“Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe” by Naomi Klein. Harper's. October 2007.
An Annotation:
In this month’s Roundtable, our contributors discuss the suggestion that, once again, and in a new way, capitalism has run amok. Looking at the market response to political and natural disasters, Naomi Klein revisits a notion upon which both Karl Marx and Milton Friedman would agree: Capitalist markets create and deal with their own problems. However, the discrepancy that places these economic giants at odds is whether this mechanism constitutes the seeds of capitalism’s own destruction, or simply is a self-corrective and balancing feature of open markets. For Marx, capitalism is perpetually expanding, devouring everything in its path as it insatiably seeks new markets until reaching a crucial tipping point. For Friedman, capitalism, if it remains free to operate, will respond to systemic shocks in such a way that in the long run will re-establish equilibrium and allow for its continuity and growth. Klein uses her own contemporary lens of privatization under neoliberalism to address this question as she looks primarily at the response to Hurricane Katrina and the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
“The end result is the same kind of unapologetic partition between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned…”
With startling, apocalyptic prose, Klein paints a stark picture of a broken government unable and unwilling to fulfill its basest responsibilities—be they security, health care or education. If the private sector performs duties traditionally reserved for the State, what is the cost? Klein, through her critique, intends to highlight the sidestepping of foundational principles of liberalism and human rights, such as transparency, accountability, and reciprocity. Underlying even these is the notion that all are equal before these principles; none are above the rule of law and none are below the safety net the State provides. Placing these obligations in the hands of corporations compromises the universal nature of the State and threatens to create a situation where these necessities are available only to the highest bidder.
“The companies at the heart of the disaster-capitalism complex increasingly regard both the state and nonprofits as competitors; from the corporate perspective, whenever governments or charities fulfill their traditional roles, they are denying contractors work that could be performed at a profit.”
The process Klein describes is one that begins with public money spent to hire private contractors, which results in transferring “common welfare” provision into the realm of commodification—the very tasks for which government is convened get outsourced and transformed into a product one must purchase. Not only does access to these services become more limited, but the nature and value inherent in them is irremediably altered. Whereas the human rights previously assigned to the State for universal protection are now subject to the dictates of the fluctuating market.
“All indications are that if we simply stay the current course, they [disasters] will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market’s invisible hand.”
Is this phenomenon an outgrowth of capitalism itself or a directed political strategy? Put another way, does “Disaster Capitalism” exist by default or by design? Do we correctly point to the “Washington consensus” and the expansion of neoliberal economic ideology or would it be more accurate to identify a State that is compelled to go to outside providers to perform its most fundamental tasks because it is overburdened, overstretched and/or simply incapable? Naomi Klein’s article implies that the Disaster-Capitalism Complex is at the same time a natural progression with its roots in the Military-Industrial Complex, as well as a deliberate attempt to weaken government and maximize revenue for private interests.
Finally we must ask: What is at stake? Do these trends produce positive results for ordinary people? To return to our authoritative economists, while Milton Friedman would respond that this is indeed a positive direction in which to be moving as the market is better suited to meet the demands of “common welfare” than the state, Marx would describe this as yet another instantiation of economic power consolidation bent on securing massive profits at the expense of human freedom and well-being.
These issues and many more are addressed in this month’s installment of Human Rights & Human Welfare’s Roundtable.
~ The Editors
Friday, November 2, 2007
Editor's Introduction - November 2007
“Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe” by Naomi Klein. Harper's. October 2007.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
American Capitalism - Disasterous Consequences?
by Richard A. Falk
"Missing is the possibility of countervailing politics here and elsewhere, from above and below...Looking at world capitalism as a whole, the American economy is being displaced by more constructive forms of profit-making elsewhere in the world that are not linked to 'disaster capitalism.'"
Naomi Klein’s depiction of late-capitalism as feeding off a disaster-prone planet and state-system is provocative and illuminating, even if it seems to be itself a form of “shock and awe” journalism. The great cultural critic of the 1960s, Norman O. Brown, memorably said of psychoanalysis, “[o]nly the exaggerations are valuable,” and so it might be with this critique of the dark sides of recent tendencies in world economic activity. It is notable that the book version of Klein’s article bears the title The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which itself can be read as a sly admission that her account is intended to portray one controversial facet of a much more complex economic reality. Also, it should be understood that most of the attention is paid to the American experience—which has certainly featured a preoccupation with disaster at home and abroad—looking at the combined impacts of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Whether her assessment would be as relevant if the same questions were considered from a Chinese, Indian, Turkish, or French perspective seems quite doubtful.
Klein’s argument is that the private sector has recently flourished in those contexts where either natural disasters occurred or geopolitical obstacles have been experienced. Her stress is upon the word “recently” in order to sustain the position that we have entered a new phase in the evolution of world capitalism. It is certainly true that extreme weather has produced a series of events around the world during the last several years in a form that has required massive aid and reconstruction efforts, and that mega-corporate construction firms such as Halliburton and Bechtel have been better positioned than governments or foreign companies to organize responses. She also correctly notes that the challenge of responding to natural disasters bears resemblance to the challenges associated with occupation and reconstruction in Iraq.
It is almost certain that natural disasters will continue to offer opportunities to private firms for profitable undertakings in the years ahead, but hopefully the outlook is less clear in the area of geopolitical failure. The possibility exists that American political leaders will learn the hazard of seeking to intervene forcibly in foreign countries, and find less costly, more acceptable, and more effective means of pursuing its foreign policy goals. This is by no means assured. The Vietnam War did inhibit interventionist geopolitics for some years, but the so-called “Vietnam syndrome” was gradually overcome by some ambiguous military successes in the First Gulf War (1991) and the Kosovo War (1999), and by the ascendancy of neoconservative grand strategy during the Bush presidency. Klein does not really take into account whether there will be a new “Iraq syndrome” that will discourage recourse to counterinsurgency ventures in the years ahead, and how that might alter the overall profile of unfolding world capitalism.
Surely, Klein is correct to note that post-9/11 homeland security has been an area of robust and profitable economic expansion, and that there exists a correlation between profitability and insecurity within American society. In this respect there is a deeply troubling connection between a politics of fear pursued by the U.S. Government to obtain a mandate for limiting the freedoms of Americans and the private sector benefits that result from the surveillance and monitoring of the citizenry. Klein’s article is valuable in making us appreciate the linkages between the “war on terror” and private sector interests.
Klein also casts her discerning eye on the privatization of the security functions of the state, including even the conduct of wars. The notorious role of Blackwater in Iraq was definitely highlighted by Klein well before it became a matter of public concern in the United States and elsewhere. Her larger point is also well-taken, to the effect that the dominant state in the world, despite its huge military budget, is increasingly dependent on private contractors and mercenary soldiers to fill the gaping holes of its military occupation in Iraq.
Although Klein does not accuse the corporate beneficiaries of conspiring to produce disasters, she notes that they use their leverage with the government and the media to discourage steps that might move toward ecological and geopolitical stability. Again, this is a disturbing trend that when coupled with neoconservative political leadership seems to be leading the country down a catastrophe-laden path.
It is a bleak picture, but perhaps not as decisively so, as Klein would have us believe. Her outlook is expressed at the end of the article where she observes that the only possible counterweight to the disaster scenario is the “unlikely scenario that this latest boom could somehow be interrupted by an outbreak of climatic stability and geopolitical peace.” What is missing is an assessment of tensions within capitalism itself, as not all parts of the economy are dependent on disaster, especially if the future magnifies the disasters experienced in the last decade. Also missing is the possibility of countervailing politics here and elsewhere, from above and below, that is, by shifts in governmental policies and by populist pressures. Looking at world capitalism as a whole, the American economy is being displaced by more constructive forms of profit-making elsewhere in the world that are not linked to “disaster capitalism.” The dollar is declining, U.S. manufacturing is losing out to foreign competitors, trade and fiscal deficits are growing, the military budget is excessive and exacts damaging opportunity costs vis-à-vis restoring the American infrastructure, and investment flows are moving elsewhere.
