Notes from the so-called Real World

In talk­ing about war the other day, we touched on the issue of the “virtues” of war.

The start­ing point was a cul­tural ref­er­ence to the song “War”, which includes the lyric “War, what is it good for? Absolutely noth­ing!” This was one of the most influ­en­tial anti-​​war songs of the Vietnam War era.

source: Steeev via Flickr (cc license)

The song was orig­i­nally writ­ten for The Temptations, but was viewed as too con­tro­ver­sial for them so was bumped down the Motown chain to Edwin Starr, who took it to num­ber 1, won a Grammy award, and made a career with it. It has been cov­ered by many oth­ers, includ­ing most promi­nently Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in 1986. The mir­a­cle of youTube makes this whole cul­tural arc accessible:

• Here is the orig­i­nal Starr ver­sion, which makes a pos­si­bly con­tro­ver­sial 70’s fash­ion state­ment as well.
• Here’s the Springsteen ver­sion, along with some 80’s fashions.
• Here’s Springsten and Starr doing it together and find­ing a sar­to­r­ial mid­dle ground.
• And then there’s Jackie Chan sport­ing some fin de siè­cle 90’s fash­ions and work­ing the same song in Rush Hour (right before beat­ing a bunch of peo­ple up).

But I digress. The ques­tion is whether war has any virtues. Clearly it does, even if they pale next to the increas­ing human costs. Indeed, the front page of the NYTimes yes­ter­day car­ried a story about the effects of the war in Libya on women’s aspirations:

Libya’s War-​​Tested Women Hope to Keep New Power — NYTimes​.com.

War is often a dri­ver for sig­nif­i­cant social change. For bet­ter or worse, it breaks down tra­di­tional social struc­tures and cre­ates open­ings for new inter­ests and per­spec­tives to arise.

Of course, unless you believe in the inex­orable march of lib­eral progress, you have to worry that social rev­o­lu­tions can go in other direc­tions. Today’s NYTimes arti­cle argues that Islamists could well hijack the Libyan rev­o­lu­tion and bring this brief open­ing for women to a very quick end.

source: Smiteme
via Flickr (cc license)

In the U.S., which suf­fered lit­tle direct phys­i­cal dam­age on its own ter­ri­tory, World War II was respon­si­ble for dra­matic social shifts. People were moved all around the coun­try — a dynamic that acutely changed the face of Norfolk, VA, for exam­ple. As in Libya, women started to work in new ways and take on roles that changed the way many thought about the place of women in American soci­ety. Although the mil­i­tary remained seg­re­gated through­out WWII, many ascribe the begin­ning of the mod­ern civil rights move­ment to the changes wrought by the war and the ideational con­tra­dic­tions between fight­ing fas­cism and Nazi racial the­o­ries abroad while sus­tain­ing Jim Crow laws at home.

As was noted in class, war often gets credit for eco­nomic stim­u­la­tion — as again demon­strated by WWII, which is widely seen as hav­ing helped res­cue the U.S. from the Depression. The real­ity, of course, is that most any mas­sive gov­ern­ment spend­ing can pro­vide a Keynesian eco­nomic boost. But, as evi­dent in our own pol­i­tics today, that can be pro­hib­i­tively con­tro­ver­sial with­out the impe­tus of a clear threat from abroad.

War is also often praised for the way it is pur­ported to build indi­vid­ual and national char­ac­ter. Camaraderie, courage, respect for author­ity, self-​​sacrifice, and the like that are said to be pro­moted in the war­rior ethos. At the begin­ning of the 20^th cen­tury, William James argued in a 1906 essay for a ver­sion of national ser­vice that could serve as “the moral equiv­a­lent of war” to pro­mote these “manly virtues” with­out the obvi­ous destruc­tive costs of war:

