The video is a spoof of John McCain’s ‘celebrity’ advertisement released last week in which the Republican candidate compared Barack Obama’s popularity with that of Ms Hilton and claimed the Democrat was no more than a celebrity candidate who was not ready to lead the nation.
In Ms Hilton’s version of the advertisement, she tells electors: “Hey America, I’m Paris Hilton and I’m a celebrity too. Only I’m not from the olden days and I’m not promising change like that other guy. I’m just hot!
In July, I argued that the African Union’s discomfort with the indictment of Sudan’s President Bashir might be a turning-point in the evolution of international law. “African leaders are setting limits on global governance,” said I, because they are sick/scared of being in a “laboratory for international institutions”. Since then, there’s been a pitched battle between the AU and the West over Bashir, with the US abstaining on the resolution extending the UN mandate in Darfur in anger, and the AU condemning the ICC for deciding “to put oil on the fire” yesterday.
But now there’s a new front opening up. Rwanda has just published a detailed report accusing France of complicity in the 1994 genocide, pointing fingers at Mitterand, de Villepin and other former Gallic high-ups. That comes less than a month after Rwanda threatened to pull its troops out of Darfur when a Spanish judge accused their general of involvement in revenge killings after the genocide. French prosecutors have also been going after members of the Rwandan government, up to and including President Paul Kagame, on similar charges – the AU has, unsurprisingly, come out in favor of the Rwandans against this.
Where on earth is this all going? Check out an interview Kagame gave to the FT in early July, when the latest report was in the works. Edited highlights:
Q: So it will name names?
PK: Yes. And hopefully our judges will enjoy indicting some of those people. There is no justice for Europe and justice for Africa that are different. And if they are to be different it cannot just be Europe extending its jurisdiction into other countries Africa if it is to be universal.
Q: So you will launch some indictments on the basis of the report?
PK: I don’t rule that out unless there is progress on these issues.
Q: To an outsider it seems like the political tensions between Rwanda and France are being exercised through the legal system?
PK:Legal systems are systems of government. No one will believe the French when they say it is the judge we are not concerned. Judges don’t make laws they only carry out their duties based on the laws of the country. There are problems relating to that between us and France and Spain. And probably there would be problems between us and any other country that would want to come up with this. First of all there is no basis in terms of fact and no basis in terms of process. It is hugely questionable what is meant by universal jurisdiction when it comes to basing things on their own law and extending it to other territories. One would have expected there to be an international regulatory mechanism, otherwise you will not avoid chaos. Everyone will be indicting everyone else.
That certainly seems to be an option. Of course, there are multitudinous differences between an ICC indictment (as on Darfur) and national courts claiming universal jurisdiction (as on Rwanda). Nonetheless, the convergence of these tensions – specifically the way they all seem to get tangled up in the Darfur peace operation and AU-Western relations – rather disrupts the legal niceties. Does this mean that promoting the rule of law is about to join democratization as an unacceptable foreign policy goal for Western governments? Not quite: the once and (I rather suspect) future Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power argues in the current NYRB that Barack should effectively launch a “Presidency of the Law”:
In his National Security Strategy for 2002, Bush used the words “liberty” eleven times, “freedom” forty-six times, and “dignity” nine times; yet people who live under oppression around the world have seen few benefits from President Bush’s freedom doctrine. Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Bush, put it best when he said, “Since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear.” The gulf between America’s rights rhetoric and the abuses carried out against detainees in American custody has been fatal to American credibility. Obama needs to restore that credibility by ending those excesses, and by following through on his pledge to launch a foreign aid initiative rooted in Franklin Roosevelt’s core democratic value: freedom from fear. The United States should invest in a long-term “rule of law” initiative that takes up the burden of helping other countries and international organizations to build workable legal systems in the developing world.
Be careful what you wish for. The task may not be building legal systems, but reconciling them. Or reconciling the various leaders indicted by them…
Partly to deflect criticism of his call for a withdrawal from Iraq, Senator Barack Obama has said the U.S “should seize the moment” to build up its presence in Afghanistan. His rival John McCain agrees; when Obama called for two additional U.S brigades to be sent to Afghanistan, McCain demanded that three brigades be deployed i.e. 15.000 more troops. They also agree on taking a harder line vis-à-vis Pakistan.
But rather than lead to a chorus of support, something else has stirred. Voicing a concern I’m told is felt by several top Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, Jim Webb, the Democratic senator for Virginia, told the Financial Timesthat the US should avoid suggesting that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be followed by a surge of troops in Afghanistan.
In a break not only with the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda, but also a post-2002 cross-party consensus that U.S should help rebuild failing and failed states, Senator Webb said the U.S
can’t create stable societies in places like Afghanistan . . . that can’t be our objective.
For now, the kink in the bi-partisan consensus on helping build failing and fragile states is small. But it also has a British variant in the Conservative Party and, I predict, will grow over time.
Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not progress via a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic “paradigm shifts”. The comparison to foreign policy ideas is, I admit, not straight (and our view of scientific development has moved on), but it is straight enough. And we may be about to witness a paradigmatic shift away from state-building. But what replaces it?
So…The US is hassling Pakistan to crack down on its border regions. But it wants the Pakistanis to use the same tactics that it failed with in Afghanistan (and Iraq, of course). Yes, it’s another episode of the dysfunctional US-Pakistan relationship.