In concluding, I believe that Klein has over-generalized her argument, insufficiently distinguishing the afflictions of American economic development from the overall condition of world capitalism. There are acute difficulties with world capitalism associated with terms of trade, widening disparities, insufficient social and environmental regulation, but these criticisms do not lend support to Klein’s contentions about “disaster capitalism.” Her framework would be more convincing if it explicitly limited the burden of her indictment to the American role in the world economy, and did not conflate the two. It is a common liberal fallacy to suppose that whatever happens to the United States happens to the world, which seems to me dangerously misleading in this setting because it fails to clarify the relationship between American economic and geopolitical decline (of which “disaster capitalism” is a symptom) and the global economy that is certainly affected by disaster, but not nearly to the same extent. For instance, European governments are more prepared to make sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than is the United States. In this central respect, Naomi Klein should be thanked for starting a conversation, but others must steer it in different directions, if we are to avoid wallowing in despair.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book, The Great Terror War (2003), considers the American response to September 11, including its relationship to the patriotic duties of American Citizens. In 2001 he served on a three person Human Rights Inquiry Commission for the Palestine Territories that was appointed by the United Nations, and previously, on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Human Rights Horizons; On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics; Explorations at the Edge of Time; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; The Promise of World Order; Human Rights and State Sovereignty; A Study of Future Worlds; and This Endangered Planet. Falk also acted as counsel to Ethiopia and Liberia in the Southwest Africa Case before the International Court of Justice.
If It Were Only that Simple
by Katherine Gockel
“The fact is that a combination of public, private and civil society efforts are usually employed in most of these situations. To lay most of the blame on privatization and business misrepresents reality.”
Reading “Disaster Capitalism,” one would think that the current dire situation in Iraq and the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina are all because of an emphasis on “small” government, privatization, and partnerships with the business sector. If only it were that simple.
That is the problem with this article and those written by people who argue the “other side”—that big government is wasteful, stifles competition and harms U.S. competitiveness. The fact is that a combination of public, private and civil society efforts are usually employed in most of these situations. To lay most of the blame on privatization and business misrepresents reality. Corruption is also found in government and civil society, especially in the developing world.
Americans need to stop accepting oversimplified arguments. Telling the whole story is impossible. Yet, we should expect those writing for the public to at least offer more than one perspective and even provide examples that might contradict their argument so that better solutions can be developed.
This response article to Ms. Klein’s piece also will not tell the “whole story.” The various situations used as “evidence” for her argument are too complex to cover in 800 words. Rather, it will provide a different perspective on what has happened in Iraq and in the New Orleans’ school system for readers who might want to think more about the validity of the “disaster capitalism” argument.
To begin, the public and private sectors are not mutually exclusive and they never have been. Business people have entered politics and politicians have entered the business world. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Let us not forget that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is an organization where many humanitarian professionals would love to work.
Yes, there are businesses with questionable practices. Especially those like Halliburton, which has been censured for overcharging the U.S. Government in Iraq. There are also politicians (from both major U.S. political parties), government officials, and non-governmental organization representatives who have demonstrated questionable and even unethical practices. There are also efforts by members of business, government, and civil society to make the globe a more inhabitable place for all people. More people are coming to accept that it is a combination of efforts from each of these sectors that leads to better and more sustainable solutions.
Let us not forget that questionable public policies brought Iraq to its current state of affairs; and not just those policies of the U.S. Government. The Iraqi Government and the various sects in Iraq are also responsible for the ongoing strife and insecurity that make development and reconstruction so difficult. Iran and other countries also have a role in this, as do groups advocating terrorist activities.
The political situation caused by internal Iraqi sectarianism is now deemed by many experts as being more critical than the security situation. In a dinner conversation last spring, a high-ranking Iraqi shared that every time something was built in Iraq, someone or some group destroyed it. So it is not as if people—from the public, private, and civil sectors—are not trying to help Iraq recover and develop. Rather, power struggles and use of violence by many players are impediments to progress. That situation cannot be blamed solely on the use of private contractors.
Yes, Americans and their allies are afforded greater security in Iraq than most Iraqis. But the picture painted in Ms. Klein’s article would have one think that people inside the Green Zone are not being shelled or attacked, which is not the case. The security situation for Americans is so dangerous that U.S. State Department employees do not want to serve in Iraq. Secretary Rice even had to implement a policy to ensure that posts in Iraq will be filled before any others.
Switching to the New Orleans school system example, again it was poor homeland security responses by local, state, and federal officials that let this natural disaster become a humanitarian crisis. Who can forget the pictures of rows of public school buses that were never used to transport New Orleans’s residents out of the city? Also, the choice to expand the number of charter schools in New Orleans was done in response to what was a previously failing school system. Those of us who have lived in Louisiana know that its educational system has always been poor. That is why so many people in the state send their children to private schools. No one knows how New Orleans’s experiment with charter schools will turn out. But is it not worth trying a new approach?
Overall, turning to the private sector to assist with disaster relief is not inherently bad. Many times the private sector can respond faster and more cost-effectively. But it also requires strong government oversight, which did not happen with many contractors in Iraq, and better administration of policies, which did not happen in New Orleans.
Let us also remember that the Bush administration was re-elected by American voters who knew that the Administration promoted tax cuts while financing two significant wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Blaming the private sector and “disaster capitalism” for what is now taking place is just a way to pass the buck, literally and figuratively.
Katherine Gockel is a program officer in the Policy Analysis and Dialogue department. Gockel leads the foundation’s Middle East policy programming and also concentrates on the areas of counterterrorism and failing states. She holds an M.A. in global studies from the University of Denver where she focused on human security and economic development. She also holds an M.B.A. in marketing and a B.A. in communications. Gockel began her career in the business sector where she worked for and with organizations such as AT&T, Sun Microsystems, The National Nanotechnology Initiative, the Center for Teaching International Relations, and Ernst & Young Consulting.
A Democratic Disaster
by Michael Goodhart
“The catalogue of outrages Klein supplies is enough to make even the local chamber of commerce president blush. Yet as I read her piece, I found myself angry not so much with the corporations as with my fellow citizens. How can we allow this to happen?”
Naomi Klein’s “Disaster Capitalism” paints a grim and compelling portrait of an emerging American dystopia: Large corporations making huge profits on non-bid contracts to handle the government’s response to natural and political disasters (like Katrina and Iraq). She envisions “a collective future of disaster apartheid, in which survival is determined primarily by one’s ability to pay.” The catalogue of outrages Klein supplies is enough to make even the local chamber of commerce president blush. Yet as I read her piece, I found myself angry not so much with the corporations as with my fellow citizens. How can we allow this to happen?
Klein’s essay should be read alongside Robert Reich’s musings on “How Capitalism is Killing Democracy,” in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy. According to Reich, “Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying competition for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks” in seeking to change the rules of the game to their advantage (41). This cash-fueled competition prices most citizens out of politics. In effect, corporations are buying a political system that makes the rules under which “disaster capitalism” flourishes.
Yet the problem is not—or is not fundamentally—corporate greed. Reich reminds us that markets are designed to make us richer: Corporations exist to make a profit. That is what all of us expect and demand that they do when we act like investors, worriedly tracking the rise and fall of our IRAs, or as consumers, shopping for the best bargain. Democracy is supposed to distill and act for the common good. To Reich, the problem is that we do not do a good job in putting our role as citizens ahead of our role as investors and consumers.
“The challenge for citizens is to stop these economic entities from being the authors of the rules by which they live” (40). In other words, citizens must use the power of the ballot to check corporate excesses. Interestingly, the word “democracy” never appears in Klein’s essay, and “democratic” appears only once, with a capital D, in identifying Representative Henry Waxman of California. That is the main flaw in her argument. As repulsive as disaster capitalism is, it is first and foremost a failure of democracy—a failure of the citizens.
Klein seems to think that we are in a hole so deep that we will never climb out of it. But she never admits that we have dug the hole ourselves—or maybe contracted Bechtel to do it for us. Even Reich talks about citizens’ voices being “drown[ed] out” and society finding itself “unable” to respond to the social calamity of unbridled capitalism. Both apparently believe that somehow the corporations have gained an insurmountable advantage, that the writing is on the wall, that capitalism will run amok right until it runs over a cliff.