All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-​​military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be per­ma­nent on this globe, unless the states, pacif­i­cally orga­nized, pre­serve some of the old ele­ments of army-​​discipline. A per­ma­nently suc­cess­ful peace-​​economy can­not be a sim­ple pleasure-​​economy. … we must still sub­ject our­selves col­lec­tively to those sever­i­ties which answer to our real posi­tion upon this only partly hos­pitable globe. We must make new ener­gies and hardi­hoods con­tinue the man­li­ness to which the mil­i­tary mind so faith­fully clings. Martial virtues must be the endur­ing cement; intre­pid­ity, con­tempt of soft­ness, sur­ren­der of pri­vate inter­est, obe­di­ence to com­mand, must still remain the rock upon which states are built
William James: “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1906)

One the odd-​​jobs that helped me get through my many years of higher edu­ca­tion was a gig edit­ing obit­u­ar­ies for the Princeton pub­li­ca­tions office. I thought it quite strik­ing at the time how many of these very promi­nent pro­fes­sors included details about their ser­vice in WWII in their short c.v.‘s. All of these emi­nences had lived extra­or­di­nar­ily rich and note­wor­thy lives. Even so, their WWII expe­ri­ence as a sup­ply sergeant in Omaha, or a lowly sailor on some remote pacific island had proven a foun­da­tional life experience.

Interestingly, as we have dis­cussed before, there is also an emerg­ing argu­ment from human rights activists that war, or at least the use of mil­i­tary force, can be desir­able and legit­i­mate when it serves to pro­tect vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions. The “respon­si­bil­ity to pro­tect” (R2P) agenda was recently reem­pha­sized by Anne Marie Slaughter, Harvard Law pro­fes­sor and for­mer direc­tor of the Policy Planning office at the State Dept. in an Atlantic arti­cle on the Libyan inter­ven­tion.

source: via Flickr (pub­lic domain license)

Along these lines, it is well to remem­ber that sociopaths and psy­chopaths bent on vicious oppres­sion and mass mur­der would usu­ally pre­fer to get their way with­out war. Ironically, then, start­ing wars is often up to those who would oppose such evil.

So, War. That’s what it may be good for. What do you think?

There were no inter­na­tional sto­ries on the front page of the NY Times today. I under­stand that the cen­tral story right now is “jobs, jobs, jobs”, but it strikes me that there are a few other impor­tant things going on around the world.

source: NYTimes [fair use]

One story that gets only a small men­tion in the Times’ world brief­ing sum­mary is the announce­ment that Turkey intends to pro­vide mil­i­tary escort for any future Turkish aid flotil­las headed for Gaza:

Turkish Warships Will Escort Aid Vessels to Gaza-​​Ergodan — NYTimes​.com.

Turkey, of course, remains in a sig­nif­i­cant huff about the loss of life in the MV Mavi Marmara inci­dent, for which Israel has not shown much incli­na­tion to apol­o­gize. Israeli defense min­is­ter Ehud Barak ref­ered to it yes­ter­day as “spilt milk”, which I think unlikely to be help­ful in the rapidly fray­ing Turkish-​​Israeli relationship.

The Turkish announce­ment is an impor­tant devel­op­ment. The NY Times may have played it down because Turkey has long expressed an inten­tion to under­mine the Israeli block­ade. Previously, for exam­ple, Turkish President Erdogan had threat­ened to ride on a flotilla ship him­self. But, the asser­tion that Turkey, a NATO ally, will use its mil­i­tary to force the issue is a sig­nif­i­cant escalation.

The recent UN Report on the MV Mavi Marmara inci­dent found the Israeli block­ade of Gaza legal, even while crit­i­ciz­ing the Israeli use of force as exces­sive. That puts Turkey’s threats to under­mine the block­ade in an inter­est­ing position.

If, as the UN report and most inter­na­tional legal experts argue, the Israeli block­ade is legal, this would be tan­ta­mount to an act of aggres­sion. Israel would have the right to stop the Turkish war­ships. Indeed, it would have an oblig­a­tion to do so, since block­ades are only legal if they are effec­tive. If you allow some ships to pass with­out mak­ing an effec­tive effort to keep most ships out, the block­ade lapses and becomes ille­gal (this odd bit of law devel­oped because of the chaos that might be expected if coun­tries could sim­ply declare a block­ade with­out hav­ing to spend any real money or effort to enforce them).

