The Yoda Doctrine and the War on Terror

The NYT picked up on my BHTV spot with Dan Drezner last weekend, where we discuss whether or not Obama should be assassinating Americans. But they only stuck a small clip of our discussion on that topic at their site, so I've clipped the entire piece for your perusal.



Note that a variety of technical snafus caused the BH folks to edit the video here and there making the context hard to infer at spots (watch out for the part at about 5 minutes in where my face and voice suddenly jump scarily forward at you!). In fact, it seems they edited out the part where I mention the Terrorist Expatriation Act currently being pushed through the Senate by Joe Lieberman, which would render it constitutional to strip Americans of their citizenship for "joining a foreign terrorist organization or engaging in or supporting hostilities against the United States or its allies."

While human rights law would still arguably make it criminal to summarily execute non-citizens, the aim of this legislation is to at least render the constitutional questions moot (would it, actually? I defer to the lawyers who blog here and elsewhere...) until such time, at least, as the Supreme Court renders said law unconstitutional.

In that regard, it's worth noting the Court's (and the current nominee's) past history on precisely these issues, which has been helpfully summarized by Richard Epstein.

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CSMonitor: Kenyan Street Embraces ICC Investigation

The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has become an iconic figure in urban Kenya. Or at least so says Scott Baldaug, reporting from Nairobi. Aside from getting Mr. Moreno-Ocampo's name wrong, his is an insightful little piece:

It may not be scientific, but a quick way to see what’s trendy in Kenya is to look at the back of a matatu, which is what Kenyans call their minivan taxis.

Some are highly adorned with the spray-painted faces of American hip-hop stars such as Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, and the late Tupac Shakur, and play those artists’ music at deafening decibels. Some are covered with pious statements such as “In God We Trust” or “Mashallah” (Arabic for “by the grace of God”).

One matatu I saw in Nairobi even had a portrait of Osama bin Laden, chosen presumably more for shock value than for ideological reasons, as the side of the van was emblazoned with the words “Thug Life.”

But the new king of the matatu is neither a rap star nor a terrorist. He is Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.

Mr. Ocampo has recently taken up the criminal investigation of top Kenyan politicians who allegedly organized ethnic violence in the wake of the December 2007 elections, violence that killed some 1,500 people and displaced nearly 300,000 from their homes.

During the elections, matatu drivers endorsed political candidates, but, in the violent aftermath, many drivers became as disillusioned as the voting public. Now they are showing their disillusionment with giant posters of the Argentine-born lawyer holding a sheaf of documents. Others simply display the word “OCAMPO” in capital letters.

Be careful, Kenyan politicians: Your people are watching you.

Or they would like to think someone is, anyway.

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More on Corpse-Counting

The HSR study I mentioned before on the declining toll of war has attracted a number of criticisms. Les Roberts at Making Sense of Sudan argues that their result is an artifact of the way in which the authors have defined the term "war." HRDAG argues that if HSR applied the standards to their own data that they apply to the Congo death data, they couldn't argue that they know anything about whether deaths are declining or not. The IRC has been quick to defend its Congo death toll estimate, which the HSR report says is inflated.

Some threads of these arguments dovetail with an ongoing academic debate about how to most accurately measure war deaths. (For example, is it better to estimate war deaths by counting the reported deaths in media accounts, or by doing surveys of war-affected populations?) But parts of the criticisms instead seem based on a belief that challenging conventional statistical wisdom is bad for human rights. Georgianne Neinaber of the Huffington Post claims:

It is far beyond unfortunate that this academic debate stands to produce a possible humanitarian aid backlash for the Congolese people. This debate should not be conducted in the press, and it is highly unfortunate that the headlined 900,000 number may become the new "fact," because of an academic paper whose authors readily admit that they "do not know" the real numbers.

Similarly, Les Roberts, who contributed to the "debunked" IRC Congo report, called the HRS' study "A Major Blow to Humanitarian Accountability."

I have my own scholarly issues with the HSR report - in particular that the authors don't really back up their assertions about why national mortality rates have declined, though their hypotheses are certainly plausible. But as a scientist, I'm leery of this narrative that somehow, even if the findings were accurate, it would be unethical to publish them on humanitarian grounds.

Would it be? Is it really the job of social scientists to publish counter-intuitive data only if they can be absolutely certain it won't be misinterpreted? Or is it merely their job to do their best to lay out the evidence as accurately as they see it, in language as likely as possible to be understood, and to correct misinterpretations when they inevitably arise? (Andrew Mack has taken pains to correct the alleged perception that his report is arguing "only" 900,000 have died, which it certainly does not - though nor have I found evidence of this "headlined 900,000 number" beyond Nienaber's Huffington Post essay.)

And is the international community really so fickle as to withdraw aid from the DRC on the basis that "too few" millions have died? I don't see evidence of that either, but if they are, should a single research team be blamed for this outcome? Or should we be blaming the international community itself for its complacency?

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Because They Can.

Why do repressive regimes sign the Torture Convention when they don't plan to comply with it? At the Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten has a round-up of some conventional answers and calls attention to a novel explanation just out as a working paper from NYU.

[cross-posted at Duck of Minerva]

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Bernstein: HRW Should Engage In Moral Relativism

As with Michael Gerson on torture, Robert Bernstein believes that some countries should be ipso facto exempt from criticism for human rights abuses:

The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.

But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers...”

Setting up standards that make it essentially impossible to prove that countries Bernstein likes have ever committed war crimes is convenient, but not very useful for organizations that want to identify human rights abuses regardless of who commits them. The rest if the op-ed is long on pointing out we already know (most middle eastern regimes are highly repressive) and very short on evidence backing up his assertions that Israel has "borne the brunt" of HRW's criticism. Based on the rest of his arguments, one suspects that for Bernstein any criticism of Israel is too much. I certainly don't see Israel being singled out here.

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