So in both of these stories, to varying degrees, capitalism is the villain, democracy the victim. This strikes me as utter nonsense. Of course, representative democracy is a flawed system: Money buys influence; the rules favor the haves over the have-nots. And, as Reich acknowledges, we face a tension between our public roles as citizens and our private roles as economic actors seeking to maximize our own personal welfare. But for all their problems, democratic institutions make it possible for the people to make and enforce the rules.
Thomas Frank, in his 2004 bestseller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, argues that people have been duped by right-wingers, distracting themselves with values issues while privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it get smuggled in under their noses. This might be true, but it hardly absolves democratic citizens of our responsibility for those economic policies or for others (like the Iraq war). If people are so lazy, ignorant, or uninterested that they have not noticed corporations plundering the treasury and impoverishing the nation, perhaps the old adage that people get the government they deserve is true after all.
Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the first step in the proletarian revolution is “to win the battle of democracy.” He saw that capitalism could never be tamed unless the people first used democratic political institutions to change the rules of the game. He would surely be saddened to learn that nearly 160 years later we have still not learned this lesson—or rather, that we have forgotten it. The post-war welfare states in Europe and North America are (were?) a testament to the power of the people to shape the system, to control capitalism without crippling it (they were also testament to an unjust global economic order, but that is another story).
Today capital again has the upper hand. Disaster capitalism, with all of its affronts, is clear evidence of that, as Klein shows. Yet perhaps the greatest outrage of all is that things have gotten so bad that democracy does not even seem to be worth mentioning.
Michael Goodhart is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on democratic theory and human rights, especially in the context of globalization. He has published on these subjects in Human Rights Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Human Rights, Polity, and elsewhere. Goodhart’s first book, Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization, was published by Routledge in 2005. He is book review editor at Polity and a past president of the APSA organized section on human rights. For more information visit www.pitt.edu/~goodhart.
The Personal Side of Disaster Capitalism
by Susan E. Waltz
“A human rights approach has to ensure fullest accountability for public response where lives may hang in the balance, whether by slow rescue (an act of omission), or by use of lethal force (an act of commission).”
Two weeks ago a tornado ripped through my small hometown in rural Michigan (population 3,500), unexpectedly providing fresh perspective on the phenomenon Naomi Klein has called “Disaster Capitalism.” While I was writing this commentary, work crews were out with chainsaws and chippers, cutting up the remains of fallen trees and clearing mountains of debris from roads and sidewalks.
Klein draws attention to the spread of privatized disaster relief, using the two catastrophes of Iraq and New Orleans as her primary examples. Her essay exposes a reality that is only slowly sinking in: Functions once considered at the core of governance responsibilities are increasingly being performed by private companies. Within the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was established in 1978 to provide direct disaster relief, but as Klein notes, Hurricane Katrina obliged FEMA to hire a contractor not simply to manage contracts, but to award them. Blackwater’s recent incident in Iraq, which left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, has at last focused attention on the expanding role of private military corporations. Klein’s article is threaded with alarm about the growing tendency to outsource disaster response or depend on private initiatives—but is this much ado about nothing?
As I reflect on Klein’s examples and look out on the clean-up efforts in my own disaster-struck community, I think the answer must be, “It depends” (it turns out that virtually all of the workmen who trampled through my backyard last week are employed by private industry under contract to utility companies or my little community. My town lives off of agriculture and light industry, and as a practical matter, it is hard to imagine how our tax dollars would be able to cover necessary services if all the equipment and personnel had to be on hand rather than on contract). Over the past two decades the U.S. has systematically privatized many erstwhile public services at every level of government—federal, state and local. In the interest of efficiency, and because private industry presumably does it “better,” government has been downsized and jobs that range from janitorial services to prison management have been outsourced. Klein’s account of this privatization focuses on the far edge of the phenomenon, where private contractors police the streets of New Orleans and perform military functions in Iraq. She leads us to, but never quite asks, the critical question: How far do we want this trend to go? Privatization and outsourcing attenuate the accountability of elected governance bodies. Are there some functions for which we do not want—and cannot ethically accept—reduced accountability?
Disaster preparations and decisions about disaster response inevitably involve utilitarian logic: What is feasible in view of available resources? What kinds of threats should receive priority preparations (and response)? Overall, how can the greatest good be achieved with the least expenditure of public resources?
From that starting point, a human rights perspective would weight the considerations in favor of fundamental human rights, beginning with the right to life itself. Even in the midst of disasters, every society—in proportion to its resources—has a rights-based duty to assure that everyone has access to basic, life-protecting emergency response, and above all, to see that no one is systematically excluded.
In addition, a human rights approach has to ensure fullest accountability for public response where lives may hang in the balance, whether by slow rescue (an act of omission), or by use of lethal force (an act of commission). It is one thing to outsource construction and maintenance. It is quite another to hire private police officers, or security guards, who may not in any substantial way be regulated by local authorities or even accountable to law and local ordinances. As an environmental contractor sent to remediate the effects of an electrical transformer that spilled its contents into my yard commented last week, “it all depends on who sets the rules, and who you’re ultimately working for.”
Susan Waltz is Professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. She has published extensively on the politics of human rights in North Africa and has recently completed a series of essays on small state participation in the negotiations of human rights standards. From 1996-1998 Dr. Waltz served as International Chairperson of Amnesty International.
The End(s) of the State(?)
by Daniel J. Whelan
“What is the oddest consequence of all of this? It is that the logic of free-market privatization has solved the problem of the War on Terrorism by destroying the public, without which there can be no such thing as a “war” (except of the Hobbesian kind).”
Last February, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed that anticipated Klein’s article, in part. In his view, the Bush administration has been engaged in an effort to “Green-Zone” the United States government by gutting the professional civil service—dubbed as “the enemy” by the American Enterprise Institute—and replacing its ranks with political appointees who have little interest or experience in running a state, but quite a bit of interest in enriching the private sector with public largesse. Klein’s “Disaster Capitalism” takes Krugman’s theme and pumps up the volume ten-fold.
Undoubtedly Klein’s article unsettles many liberal-minded Americans whose inclinations tend toward suspicion of the market and privatization, “just because.” They react to the enormous amounts of money being siphoned off from the public treasury to serve those who find themselves doubly-engrossed as investors in companies that now perform public functions, and due to their favorable treatment by the Bush administration as high-income taxpayers. I believe, nevertheless, that we have a much deeper problem than fat-cats feeding liberally at the public trough.
That deeper concern is a move toward private control over public life, justified within a powerful rhetoric of meeting public ends (national security, for example). Klein warns us that private corporations have created “a state within a state,” or worse, that they are replacing the state altogether. Eventually, Klein suggests, only those who can pay (privately) will benefit from that which we have always considered as “public goods.” Those who cannot pay will be left with little recourse. The fantasy of free-marketers, of course, is that those who do without will simply live with the situation.
How can we evaluate this state of affairs in a way that gets around simple knee-jerk reactions to the growing “power” of the market at the public’s expense? I think we need to clarify the appropriate means and ends of public and private institutions—the state and civil society (including the market). Let us assume that ensuring national security, “promoting the general welfare,” or the building and maintenance of infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, and water systems) are appropriate ends of the state. They are appropriate because they are public, universal goods. How about the means for meeting those ends? We can think of means in terms of resources (money—that is, public funding garnered by taxation). We can also think of means in terms of who “does the work” of meeting public ends. Does it matter if this work is done in civil society—by private corporations, non-profits, and so forth? There might be good public reasons for contracting with organizations and companies that specialize in some manufacture or providing some service—such as the building of F-14s or conducting a research study on diabetes. So, while those “doing the work” may be outside the state, the contracts they assume make them an extension of the state. The public is protected by the terms of contracts that protect the integrity of the ends those enterprises and organizations fulfill. As long as this is done, and our public ends are met properly, the fact that the work might be carried out by private groups should not overly concern us from the standpoint of our public life.
In civil society (especially the market), the means-ends principle is that we use private means (our own money) to secure private, particularized ends. A modern market economy is based on meeting the differentiated needs or wants of individuals. Because individuals are self-determining, their needs and wants are neither common nor predetermined. Writers from Adam Smith to Amartya Sen have pointed out how, in this way, the market is intrinsic to the very notion of human freedom and individuality.