This announce­ment may just be for Turkish domes­tic con­sump­tion, and any new aid flotil­las may find them­selves enveloped in the kind of bureau­cratic foot drag­ging at which most mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions excel. It doesn’t seem likely that the Turkish mil­i­tary, which has long had a pretty cozy rela­tion­ship with Israel, would really want to push this con­fronta­tion into a test of mil­i­tary capabilities.

source: freegaza­org via flickr [cc license]

Probably, as with President Erdogan’s threat to travel with a flotilla him­self, this is just Turkey talk­ing. But it still rep­re­sents a dan­ger­ous esca­la­tion and a poten­tial chal­lenge for the NATO alliance. Stay tuned…

Continuing this week’s theme on China, indus­trial pol­icy, cars, and cli­mate is this story from the Times on China’s attempts to use mar­ket access as a lever to get its hands on the tech­nol­ogy behind the Chevrolet Volt:

G.M. Aims the Volt at China, but Chinese Want Its Secrets — NYTimes​.com.

As we have seen, the Chinese mar­ket is a hugely attrac­tive for for­eign car mak­ers. Indeed, one might even see it as essen­tial: those com­pa­nies that can sell in the Chinese mar­ket will be able to grow faster, make more money, and amor­tize research and mar­ket­ing over a larger base than those com­pa­nies that are stuck in the rel­a­tively stag­nant mar­kets for replace­ment cars in the devel­oped world.

As a con­di­tion for includ­ing the Volt in the $19,000 rebate pro­gram for low emis­sions vehi­cles, China insists that GM share some of the Volt’s crit­i­cal hybrid tech­nolo­gies. There is no way that the Volt could com­pete with other hybrids and elec­tric vehi­cles with­out this price bump. (Note again that the U.S. had a sim­i­lar tax rebate pro­gram for hybrid own­er­ship, which helped launch the Toyota Prius, and still pro­vides a $7,500 tax credit for Volt buy­ers — as the Prius exam­ple shows, how­ever, it was not lim­ited to domes­tic pro­duc­ers and did not require tech­nol­ogy transfers.)

This has become some­thing of a rou­tine for China:

The government’s demand is the lat­est exam­ple of China’s will­ing­ness to use the lever­age of Western access to the vast Chinese mar­ket to extract con­ces­sions on advanced tech­nolo­gies. Policies to force tech­nol­ogy trans­fers from non-​​Chinese com­pa­nies have already helped this nation build big indus­tries in areas like wind tur­bines, high-​​speed trains and water purifi­ca­tion.
source: NYTimes

These demands also rep­re­sent an alter­na­tive national strat­egy, which allows China to under-​​invest in its own research efforts:

Chinese automak­ers may need tech­nol­ogy assis­tance for advanced cars because their research bud­gets tend to be only a tiny share of sales by inter­na­tional stan­dards. That is why the Chinese gov­ern­ment wants to ensure that its automak­ers gain the tech­nol­ogy to man­u­fac­ture their own elec­tric and hybrid cars.
source: NYTimes

source: gmeu­rope via Flickr (cc license)

China’s demand is a pretty clear vio­la­tion of WTO prin­ci­ples, in that it clearly dis­crim­i­nates against for­eign man­u­fac­tur­ers. We’ll see how the power pol­i­tics play out.

Speaking of indus­trial policy…today’s NYTimes brings an impor­tant story about a shift in Chinese strat­egy on car manufacturing:

NYTimes: China Changes Direction on Car Sales

source: Philip Jagenstedt
via Flicker (cc license)
ktg mod­i­fi­ca­tions

China wants to reduce the growth in car man­u­fac­tur­ing while focus­ing on increas­ing qual­ity and fuel efficiency.