All this comes, according to the LA Times, after the new, and beleaguered, Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yusaf Raza Gillani, “got an earful from both the White House and Congress about the need to act far more aggressively in the tribal areas.” Their response? Send in the Special Forces. A US-trained and equipped commando division is being sent to the tribal region, we are told. Its mission – to put the insurgency to the sword.
I am sure this is a heady stimulant for the armchair warriors in the White House, but it flies in the face of the US counterinsurgency doctrine, which states flatly that “the military forces that successfully defeat insurgencies are usually those able to overcome their institutional inclination to wage conventional war against insurgents.”
But conventional war has long been the strategy of choice for Pakistan to deal with its internal problems (problems that could eventually lead to total state failure). Look at what happened back in 2004, when the US bullied General Musharraf into a disastrous attack on the tribal areas:
The tribesmen considered the military action as an attack on their autonomy and an attempt to subjugate them. Attempts to persuade them into handling over foreign militants failed and, with apparent mishandling, the military offensive against suspected al-Qaeda militants turned into an undeclared war between the Pakistani military and rebel tribesmen. Anger grew as government forces demolished the houses of members of the defiant tribes as collective punishment and seized their properties, even in other parts of the province.
The result was humiliation. One Colonel took shelter in a mosque and emerged with the Koran on his head, begging for mercy. Tribesmen stripped him of his uniform, and sent him on his way. In the end, the army signed a truce with the militants – a move that was widely (and rightly) interpreted as surrender.
In 2004, there was some excuse for this. The US, after all, was still learning some very hard lessons in Iraq, lessons that led David Petraeus to come back to the US believing that:
Success in a counterinsurgency requires more than just military operations. Counterinsurgency strategies must also include, above all, efforts to establish a political environment that helps reduce support for the insurgents and undermines the attraction of whatever ideology they may espouse.
Five years on, however, and the US’s Pakistan policy remains stuck in the dark ages. One of the most fragile countries on earth continues to be used as a political football in Washington (with Obama a willing participant, sadly).
The US’s field manual on counter-insurgency is selling well on Amazon (who would have predicted that a few years ago?). It described counterinsurgencies as ‘learning competitions’. At the moment, that’s one game we’re clearly losing.
Can I suggest that someone in Washington RTFM and reads it soon?
Take a two-party system. Drop it into a multi-connected, media frenzied world. And what you get is a system with two steady states and dramatic swings between the two.
When you’re in, you’re in big time. Everything goes your way. But once you’re on the slide, it’s a one way trip to the wilderness. This is the world of disruptive politics – where it can be better to lose well, than even to try to win.
Disruptive politics has one imperative: to change the terrain on which political battles are fought. The disruption results from the opponent’s inability to react. He fights the old battle and is utterly hapless as a result. You know what he is thinking, can predict how he will react, and anticipate his every move with ease.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had instinctive mastery of disruptive politics. Neither was an intellectual colossus nor did they emerge from a vacuum. But, somehow, they had the skill to weave the threads of what was possible into a cloth that had a magical power to mystify their opponents.
The game was up for the Tories when Blair announced he was ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ Yet many Conservatives still believed they could win the 1997 election. They simply didn’t believe that Blair was who he said he was or believed what he said he did. They were still in denial four years later, fighting ‘Phoney Tony’ – their own chimera – rather than the real Prime Minister. Thatcher had previously bewitched Old Labour just as successfully.
In the US of the 80s and 90s, Reagan and (Bill) Clinton sowed similar confusion. For two elections, Democrats fought a George Bush of their own invention. Next Hillary battled an Obama who didn’t exist. Now McCain is doing the same thing. Obama is a flip flopper. No, he’s a lightweight. Wait, did I tell you the one about him ignoring the troops?
It took Margaret Thatcher’s fall to snap the Labour vanguard out of its trance. The second Gulf War has had a similar effect on the Tories. It’s like a return to sobriety – time to rebuild in the cold light of day. The Democrats, meanwhile, were saved by a Deus ex machina. The candidate from nowhere who will, I believe, win convincingly in November and should go from there to a resounding victory in 2012.
So where does this leave the Labour Party? Has it lost both this election and the next one? Well, that depends on what it tries to do now.
Faced with a superior force, the most important thing is to control the manner in which you lose. (Think of how an effective insurgent melts away when a conventional army marches into town – all the better to regroup and seize back the momentum when the time is right).
Should Gordon Brown step down (and I have no opinion on whether he will or should), then the overriding focus of his successor should be to take the party into opposition in good shape.
That means:
Calling a general election as quickly as possible (while you’re still in a honeymoon period).
Aiming to win the campaign, even if there’s little chance you can win the vote (you want to go into election day on the up).
Arriving on the opposition benches with momentum on your side and morale high.
What you shouldn’t do:
Hold onto power to the bitter end (by which time the press are already speculating about your successor).
Lose the campaign and the vote (doing worse than the pundits predicted).
Arrive in opposition fit only to tear yourselves to pieces for the next five years.
It’s a tough course to take and one that will need selling to the party faithful. After all, the faithful would often prefer to die in a ditch than live to fight another day.