The problem that Klein has uncovered here is complicated, but worth thinking about. In “Disaster Capitalism,” we understand that the contractor has its own ends, which is to make a profit or, in the case of a non-profit organization, to do “good works.” And those ends are appropriately private. However, when Erik Prince, the CEO of Blackwater, claims that his “soldiers” are not mercenaries (because they are not “foreign”) and wraps the ends of his corporation in the flag (“we are loyal Americans”), we should be suspicious. Blackwater’s ends are to make a profit. Their means are to provide security services. But the market principle is confused in this relationship: If the private corporation exists to meet differentiated ends, how can it meet ends that are universal, such as security?
The answer is, they cannot. What we are seeing here is a movement to privatize public ends so they are no longer public, but use public means to achieve private results. Clearly this has implications for public life: We need to restore the integrity of the state to ensure our public ends are guaranteed. But I should note that private corporations and non-profits should equally be concerned for the integrity of civil society. Once public ends disappear, the concepts of “security” or “education” or “infrastructure” lose their meaning. Once public ends are privatized, there is no public. Once there is no public, there is no largesse from which to feed. The market—the “buyer” of private services—shrinks considerably. The state, once able to command vast resources to meet once-public but now-private ends, is gone.
What is the oddest consequence of all of this? It is that the logic of free-market privatization has solved the problem of the War on Terrorism by destroying the public, without which there can be no such thing as a “war” (except of the Hobbesian kind). We are left with little more than private individuals with private money protected by private mercenaries. We will have collapsed into enclaves. Not only will we have destroyed the state, we also will have destroyed the “free market” that the state made possible.
Daniel J. Whelan (Ph.D., DU, 2006) is currently Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Hendrix College. He was founding editor (with Laura A. Hebert) of HRHW from 2001-2004, and Senior Editor from 2004-2007. He now serves on the HRHW Editorial Review Board. His doctoral dissertation, "Interdependent, Interrelated, and Indivisible Human Rights: A Political and Historical Investigation," was awarded the 2006 Best Dissertation citation by the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association.
November 2007: Response
Iraqi Resettlement: Why Congress Will Act
by David A. Weinberg
“While it is regretful that Congressional wheels may at times turn slowly, it is not unreasonable to expect groundbreaking legislation to assist and resettle Iraqi refugees before the year’s end.”
I would like to commend Human Rights & Human Welfare for their recent roundtable on the Iraqi refugee crisis. The Roundtable rightly draws attention to the United States government’s woefully inadequate efforts thus far to address a major humanitarian crisis of its own making.
However, I do not agree with Professor Daniel Whelan’s assessment of “why Congress won’t act” on Iraqi resettlement. Dr. Whelan argues that the new Congress appears reluctant to resettle a reasonable number of Iraqi refugees in danger because Democrats fear that doing so would precipitate Iraqi state failure by means of “brain drain.” Instead, I would argue that Congress has been slow to act due to mitigating institutional and political factors.
Anecdotally, it is worth noting that I have actually met the brave Iraqi journalist Nour al-Khal and her remarkable American patron Lisa Ramaci-Vincent mentioned in the article by Joseph Huff-Hannon to which the HRHW Roundtable was responding. When Ms. al-Khal was finally admitted to the United States soon after the article was published, the two of them spoke at a Congressional staff briefing which I organized while working as a foreign policy staffer on Capitol Hill this past year.
This incident is illustrative of a broader point—the reason Congress has yet to act on the Iraqi refugee crisis is not out of some illusion that by plugging Iraq’s “brain drain” the country can somehow be packed back together. Indeed, there is a growing understanding on Capitol Hill of the dire urgency and humanitarian import of the Iraqi refugee crisis, and many Democratic members of Congress ran their campaigns in 2006 on the premise that the battle for a stable Iraq has already been lost.
Rather, the immediate challenge has been a matter of workload. When the Democrats assumed control of Congress at the start of 2007, all energy in the field of foreign policy was focused on trying to convince the President to change his overall Iraq strategy. Additionally, a panoply of other foreign policy issues (such as the Iranian nuclear question) made pressing demands on the remaining time and attention of the Democratic leadership. Thus, even though the new Congress was from its start more ideologically responsive to addressing the Iraqi refugee crisis than the Republican-dominated one that preceded it, it took until mid-way through the year before Iraqi refugee issues began to be addressed in earnest.
Those observing Congress finally witnessed a flurry of activity in May and June as Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY), and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) all introduced comprehensive Iraq refugee bills within a matter of weeks (Professor Susan Waltz briefly cited Kennedy’s Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act in her Roundtable contribution). Consequently, Senator Kennedy succeeded in tacking a modified version of his proposal as an amendment onto the Defense Authorization Act that passed the Senate on the 1st of October. This means that the Kennedy program will be debated when the House and Senate go to conference to reconcile their versions of the Authorization Act, after which the conference’s final document will go to the House and Senate floors for a quick up-or-down vote. It is also worth noting that the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA), was somewhat ahead of this curve, calling for the assistance and resettlement of Iraqi refugees in a segment of his Iraq Reconstruction Improvement Act introduced in late March.
The Kennedy proposal is by no means perfect. The Senator was compelled to drop a number of important provisions from the bill, including scaling down the number of special immigrant visas from 15,000 per year—as Rep. Blumenauer had called for—to 5,000 and dropping a waiver provision on “material support” so that his Republican counterparts would agree not to obstruct his bill at the committee level.
However, the bill remains an enormous step forward from current U.S. policy on Iraqi refugees. As is, the Kennedy amendment would open the “priority two” category for humanitarian refugees to Iraqis under threat for their association with the United States; it would also make those Iraqis who have loyally served the Coalition effort either in the direct employ of the U.S. or through an affiliated contractor eligible for the special immigrant visas mentioned above. Finally, it would instruct the federal government to set up in-country refugee processing facilities to allow Iraqis under imminent threat to immediately seek asylum straight from Iraq instead of risking life-and-limb to get to Jordan in hopes of being processed there.
There are a number of other potential measures which policymakers would do well to consider. For example, the bill could grant Iraqis temporary protected status, which would prevent those already in the United States who may have overstayed their visas from being forcibly deported to a war zone. The NGO community would be very happy to see the material support provisions put back into Kennedy’s bill and his lesser requirement of 5,000 special immigrant visas rose back up to 15,000.
The bill could also call for the Administration to submit a comprehensive diplomatic strategy to address the crisis, including negotiating memoranda of understanding with host countries to leverage U.S. assistance into guarantees that they will treat refugees in accordance with established international standards of human rights. Such a strategy could also entail soliciting matching donations from European countries and oil-rich Gulf states, which thus far have largely opted-out of this crisis on the mistaken premise that the displacement of millions of Iraqis from their homes is somehow the United States’ problem alone.
While it is regretful that Congressional wheels may at times turn slowly, it is not unreasonable to expect groundbreaking legislation to assist and resettle Iraqi refugees before the year’s end. Then all eyes will be on the executive branch and the international community, in hopes that they match the dire nature of this crisis with the humanitarian response that is required. It is already too late for many unfortunate Iraqis; let us not sit idly on our hands while others perish.
David A. Weinberg is pursuing his doctorate in political science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an affiliate of the
Institute's Security Studies Program.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Editor's Introduction - October 2007
“No Refuge Here: Iraqis Flee, but Where?” by Joseph Huff-Hannon. Dissent. Summer 2007.
An Annotation:
Following closely the last installment of the Roundtable, this month we detail another aspect of the human side of the Iraq war: the mass displacement of Iraqis who have fled their country as it crumbles around them. The traumatic process of flight from one’s home cannot be understated and is increasingly entering mainstream dialogue about the war. While these stories are often framed as human-interest pieces, they are underwritten by very real, very serious implications. Unpacking the potential repercussions of another massive refugee population sprawled throughout the Middle East, and to a far lesser extent the West, requires addressing not only particular geopolitical considerations, but also the impact on these people and their communities.
“In much the same way that media images of the flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in combat have been kept from the public eye, Iraqis fleeing their war-torn homeland have also been effectively kept out of sight and out of mind by current U.S. refugee and immigration policy.”
If it were the case that Iraqi refugees were allowed to resettle en masse in American cities and towns, the human consequences of this war would be driven home all the more forcefully. In such a scenario, how would Americans respond to the Bush administration’s war policy? Coming face-to-face with those affected so dramatically would possibly have the effect of changing many attitudes toward compassion, away from militancy. Distance has a way of allowing for a detached naïveté in decision-making—the type of ignorance that even good journalism cannot remedy.