A suc­ces­sion of gov­ern­ment offi­cials at a week­end con­fer­ence called for China’s automak­ers to shift their focus from mak­ing ever more cars and toward pro­duc­ing more fuel-​​efficient and more advanced mod­els, includ­ing gasoline-​​electric hybrids and all-​​electric cars.
source: NYTimes

In terms of indus­trial pol­icy, think about how these kinds of choices are made and then imple­mented in the U.S. com­pared to China. It isn’t that the U.S. is a pure free mar­ket sys­tem, while China’s is a com­mand econ­omy. The U.S. imposes fleet fuel stan­dards, safety stan­dards, and tax incen­tives to push the car indus­try in a desired direc­tion. It is just that the Chinese gov­ern­ment has much more direct levers of con­trol, and is much more will­ing to use them. At the same time, how­ever, China can­not escape from global mar­ket dynam­ics. And China has to deal with the bur­geon­ing demand for cars that has accom­pa­nied the dra­matic income growth that China has expe­ri­enced since throw­ing off the shack­les of Mao’s pure com­mand econ­omy and his restric­tions on inter­na­tional trade.

A forced shift of this sort in China has enor­mous impli­ca­tions for the global car mar­ket, the global oil mar­ket, and for the global cli­mate. Oil-​​based trans­porta­tion is the fun­da­men­tal dri­ver of cli­mate change. It also has huge secu­rity impli­ca­tions as the global demand for oil props up some of the most prob­lem­atic regimes in the world. And, as we saw in the eco­nomic dif­fi­cul­ties of 2008, the global car mar­ket is a crit­i­cal ele­ment in the mod­ern eco­nomic order.

To get per­spec­tive on the poten­tial impact of this shift, remem­ber that the U.S. has about 828 motor vehi­cles per 1000 peo­ple – that’s more than one per dri­ver, so the mar­ket is sat­u­rated. The only way to sell more cars in the U.S. is to replace other cars. In 2008, China had just 37 cars per 1000 people.

Here is a graph show­ing the increase in Chinese cars over the past 25 years. If China increased to the same own­er­ship rate as the U.S., that would require about 1 bil­lion new cars. The total num­ber of motor vehi­cles in the whole world right now is about 800 million.

source: SmokingPermitted via Flickr (cc license)

Then, there is India, with a pop­u­la­tion of 1.1 bil­lion and a car own­er­ship rate of about 6 cars per 1000 people…

Anyone who has dri­ven up the Nimitz Freeway along the east­ern edge of the San Francisco Bay has seen the big shiny Solyndra factories:

Solyndra Factory – Fremont, CA
source: Monica’s Dad via flickr [cc license]

Solyndra was selected by the Department of Energy to be a high flyer in the nascent solar power indus­try. Lots of sil­i­con val­ley sorts got excited about invest­ing in clean energy and apply­ing their tech­ni­cal prowess to solv­ing the world’s energy prob­lems, while tak­ing care of cli­mate change (and mak­ing oodles of money) on the side. Just a lit­tle fur­ther north on the Nimitz is another such ven­ture — the big shiny Tesla plant.

The Tesla fac­tory in its for­mer NUMMI guise – Milpitas CA
source: Greg Woodhouse Photography via flickr [cc license]

Word comes now that Solyndra is clos­ing up and that some­one is going to be on the hook for about a bil­lion bucks. Partly that some­one is a bunch of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists. That, for bet­ter or worse, is the nature of their busi­ness. But partly that some­one is you and me (well those of us who pay taxes to the American gov­ern­ment at least). DoE guar­an­teed about half a bil­lion of the ven­ture cap­i­tal money that went into Solyndra.

Here’s the NYTimes on the story:
Solar Firm Aided by Federal Loans Shuts Doors

Solyndra had some pretty cutting-​​edge clever tech, but between the time they drew up plans for the busi­ness and now, the price of solar pan­els dropped pre­cip­tiously. That’s good news for solar power in gen­eral, but bad news for the high-​​priced providers like Solyndra.

source: Tulane Public
Relations via flickr
(cc license)

At least a part of the rea­son solar prices dropped so much is that the Chinese gov­ern­ment was also putting a lot of money into this industry-​​of-​​the-​​future, and their com­pa­nies were pro­duc­ing much cheaper prod­ucts. Thomas Friedman has often high­lighted how smart the Chinese are about invest­ing in green tech (and high-​​speed trains, though, trag­i­cally, that went a bit off the rails ear­lier this summer).

