their proposed solution -- "maintain[ing] our gaze" and "authoriz[ing] a commission of inquiry" -- well-prescribed (both by these two and by one of our own) but not wholly fleshed out here and, if anything, insufficient.
As symbolically (and actually) egregious as the continued imprisonment of Burma's celebrated pro-democracy leader is, I've always found the international attention heaped upon her -- as if her release alone would clear the way for a domestic Burmese solution -- troublingly myopic. This has in fact allowed the Burmese generals to focus their propaganda efforts on show trials and (severely) limited accommodations for one individual, even as the subjugation of the rest of the country's population steamrolls along. Similarly, for Burmese to rest their hopes on Suu Kyi's shoulders is to foster an illusion that her release would wholly relieve them of their plight.
But Nice and Nikken are right; the world has known about these pervasive patterns of abuse for a long time. Despite citing a study that relied only on UN documentation, though, the authors allege that "the U.N. Security Council has not systematically investigated these abuses." A commission of inquiry mandated for a wide-ranging investigation is doubtlessly necessary, but even a full accounting of abuses will not, like the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, guarantee that the abuses cease.
I don't expect an op-ed to propose a long-range, comprehensive plan for Burma's rehabilitation (nor do I have one), but some acknowledgment of the factors that would make a commission of inquiry difficult -- the chokehold that the country's generals maintain over the population, their North Korea-esque penchant for unpredictable intransigence and intractability, and the dire humanitarian needs of the country -- seems necessary (the ICC indictment of Bashir could provide lessons, for instance). Urging on the Security Council and a commission of inquiry is important, but important players like China, India, and the United States cannot hide behind either the UN or a claim to need to know more.
(image of Burmese generals, from flickr user deepchi1 under a Creative Commons license)
You should be following the Tech4dev on twitter, because, if you were, you would have gotten this shocking statistic quicker:
1.6B ppl live "off the grid"; 80% of them on $1-$2/day. Yet in Kenya, these homes spend $200/yr on alt energy - fuel, etc.
That $200 a year (out of $365 for those who live on $1/day) goes toward lighting and cooking fuel, mobile phone charging, dry cell batteries, and car-battery charging.
At the HTC, Richard Baseil is currently comparing the group's solutions search to Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Full disclosure, it's my favorite cartoon (though I do love the weirdness of the Smurfs, Dad).
Baseil, who led my breakout group yesterday and is generally a very personable guy, notes that Coyote, carnivorous vulgaris, had a multitude of possible solutions -- earthquake pills, a rocket-powered sled...just a plain rocket, jet engine roller skates, etc. -- and even the support of a major supplier, Acme (one of the many reasons I love Wikipedia). However, he had major operational issues. He had the technology but no good way to implement that technology.
The message, just like Kathy Calvin's yesterday, is that the products alone are not enough. You've got to have usable standards, have plans for operations, administration, and maintenance, and be driven by an economic implementation plan. This has been a rucurring theme here, and I think a message to the engineers in the room.