“Though historically the world’s largest resettlement destination, the United States has linked refugee policy to foreign policy, making a consistent distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ refugees.”
The old adage of “Give me your tired, your poor…” is sadly accompanied by political fine print. The maxim that has defined America as the universal recipient—the arms unconditionally open to the oppressed and downtrodden—was amended after September 11, 2001, placing enormous burdens on refugees, asylum seekers and all immigrants generally to demonstrate their plight and prove their credibility. While one option available to the U.S. is to exhibit care and concern for the well-being of Iraqis fleeing terror, it seems at every turn policies are enacted that further erodes the moral standing of the superpower.
“With or without a U.S. withdrawal, the current exodus continues and demands an immediate solution.”
As domestic debate rages about the future of the U.S. presence in Iraq, the discussion must address all possible consequences of withdrawal: those that impact Americans, as well as those that impact Iraqis. This month’s Roundtable highlights the fact that the effects of this war and occupation are far-reaching, beyond the battlefield and into the homes of innocent Iraqis. Therefore, an American exit will also have broad ramifications on the landscape in the Middle East—its countries, its politics, and its people.
These issues and many more are addressed in this month’s installment of Human Rights & Human Welfare’s Roundtable.
~ The Editors
Would Iraqi Refugees Please Disappear
by Richard A. Falk
"The imperial mind tends to be narcissistic: It always insists that its power is deployed for the benefit of others, but when things go wrong, the primary victims are kept at a safe distance so that the metropole is spared the anguish of confronting the havoc that it has caused."
I am grateful to Joseph Huff-Hannon for drawing our attention vividly and movingly to the plight of Iraqi refugees, its magnitude and cruelty. There are more than two million Iraqi refugees, with an estimated 50,000 per month added to the total. Many are languishing in terrible conditions in such neighboring countries as Syria and Jordan. These states, neither of which are notable as places of refuge, lack the capabilities for humane treatment even if their governments were altruistically inclined. Many Iraqis cannot even find such refuge, and remain hapless nomads in search of a sanctuary country. The U.S. refusal to do more than make nominal gestures toward admitting a pitiful few Iraqis is a dimension of the Iraq War that is so scandalous that most otherwise decent people ignore the issue altogether.
This eerie silence is likely to haunt any future understanding of the American role in Iraq, and add gravitas to those who offer dark explanations of what really motivated the invasion and occupation of the country. If refugee policy were established as a test of humanitarian credibility, it would certainly add weight to skepticism about the claims of the Bush presidency—aside from its search for weapons of mass destruction—that a secondary goal was to liberate the Iraqi people from the truly brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. It hardly qualifies as “liberation” if the intervening nation cannot create the minimal conditions of stability required to keep people from fleeing their homes, and enduring the dreadful fate of most refugees. It is a rarely discussed failure of the American policy that so many of the most-highly skilled and financially endowed Iraqis risk life and limb to escape from their country, or failing that, relocate internally away from the combat zones (there are reportedly as many internally displaced Iraqis as refugees, with an additional million expected by the end of 2007).
The U.S. Government and public should certainly be ashamed of its currently miniscule program for the admission of Iraqi refugees. This unwillingness to do more to help Iraqi refugees is certainly by itself dismaying and discrediting, but the deeper issue here is the degree to which this scale of displacement, given a pre-war total Iraqi population of 27.5 million, is a decisive indicator of what a disaster the Iraq War has become for Iraq. Almost all of the American concern about the war continues to be associated with the adverse consequences for us. The imperial mind tends to be narcissistic: It always insists that its power is deployed for the benefit of others, but when things go wrong, the primary victims are kept at a safe distance so that the metropole is spared the anguish of confronting the havoc that it has caused. Consciously or not, this refusal to acknowledge the suffering brought upon the people of Iraq seems mainly to explain why our government lacks the decency to admit Iraqi refugees in far larger numbers.
The refugee issue highlights some other questionable aspects of the American role in Iraq, as in a nested Russian doll that embodies a generally heartless occupation so far as Iraqis are concerned. Perhaps, more disturbing than the callous disregard of the refugees, is the treatment of Iraqi casualties. Early in the occupation, General Tommy Franks dismissed inquiry about Iraqi civilian deaths with the nasty quip, “we don't do body counts.” It is appropriate to personalize American deaths and injuries in the war, but to exhibit indifference to Iraqi civilian losses confirms ugly suspicions of racism and imperial mentality. It conveys to Iraqis, and for that matter to anyone who stops to think, that Iraqi casualties have no bearing on how the United States assesses its approach to the occupation, which is better conceived of as the unfinished, and likely unfinishable, Iraq War. The best estimate by expert, neutral NGOs is that more than one million Iraqi civilians have perished so far. This is a huge figure that if admitted would go a long way to discredit the purported mission.
In recent months, under pressures from Democrats in Congress, the Bush presidency has agreed to evaluate its Iraq policy by reference to no less than 18 so-called “benchmarks.” Not one of these looks at the trends affecting the people of Iraq—for instance, there could be a benchmark involving a decline in the outflow of Iraqis, another on the per-month figures of those internally displaced, and certainly one on the rise and fall of Iraqi civilian casualties. One would search in vain for such benchmarks. The benchmarks are mostly connected with diminishing the American combat role and determining whether the Maliki leadership is capable of producing policy results desired in Washington, especially making the oil industry open to foreign investment and relying on the Iraqi army and police to do more of the fighting, killing, and dying, thereby relieving American troops of that role.
Huff-Hannon is to be commended for writing so well about the plight of Iraqi refugees, but he fails to connect these dots, and therefore does not convey the extent to which the deplorable treatment of Iraqi refugees is an aspect of a far wider pattern of disregard of Iraqi well-being that has had such a devastating effect on Iraq ever since the invasion was mounted in March of 2003. By now, it requires only modest intelligence to understand that as bad as Saddam Hussein was as an oppressive leader, the American-led occupation of Iraq is far worse, at least for the people of the country. For me, this is the primary message of the Iraqi refugee crisis.
As citizens, we should insist that our government adopts a more responsible refugee policy. Yet, more importantly, we should interrogate an approach to military intervention that is supposed to benefit a foreign society and yet makes no effort to assess the losses inflicted on its people. These losses are immense aside from the refugees.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book, The Great Terror War (2003), considers the American response to September 11, including its relationship to the patriotic duties of American Citizens. In 2001 he served on a three person Human Rights Inquiry Commission for the Palestine Territories that was appointed by the United Nations, and previously, on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Human Rights Horizons; On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics; Explorations at the Edge of Time; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; The Promise of World Order; Human Rights and State Sovereignty; A Study of Future Worlds; and This Endangered Planet. Falk also acted as counsel to Ethiopia and Liberia in the Southwest Africa Case before the International Court of Justice.
Will Refuge Continue to be Elusive?
by Katherine Gockel
“...the last thing needed right now is another blame game in Washington. Rather, efforts should be directed toward fixing the problems and developing solutions that consider both current and future migration scenarios for people displaced within Iraq, as well as those who have fled to other countries.”
According to U.N. estimates, if current trends continue, the number of Iraqi asylum seekers by year-end could reach between 40,000 to 50,000. The influx of Iraqis into states such as Syria and Jordan also threatens to be a destabilizing force in those countries. Therefore, it is unreasonable to expect these states to individually cope with migration flows of this magnitude.
As conveyed in the Dissent article, the U.S. Government’s response is untenable and unconscionable, particularly given the actions taken by smaller states such as Sweden, and the continued calls from the U.N. and other organizations for greater support. Thankfully, a recent memo sent by the current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, appears to have prodded the U.S. Government to take action. The memo points to coordination breakdowns between various departments of the U.S. Government that resulted in an inadequate response to asylum requests. Yet, the last thing needed right now is another blame game in Washington. Rather, efforts should be directed toward fixing the problems and developing solutions that consider both current and future migration scenarios for people displaced within Iraq, as well as those who have fled to other countries.