The Energy Department, which is going to take the fall for mak­ing this invest­ment, is call­ing China’s behav­ior preda­tory rather than smart:

The Energy Department, which approved the fund­ing, said China’s sub­si­dies to its solar indus­try were threat­en­ing the abil­ity of Solyndra and other American man­u­fac­tur­ers to com­pete. The price of a solar array, mea­sured by cost per watt of capac­ity, has fallen 42 per­cent since December 2010, the agency said.
NYTimes

So what does it mean for inter­na­tional rela­tions and inter­na­tional law?

In the first place, it raises some of the level-​​playing field ques­tions:  how does the nat­ural process of inno­va­tion and com­pe­ti­tion work when gov­ern­ments are pour­ing bil­lions of dol­lars into indus­tries like this? We are quick to accuse the Chinese of help­ing their indus­tries keep their prices down and steal American jobs.  The U.S. has already filed W.T.O. com­plaints about Chinese sub­si­dies for the wind power indus­try, and is now under pres­sure to file sim­i­lar com­plaints regard­ing the solar industry.

But, while China has cer­tainly been sup­port­ing its solar indus­try, the U.S. (and the Germans) have been doing the same thing (Although at a sig­nif­i­cantly lower level, and there are some other impor­tant tech­ni­cal dif­fer­ences – the Chinese for exam­ple, were giv­ing their wind power man­u­fac­tur­ers sub­si­dies not to use any for­eign parts, while the U.S. was giv­ing sub­si­dies for installing solar power, which U.S. com­pa­nies were using to buy Chinese solar panels).

U.S. Solar Company Bankruptcies a Boon for China — NYTimes​.com.

The sec­ond point is how hard indus­trial pol­icy is. It is very hard for gov­ern­ment bureau­crats to select tech­no­log­i­cal win­ners and losers. In the 1980’s we wor­ried that the Japanese were going to buy up all of America because they had an indus­trial pol­icy that made it impos­si­ble for American com­pa­nies to com­pete. Read Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun if you want to get a sense of the para­noia of those times.

Now we are see­ing the same con­cerns about China. It does seem that the U.S. is con­sis­tently poor at choos­ing winners. But, in the longer run, do you really believe that the Chinese gov­ern­ment, with its crony­ism and lack of trans­parency is going to do such a good job of it?

The world’s atten­tion has been focused for some time now on the dra­matic and vio­lent polit­i­cal changes rack­ing Libya and Syria. Largely unno­ticed last week were lead­er­ship elec­tions — a hall­mark of peace­ful polit­i­cal change — in Estonia and Nepal. Of course, as coun­tries go, Estonia and Nepal are often in the “unno­ticed col­umn”. But this is a pretty inter­est­ing juxtaposition.

source: UN Photo via
Flickr (cc license)

Estonia, one of the Baltic republics that suf­fered under the Soviet boot, suc­cess­fully tran­si­tioned to democ­racy in 1991 and set off on one of the world’s most dra­matic exper­i­ments with rel­a­tively lib­er­tar­ian eco­nomic poli­cies. In 2006 the State of World Liberty Project rated Estonia as the most lib­er­tar­ian coun­try in the world. It is widely regarded as one of the eas­i­est places to start a busi­ness, is com­mit­ted to free trade, and has a sim­ple flat tax rate that is rel­a­tively low at about 20 per­cent. These poli­cies are widely regarded as hav­ing helped make Estonia one of the most dynamic and fast-​​growing economies in the early 2000’s. Alas, they also made it par­tic­u­larly vul­ner­a­ble to finan­cial col­lapse in the bank­ing cri­sis of 2008. Since, then, how­ever, Estonia has had a very strong recov­ery. On the strength of this recov­ery, and despite very harsh aus­ter­ity mea­sures, the rul­ing Reform Party retained their major­ity in Parliamentary elec­tions this past March. Then ear­lier today, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves was elected by par­lia­ment for a sec­ond five-​​year term.

source: The Advocacy
Project via Flickr (cc license)

Meanwhile, in Nepal, the Parliament has elected a Maoist as the new prime min­is­ter. Nepal was beset for many years by a cor­rupt and debased monar­chy and a Maoist insur­gency. In 2006 mass protests led to a peace agree­ment and even­tu­ally to the depos­ing of the Nepali monar­chy. Baburam Bhattarai and The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) now have the oppor­tu­nity to trans­late their vision of the Maoist phi­los­o­phy to the Nepali con­text. Perhaps this will work out alright.  But one has to be more than a lit­tle wor­ried about the vision of a polit­i­cal party that extols the exam­ple of a leader who’s poli­cies failed so spec­tac­u­larly in China and led to the largest num­ber of mass polit­i­cal killings of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, far sur­pass­ing the not incon­se­quen­tial efforts of Stalin and Hitler combined.

Two often over­looked coun­tries. Two elec­tions. Two rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent directions.

Nepal: Great moun­tains, not really such great pol­i­tics
source: Rupert Taylor-​​Price via Flickr (cc license)

(For our “sins of the sons” file, it is worth not­ing that the begin­ning of the end for the Nepali monar­chy was the tragic and bizarre 2001 mas­sacre in the royal palace in which crown prince Dipendra killed the King, the Queen, sev­eral other rel­a­tives, and finally shot him­self in a drunken rage over not being able to choose his own bride. Dipendra then became de jure King of Nepal for the two days he was in a coma before his death — the so-​​called “Comatose King”.)

Friends — I’m on blog­ging vaca­tion until August 15 or so. In the mean­time, please keep an eye on:

• The WTO com­ing down on China’s poli­cies on rare earths exports (along with a num­ber of sto­ries about other rare earths–which prove to be really not so rare – com­ing on line).
• The ongo­ing drama sur­round­ing the attempt of a num­ber of peace activists to sail from Greece to Gaza in sup­port of the peace-​​loving war crim­i­nals who lead Hamas. Greece is not inclined to allow them to go.
• The devel­op­ments in South Sudan, where clean­ing up the last bits of dis­puted bor­ders and the immi­nent sep­a­ra­tion of the two coun­tries has led to yet more charges of eth­nic cleans­ing as Sudan works to make sure that the sit­u­a­tion on the ground is as favor­able as pos­si­ble before the July 9^th inde­pen­dence day for South Sudan. Meanwhile, the Chinese, who aspire to a lead­er­ship posi­tion in the inter­na­tional sys­tem, don’t feel any appar­ent embar­rass­ment about win­ing and din­ing Sudan’s pres­i­dent al-​​Bashir, despite his open inter­na­tional arrest war­rant for crimes against human­ity.
  

• The unfold­ing DSK saga, which is no longer about diplo­matic immu­ni­ties, but retains impor­tant ele­ments about juris­dic­tion, inter­na­tional crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions, immi­gra­tion and asy­lum law, the sta­tus of women, French juris­dic­tional rules, and per­haps in a lit­tle bit we’ll see some more action on French defama­tion and crim­i­nal libel laws.
• And, of course, the con­tin­ued work­ing out of the Arab Spring in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Tunisia.

We don’t think much about vet­eri­nar­i­ans in inter­na­tional rela­tions. We know that they are there behind the scenes tak­ing care of the dogs that sniff out drugs and help out Navy Seals, but today’s New York Times story on the erad­i­ca­tion of rinder­pest high­lights a much more impor­tant role in the con­trol of ani­mal diseases:

Rinderpest, a Centuries-​​Old Animal Disease, Is Eradicated — NYTimes​.com.

So, what’s the big deal? Rinderpest is a dev­as­tat­ing dis­ease for cat­tle. Cattle have long played a crit­i­cal eco­nomic and social role in human life:

[R]inderpest is hardly irrel­e­vant to humans. It has been blamed for speed­ing the fall of the Roman Empire, aid­ing the con­quests of Genghis Khan and hin­der­ing those of Charlemagne, open­ing the way for the French and Russian Revolutions, and sub­ju­gat­ing East Africa to col­o­niza­tion.
NYTimes

source: David F. Bacon (cc license)

Moreover, in all of his­tory, this is only the sec­ond dis­ease that has been suc­cess­fully erad­i­cated. Smallpox, which killed 300 – 500 mil­lion peo­ple in the 20^th cen­tury (com­pared to 36 mil­lion battle-​​deaths in wars, and 262 mil­lion killed by their own gov­ern­ments), was cer­ti­fied by the World Health Organization as hav­ing been erad­i­cated in 1979. This makes the vic­tory over rinder­pest impor­tant because epi­demi­ol­o­gists were increas­ingly wor­ried that the erad­i­ca­tion of small­pox was a fluke and would not be repeated.