A first step in this direction was taken with the appointment of two new officials—James Foley as the coordinator for Iraqi refugee issues at the U.S. Department of State and Lori Scialabba as senior advisor at the Department of Homeland Security. These appointments need to be followed very quickly by bi-partisan plans of action on the part of the Administration and Congress to ensure continued oversight of future activities.
Several key elements need to be part of these plans. First, special attention needs to be paid and policies enacted on behalf of Iraqis who have assisted the U.S. and Coalition Forces in Iraq. As noted in a recent Newsweek article, if and when the U.S. decides to draw down its troop presence, these individuals will be in even more danger than they are now. Therefore, ensuring their security and safety needs to be part of any troop redeployment and force reduction plans.
Second, the U.S. needs to reassess how its strategies and plans can be coordinated as part of a larger, sustained multilateral response. This is necessary due to the magnitude and nature of the current migration patterns and the fact that the security situation in Iraq is not likely to improve in the near future.
A component of this larger multilateral response should be formal requests to Iraq’s Arab neighbors for resources and support. In Track II diplomatic conferences sponsored by the Stanley Foundation in 2006 and 2007, individuals from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states asked for the Iraqis to provide concrete requests for assistance. It was also noted in the 2007 conference that Iraq is a member of the Arab League and as such should be able to rely on fellow member states for assistance.
These conference discussions beg the question as to whether or not these specific assistance requests have been made in support of Iraqis who have fled their homes. If these requests have been made and have gone unanswered, then this lack of response needs to be documented and brought to the attention of the international community. If the requests have not been made, then the Iraqi Government should immediately begin working with these organizations and states to develop plans on how immediate and ongoing assistance can best be provided and sustained until Iraq’s security situation improves. After all, this type of assistance serves everyone’s interest as further destabilization, caused by migration flows, is not in the best interests of the GCC or members of the larger Arab League.
Finally, given the number of Iraqis fleeing to neighboring states such as Syria and Jordan, another component of the multilateral response must be a rethinking of prior refugee strategies, as these displaced populations are not following “typical” refugee behaviors and are not covered under traditional refugee conventions. It will also be important to determine ways to mitigate the destabilizing effects of these Iraqi populations on the states to which they have fled, especially as these states are already grappling with their own security, demographic, and economic issues.
In conclusion, as noted by the authors of the article, the U.S. response to date has not been worthy of the situation it helped create or of its leadership status in the world community. Thankfully, publicity regarding this current sad state of affairs appears to have finally gained the U.S.’s and the international community’s attention which may in turn finally lead to a commendable response. In order to develop and implement the type of future solutions needed, the U.S. must make a concerted effort to work constructively across party lines and within a larger multilateral framework. Otherwise, refuge and sanctuary will continue to be fleeting and the negative fallout from Iraq will continue to cast the world’s only superpower in a disparaging light.
Katherine Gockel is a program officer in the Policy Analysis and Dialogue department. Gockel leads the foundation’s Middle East policy programming and also concentrates on the areas of counterterrorism and failing states. She holds an M.A. in global studies from the University of Denver where she focused on human security and economic development. She also holds an M.B.A. in marketing and a B.A. in communications. Gockel began her career in the business sector where she worked for and with organizations such as AT&T, Sun Microsystems, The National Nanotechnology Initiative, the Center for Teaching International Relations, and Ernst & Young Consulting.
Fleeing from Terror versus Fleeing from Poverty
by Michael Goodhart
“This is not a politically naïve call for granting asylum to all economic migrants. . .Yet ethically and conceptually, there is little basis for treating this category of people differently.”
Nour al Khal worked as a translator for New York Times reporter Steven Vincent, who was murdered by Shiite militants in Iraq. Vincent’s widow has been trying to help al Khal (who was kidnapped and shot by the same group who killed Vincent) win asylum in the United States. So far political and bureaucratic obstacles have proven insurmountable.
Al Khal is one of the millions of Iraqis uprooted by the American-led invasion and occupation, which, Joseph Huff-Hannon reports, has triggered the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis. The current refugee crisis is the sad, direct, and entirely predictable result of American disregard—if not contempt—for the security and well-being of the Iraqi people. Huff-Hannon joins a long list of journalists, including the New Yorker’s George Packer, who have written about the disturbing failure of American policy with respect to those “Iraqis who trusted America the most. ” The United States clearly has special obligations to those who have directly aided the coalition effort in Iraq; obligations it has recently accepted but so far failed to meet. But t he plight of Nour al Khal also highlights just how restrictive international refugee law can be.
The U.N. Convention and Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as a person who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country....” This is a narrow definition; indeed, the U.S. State Department told Vincent’s widow “that al Khal does not qualify for refugee or asylum status because Iraq is now a democracy, hence there should be no reason she would need to flee.”
International refugee law presently omits at least three common categories of refugee: those fleeing persecution by non-state actors, those fleeing conflict who are not directly threatened with persecution, and “economic migrants.” I shall say something briefly about all three.
Traditionally, the persecution described in the Convention and Protocol was understood to mean “persecution by states.” Increasingly, non-state actors like ethnic militias and insurgent groups that operate outside the (direct) control of states are responsible for persecuting minorities—as in Iraq. International law needs to change to reflect this reality. Moreover, recent asylum cases in the U.S. and Canada have established that threat of female genital mutilation qualifies as a reasonable fear of persecution; still, asylum for women fleeing honor killings has lagged behind, and international law still does not explicitly recognize the specific forms of violence women endure as grounds for asylum (some courts have relied on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and an expansive notion of persecution to make this connection).
A second type of refugee not presently recognized under international law is the person who flees a conflict but is not in direct danger of persecution on the basis of group membership. In many of the sectarian conflicts ravaging the world today, this distinction is hard to maintain. The “normal” tactics of war, including rape, ethnic cleansing, forced evacuation from neighborhoods, routine bombings of civilian targets, and so on, are themselves forms of persecution. In such cases, fleeing a conflict and fleeing persecution amount to more or less the same thing. Again, however, international refugee law does not adequately reflect these changing realities.
Finally, refugee law presently excludes individuals who are seeking a better life, so-called economic migrants. This is probably the most difficult case. Economic migrants appear at first glance to fall into a different category than those I have discussed so far. On closer inspection, however, the apparent differences blur. Persecution involves the systemic and sustained violation of fundamental human rights. But rights to food, clothing, and shelter are every bit as fundamental as rights to associate or to express ideas; dire poverty is a significant threat to life. In cases where corruption, violence, or intimidation result in grinding poverty, the case for treating it as a form of persecution is strong. It might also seem that economic migrants are not fleeing conflict and thus not entitled to refugee status. But structural or enforced poverty seems every bit as much an instance of conflict as gendered violence, which is rightly being recognized as grounds for asylum. In both instances, it is the violation of fundamental rights that represents a form of conflict.
This is not a politically naïve call for granting asylum to all economic migrants. The floods of people who might seek asylum on economic grounds would inundate recipient countries. Yet ethically and conceptually, there is little basis for treating this last category of people differently, and the international community has an obligation to protect and promote the rights of those in dire poverty as well. International development aid is shockingly measly, and few states would acknowledge any kind of binding obligation to give more. States that recognize a legal duty to accept those fleeing political persecution think it perfectly acceptable to deny refuge to people who might be starving.
Much more could and should be done to protect the most economically vulnerable people in the world. Obviously, the devil is in the details. But we should not be misled by those who say the resources are not available; the two trillion dollars the American Government is likely to spend on the Iraq war would have been enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals three to five times over. Protecting the poor is a question of priorities and values, not money.
Michael Goodhart is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on democratic theory and human rights, especially in the context of globalization. He has published on these subjects in Human Rights Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Human Rights, Polity, and elsewhere. Goodhart’s first book, Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization, was published by Routledge in 2005. He is book review editor at Polity and a past president of the APSA organized section on human rights. For more information visit www.pitt.edu/~goodhart.
The Least We Can Do
by Susan E. Waltz
“Until Iraqis can safely return to their homes, this war is not over. In the meantime, we Americans have a moral imperative to provide refuge to those whose own safety has been put at risk for their efforts to assist the U.S. ”
In the early months of 2003, when the U.S. was only threatening war, humanitarian relief organizations expected thousands of refugees to flee from Iraq into neighboring countries of Jordan and Syria. They were surprised when it did not happen. Four years later, the anticipated wave has at last arrived—and in tsunami proportions.