As with many human dis­eases, the prin­ci­ple bar­rier to elim­i­nat­ing rinder­pest was pol­i­tics and war. Veterinarians had to get access to war zones to treat herds. Governments some­times wanted to hide the extent of infec­tion rather than treat it. Nomads and refugees made it dif­fi­cult to track down vul­ner­a­ble animals:

In 1998, a long­time leader of the effort, Sir Gordon R. Scott of the Center for Tropical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, wrote an arti­cle say­ing he had reluc­tantly con­cluded that it would fail.

“The major obsta­cle,” he wrote, “is man’s inhu­man­ity to man. Rinderpest thrives in a milieu of armed con­flict and flee­ing refugee masses. Until world peace is secured, the nays win the argu­ment.”
NYTimes

The effort against rinder­pest is par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because it intro­duced sev­eral approaches that may pro­vide impor­tant lessons for advanc­ing the work on human dis­eases. It would be impos­si­ble to inoc­u­late every cow, not to men­tion the wilde­beests, warthogs, giraffes, pigs, deer, and the like who can also carry the dis­ease. Instead, the cam­paign was con­ducted with strate­gic choices about the selec­tive vac­ci­na­tion of crit­i­cal herds and cer­tain more vul­ner­a­ble ani­mals. Likewise, as with the efforts against human dis­eases, cul­tural knowl­edge was essen­tial for fig­ur­ing out how to pro­mote vac­ci­na­tion pro­grams and encour­age compliance.

Finally, for our pur­poses, it is also worth not­ing that this effort required the coor­di­na­tion of an inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion to get the job done — in this case the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. There are lots of good rea­sons to be con­cerned about the patholo­gies of inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions; but that shouldn’t blind us to the places where they play a crit­i­cal role in improv­ing the lot of human beings.

And, of course, let’s not for­get about the veterinarians:

The long but little-​​known cam­paign to con­quer rinder­pest is a trib­ute to the skill and brav­ery of “big ani­mal” vet­eri­nar­i­ans, who fought the dis­ease in remote and some­times war-​​torn areas — across arid stretches of Africa big­ger than Europe, in the Arabian desert and on the Mongolian steppes.

“The role of vet­eri­nar­i­ans in pro­tect­ing soci­ety is under­ap­pre­ci­ated,” said Dr. Juan Lubroth, chief vet­eri­nary offi­cer of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,
NYTimes

So, a big “thanks” and “well-​​done” to our val­or­ous vets!

There is, in my view, no idea in all of human his­tory more impor­tant than the notion of women’s equal­ity. It is crit­i­cal to both our per­sonal lives and our social lives. In the arena of inter­na­tional rela­tions, it is most clearly crit­i­cal for devel­op­ment, as Amyarta Sen and many oth­ers have cogently argued. It has also been the source for impor­tant insights on the secu­rity side.

That said, I am less enthu­si­as­tic about the strain of fem­i­nist thought that holds that most of the prob­lems of the world can be traced to the per­ni­cious influ­ence of testos­terone and that if women ran the world, hunger and war and injus­tice of every stripe would melt away.

I am sure that testos­terone is respon­si­ble for many abom­i­na­tions both large and small. But the sim­plis­tic logic that women are inher­ently and uni­ver­sally more gen­tle is an obvi­ous folly. The news today from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of the con­vic­tion of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko for geno­cide is a graphic reminder of this fact:

Life Sentences in Rwanda Genocide Case — NYTimes

Despite her own back­ground as a mother, an AIDS edu­ca­tor, and even being part Tutsi her­self, Nyiramasuhuko’s hor­rific crimes included push­ing Rwandan Hutus not only to mas­sacre Tutsis, but to rape and muti­late them in the process.