For more than a decade, specialists have been calling attention to a multitude of problems associated with the international refugee regime. Now, as many as four million Iraqi refugees are at risk of tumbling through one or another of its cavernous cracks, and that is to say nothing of the thousands of internally displaced Iraqis unable to cross an international border.
Several problems plague the international refugee regime—even before you get to the political overtones and undercurrents. To begin with, there is the question of definition. By the terms of the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, an individual must pass two tests to be considered a refugee. First, they must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution, and secondly, they must have fled their country, crossing an international border. Those who meet these tests have an internationally recognized legal right to claim asylum in a safe country, and receiving countries have a corresponding duty to fulfill that right. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other immigrants do not have legal claim to those same rights—which builds in an internal and perverse incentive to prevent people in trouble from crossing international borders.
Those who succeed in leaving their country face massive bureaucratic entanglement. Western developed countries have their own procedures for granting asylum, and most of them are not triggered until a refugee is actually on that country’s sovereign territory. Most refugees, however, do not get that far—they are lucky to make it to the nearest neighboring country. They queue up to have their eligibility assessed by local offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or go to plead their case at one or another of the Western embassies in town. And in the meantime, they rely on their own savings, the largesse of the country to which they have fled, or international assistance to address their daily needs—which may include food, shelter, medical assistance, and education. Displaced people who do not succeed in crossing a border may receive some material assistance from international agencies, but they generally are not eligible for help with resettlement or political asylum.
This is the situation facing refugees anywhere in the world, but the Iraqi refugee crisis entails one more crucial political factor: U.S. politics. Until very recently, the U.S. has been unwilling to acknowledge that any Iraqis have a “well founded fear of persecution” because the entire justification for this war was ostensibly to free them from such fears. Although the U.S. has said it would admit a few thousand Iraqis appealing for asylum from abroad (or from within the U.S.), it has not been generous with the assistance it has provided to the U.N., and it has done very little to expedite its own clearance procedures, which have only become more cumbersome in the context of the war on terror.
Following stories like the one in Dissent, several U.S. Senators have introduced the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act to assist Iraqis at grave risk because of their association with Americans or American interests, and provide them an expedited pathway to political asylum. This proposed relief is only a drop in the bucket compared to the need, but it is the least we can do. Sectarian violence, improvised explosive devices, and body counts have been used as metrics for assessing the progress of the Iraq War. The numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons is another measure of the state of affairs in Iraq. Until Iraqis can safely return to their homes, this war is not over. In the meantime, we Americans have a moral imperative to provide refuge to those whose own safety has been put at risk for their efforts to assist the U.S.
Susan Waltz is Professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. She has published extensively on the politics of human rights in North Africa and she regularly teaches a graduate course on human rights and public policy. From 1996-1998 Dr. Waltz served as International Chairperson of Amnesty International. On a number of occasions over the past two decades, she has offered expert witness testimony for North Africans seeking asylum in the U.S.
Iraqi Resettlement: Why Congress Won't Act
by Daniel J. Whelan
“If Congress were to open the resettlement gates, the flood might very well put to death forever any possibility of salvaging the wreckage that Iraq has become.”
After making an excellent case for the plight of Iraqi asylum seekers who have served as valuable allies to the United States in Iraq, Joseph Huff-Hannon’s article suggests that Congress should play a stronger role in developing a resettlement policy to allow Iraqis, who have been on “our side,” to come to the U.S. Given the current political climate on Iraq—and with Congressional Democrats desperate to score some kind of victory in its battle with the Bush White House—what exactly is holding them back?
While Congress is usually deferential to the White House in setting broad foreign policy goals when it comes to refugee and asylum policy, Congress’s implied Constitutional authority extends from its express powers to, for example, regulate foreign commerce and establish a uniform naturalization policy. Congress thus would stand on solid Constitutional ground were it to craft an Iraqi resettlement policy.
Furthermore, Congress has been able to exert its will against the President, even when the latter wanted to extend, rather than restrict, asylum status for certain populations. In 1992, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted more than 40,000 Haitians who fled after the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in late 1991. These refugees were taken Guantánamo Bay for initial asylum-screening. Eleven-thousand were allowed to continue to the U.S. to seek asylum formally. However, 217 of those who were cleared were nevertheless further retained at Guantánamo. They were HIV-positive, and therefore barred entry into the U.S. But they legally could not be returned to Haiti (that would constitute refoulment). They were stuck in limbo, a kind of “permanent exile.”
Since 1987, it had been U.S. policy to exclude anyone with HIV from entering the country—whether tourist, businessperson, immigrant, or asylum seeker. At first, this exclusion was based on specific legislation—an amendment to the immigration law which added HIV to a Congressionally-determined list of “dangerous and contagious diseases” that precluded aliens from entering the U.S. A 1990 overhaul of the Immigration and Naturalization Act replaced the Congressional “list” with a blanket provision allowing exclusion of anyone carrying a “communicable disease of public health significance”—but what would be such a disease was now to be determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), not Congress. Nevertheless, Louis Sullivan—the-then Secretary of HHS—was feeling significant pressure from conservatives and “determined” that HIV was just such a “communicable disease.” That policy was still in effect when the Haitian crisis began.
Bill Clinton, who came into office in early 1993, had vowed to resolve the plight of the Guantánamo detainees—and the 1990 Immigration Law was on his side. He soon directed his Secretary of HHS, Donna Shalala, to remove HIV from the list. But Senate stalwarts (led by Republicans, but joined by plenty of Democrats) moved to block him. They effectively placed HIV permanently on the list “communicable diseases of public health significance” through an amendment to an important reauthorization for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unable to justify vetoing a bill that included new money for HIV/AIDS research, Clinton signed it. The matter of the Haitian refugees was finally settled by a federal judge who ruled the detention (but not the policy) unconstitutional. While those committed to human rights and sound public health (myself included) may find Congress’ actions in 1993 to be reprehensible, we see how it was able to force the president’s hand and prevail.
So Congress is standing on solid Constitutional ground, and there is a strong precedent in the Haitian HIV case which demonstrates that Congress does has significant “power” to force the President to adopt a policy he may find politically misguided (or embarrassing). On top of that, we must consider how attractive the political nectar of a victory over the White House on some, indeed any, aspect of Iraq policy must be to Congressional Democrats. So what is to stop the current, Democratic Congress from using its authority to address not only a serious moral and humanitarian need (indeed, responsibility) but also to score political points in its battle with the White House over Iraq policy?
I can only come up with one possible answer—and one that, surprisingly, Huff-Hannon completely overlooks. No matter what the contours of the debate in Washington about Iraq policy, no one wants to see a failed state sitting like a very lonely chick under the covetous eye of an Iranian wolf. At the heart of the debate is whether the U.S. is making things better or worse by following the current policy ( U.S. casualties notwithstanding). Congressional Democrats want a stable Iraq. But a stable Iraq means stable, secure Iraqis committed to building their nation and the institutions of government, civil society, and some kind of market economy. Nevertheless, since at least 2005, Iraq has been hemorrhaging talented men and women who are key to any such future for Iraq. If Congress were to open the resettlement gates, the flood might very well put to death forever any possibility of salvaging the wreckage that Iraq has become.
No matter how noble and humanitarian a resettlement policy would be, perhaps those stakes are simply too high—even for a Democratic Congress.
Daniel J. Whelan (Ph.D., DU, 2006) is currently Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Hendrix College. He was founding editor (with Laura A. Hebert) of HRHW from 2001-2004, and Senior Editor from 2004-2007. He now serves on the HRHW Editorial Review Board. His doctoral dissertation, "Interdependent, Interrelated, and Indivisible Human Rights: A Political and Historical Investigation," was awarded the 2006 Best Dissertation citation by the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Editor's Introduction - September 2007
“The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness” by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian. The Nation, July 30, 2007.