Here is a lengthy NYTimes Magazine story about Nyiramasuhuko: “A Woman’s Work”

This is par­tic­u­larly tragic and ironic because one of the great con­tri­bu­tions of fem­i­nist schol­ar­ship in the secu­rity arena has been the increas­ing under­stand­ing of the per­ni­cious and wide­spread use of rape as a weapon in vio­lent conflicts.

(On this issue, see also today’s CNN report on the grow­ing schol­ar­ship on rape and the holo­caust)

Of course, Nyiramasuhuko is just one woman — indeed the only woman so far to have been con­victed of geno­cide. But we have lit­tle con­crete evi­dence from which to assess the coun­ter­fac­tual propo­si­tion that women would run the world dif­fer­ently than men.

My own intu­ition is that even if the behav­ioral bell curves have dif­fer­ent cen­tral ten­den­cies, there are enough sociopaths and psy­chopaths of both gen­ders to ensure that the march towards human­i­tar­i­an­ism and good gov­er­nance will remain a long hard slog, regard­less of whether men or women are in charge.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha, Tanzania)
source: hotelde­phil via flickr (cc license)

On the inter­na­tional law side, it is worth not­ing that Nyiramasuhuku was first indicted in 1999 and it took almost 12 years for the International Criminal Tribunal to resolve her case.

You can read a lengthy sum­mary of the judge­ment here. The full ren­der­ing is some 1,500 pages long.

A front page story in the NYTimes today on the com­ing evo­lu­tion and ethics of drones in war:

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

As we dis­cussed a few days ago, the cen­tral issue with drones goes beyond the tra­di­tional con­cerns of the laws of war to con­sider the eth­i­cal prob­lem of mak­ing war less costly and there­fore more likely.

Similar issues might well be raised about cyber war. This issue has received height­ened atten­tion of late with increas­ing evi­dence that the Chinese are mov­ing aggres­sively into this area. And, let’s not have any illu­sions but that this is a space the U.S. has already staked out.

Here’s a Reuter’s piece on a new DARPA pro­gram to set up a cyber­war test bed:

Pentagon’s advanced research arm tack­les cyber­space | Reuters.

At one level cyber war oper­ates as a sort of inverse neu­tron bomb—it can inflict very costly dam­age on infra­struc­ture with­out killing peo­ple. The Stuxnet virus is an excep­tional exam­ple of this phenomenon.

But, of course, it is not hard to imag­ine cyber war killing peo­ple as well. Think here of the con­trol sys­tems for air­craft, chem­i­cal fac­to­ries, rail­roads, dams, nuclear power plants, and the like.

Indeed, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has just reported evi­dence of exploitable Stuxnet style vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties implanted in Chinese indus­trial con­trol software:

US Warns of Problems in Chinese SCADA Software).

The Navy Cyber Force Headquarters here in Norfolk
source: U.S. Navy-​​Joshua Wahl via usa​.gov (pub­lic domain)

As with drones, any attempt to reg­u­late cyber attacks is going to require wholly new rules, rather than just extend­ing cur­rent human­i­tar­ian legal prin­ci­ples. The cen­tral chal­lenge here is attri­bu­tion: How do you know with suf­fi­cient cer­tainty from whence an attack has come? And note that this is as much a prob­lem for tra­di­tional deter­rence as for legal reg­u­la­tion of the problem.

My stu­dent Jeff McNeill argued in his doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tion that reg­u­lat­ing cyber­war on the inter­net may require a change in the nature of inter­net pri­vacy in order to pro­vide reli­able attri­bu­tion. That would be a dif­fi­cult change for us to stomach.

Consider in this regard, the American ini­tia­tive to facil­i­tate anony­mous inter­net access in the inter­est of help­ing peo­ple to cir­cum­vent gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship and to fur­ther the Arab Spring. Such is the world of dif­fi­cult trade-​​offs in inter­na­tional politics.