An Annotation:
Beyond the Congressional hearings and the Defense Department briefings, operating on another plane from debates in the American media about the state of the war in Iraq, are the daily operations of the men and women of the U.S. Military who have been dealt the responsibility of “winning” the war. For observers without first-hand exposure to the “hell” of war, the perspective of those on the ground is something foreign. Even reading their testimonials is surreal, though it cannot be dismissed as mere fiction. Rather, the harsh reality of their experience is evidence of the depth of the impact this war has had on those most directly involved. This month’s Roundtable discusses the human story that has been virtually absent from all mainstream discourse on this seemingly intractable conflict. This human story is irreducible to the traumatic effect on the soldiers, the enormous cost of Iraqi civilian lives, and the growing hatred throughout the world of all things American—these elements are the causes and results of a tragedy, the sum of which is unknowable and the end of which is unforeseeable.
“In Iraq, Specialist Middleton said, ‘a lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don’t speak English and have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want.’”
The dehumanization of the enemy in warfare—commonly achieved through racist demonization—is not a new phenomenon, but a perpetual product of conflict. Conceiving of the opposing force as the “Other,” as so radically different from “Us” that any comparison fails from the outset, seeks to teach the type of moral flexibility necessary to affect the most harm and sidestep the kind of second guessing that disrupts esprit de corps. Once it has been established that “They” are not like “Us,” the Golden Rule—the virtual foundation of universal human rights—ceases to play a role in decision-making. The rules of war are effectively dismissed as irrelevant as soon as the humanity of each side is relegated.
“‘The second you left the gate of your base, you were always worried,’ said Sergeant Flatt. ‘You were constantly watchful for IEDs. And you could never see them. I mean, it’s just by pure luck who’s getting killed and who’s not. If you’ve been in firefights earlier that day or that week, you’re even more stressed and insecure to a point where you’re almost trigger-happy.’”
Without a clear-cut mission, and ill-equipped to deal with the threats that confront them, U.S. soldiers are placed in a compromised position from day one. Iraqis equally experience symptoms, as U.S. forces are simultaneously perceived as occupiers, as well as those responsible for protection from violent elements within. Confused, base instincts fill the space previously held by common sense and proper training; survival and self-defense take priority. Unprepared, scared and armed with lethal weaponry, lines between innocent and guilty, friend and enemy, blur completely.
“For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. ‘I just remembered thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that’s just not what I joined the army to do,’ he said.”
In war, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme because the stakes are so high. However, any peripheral research into military history will illustrate that these circumstances are not new ones. It is for this expectation that it is wiser to tiptoe rather than trudge ahead on the march to war. Unfortunately, this human story does not provide the way out; it merely describes the wrong way in. Human rights advocates face the daunting task of enriching the debate about the Iraq war by injecting a greater respect for human dignity, recognizing that the situation may get worse before it gets better.
These issues and many more are addressed in this month’s installment of Human Rights & Human Welfare’s Roundtable.
~ The Editors
Wars against Civilians are Unjust Wars
by Richard A. Falk
"There is an intellectual gap that exposes the central flaw of the whole Iraq War. Instead of the illusionary slogan of 'mission accomplished,' a more accurate rendering would be 'mission impossible.'"
For those of us old enough to recall the anti-war testimony of Vietnam vets during the early 1970s, reading the chilling report by Hedges and Al-Arian on the attitudes of Iraq war vets is shocking, and yet not surprising. It is shocking because of the eyewitness confirmation of cruelty and lethal brutality on a regular basis in the interactions between the coalition army of occupation and Iraqi civilian society. Sadly, it is not shocking because of the nature of the violent resistance to occupation being encountered by American forces in Iraq, giving rise to a Vietnam-style mentality of counterinsurgency in which “victory” is pursued by treating the whole of Iraqi society as potentially, if not actually, hostile.
As with Vietnam, there are many contradictions present. In Vietnam while soldiers summed up the war by the oft-quoted assertion, “[w]e had to destroy the village to save it,” official thinking came to believe in the latter stages of the struggle that the war would be won or lost in the “hearts and minds” of civilian society in South Vietnam. Of course, a low-technology adversary makes its own strategic use of this muddle. It blends in many of its militants with sympathetic elements of the society. It sensibly refuses on almost all occasions to meet the occupying high-technology adversary in open battle, and it too struggles for the hearts and minds of the people. And here is its huge advantage in most counterinsurgency situations: the people whose allegiance is at stake share an ethnic and cultural identity with the insurgent side, which can more easily claim the mantle of nationalist legitimacy. This was certainly true in Vietnam where the American presence was widely seen as “colonialist,” the successor to France, previously defeated in a long war of independence, and in more complex ways, it is also true in Iraq.
What the Hedges/Al-Arian study shows vividly is that occupying soldiers on the ground are confronted with situations in which the humane treatment of Iraqi civilians runs counter to their personal fears and resentments, but also seems inconsistent with a climate of opinion established by their commanders. Combat operations are conducted against supposedly hostile forces in urban settings where battlefield tactics are of little use. Soldiers are wounded and killed during their terms of duty, but the militants engaged in the violence of resistance are generally invisible. Moving against civilians suspected of being militants was based on thin, often misleading evidence, leading to fury and anger generating many atrocities as expressions of frustration or sheer revenge.
In my view, the most powerful conclusion of this study of Iraqi vets’ combat experience was their sense that “most of the Iraqi civilians were assumed to be hostile” which made “it difficult for soldiers to sympathize with their victims- at least until they returned home and had a chance to reflect.” A quote attributed to one soldier is emblematic of the consensus among the soldiers, “Well, we’re trying to help you and you just turn around and try to kill us.” Hedges and Al-Arian correctly conclude that this kind of attitude “led many troops to declare open war on all Iraqis.” As such, the basic tactics were indiscriminate, and civilian casualties were not “collateral damage,” but the core result of the military effort and, as such, unlawful and unjust.
This dynamic was encouraged, at least passively, by the words and deeds of American military and political leaders. The abuse of Iraqi civilians derives from the same climate of leadership that produced the scandals associated with torture at Abu Ghraib, and other prison facilities. There was little training that emphasized the importance of guidelines embodied in international humanitarian law, or more simply, in the ethics of human interaction. This should not be understood as just a moral lapse. There is an intellectual gap that exposes the central flaw of the whole Iraq War. Instead of the illusionary slogan of “mission accomplished,” a more accurate rendering would be “mission impossible.” Iraq was an artificial state created after World War I as a matter of colonial whim, an expression of Anglo-French oil diplomacy. Its coherence depended on coercion, and thus the twin aims of liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial rule and establishing a constitutional democracy sympathetic to Washington were internally contradictory. A unified Iraq depended on an authoritarian state, and continues to do so; the most that the United States could hope for by way of “victory” at this stage would be either the reestablishment of a coercive government under either Sunni or Shi’ia dominance or the acceptance of a dismembering of Iraq either by the de facto partition of the country and its substantial retribalization—that is, working out deals with local tribal leaders as has been the reported “success” of the surge strategy in al-Anbar Province.
The main points I would stress are the following:
—counterinsurgency warfare against a mobilized hostile opposition necessarily results in the civilian population identifying, at least in part, with the resistance effort; in turn, this leads the occupying soldiers, being unable to tell reliably who is hostile, to regard the civilian society as a whole as dangerous. Such attitudes are further inflamed by racist images based on differences of language, religion, dress, which in the case of Iraq are further accentuated by post-9/11 Islamophobia;
—this dynamic produces a vicious circle in which the civilian population becomes more and more alienated by the tactics and attitudes of the occupiers, and the occupiers become more and more disillusioned about their supposed mission of democratization and liberalization. Each attitude feeds off the other, and the military and civilian leadership of the occupying forces is generally reluctant to face the problem because it will seem defeatist and demoralizing to do so, and tries to hide its failures by claims of progress;
—the central conclusion is that this kind of warfare based on foreign intervention in violation of international law cannot achieve its political goals by acceptable means even if it enjoys total military supremacy and dominates battlefield phases of the conflict.
Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent book, The Great Terror War (2003), considers the American response to September 11, including its relationship to the patriotic duties of American Citizens. In 2001 he served on a three person Human Rights Inquiry Commission for the Palestine Territories that was appointed by the United Nations, and previously, on the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Human Rights Horizons; On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics; Explorations at the Edge of Time; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; The Promise of World Order; Human Rights and State Sovereignty; A Study of Future Worlds; and This Endangered Planet. Falk also acted as counsel to Ethiopia and Liberia in the Southwest Africa Case before the International Court of Justice.
Posts
