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Markus Miessen

Made in Washington

Spatial Practices as a blueprint for Human Rights violations

In 2004, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben re-interpreted the US "war against all evil" as a symbolic gesture that envisions an alteration of the political landscape. Two months after the September attacks in 2001, the Bush administration – in the midst of what it perceived as a state of emergency – authorised the indefinite imprisonment of non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities. This policy, according to Agamben, should be understood as "The State of Exception",^[2] a powerful strategy that enables the transformation of a contemporary democracy into a civil dictatorship. Agamben argues that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, has become part of the everyday fabric

In such a reinterpreted register of geopolitics, "rights" are exposed to the higher principle of possible war and the response towards international terror. In this sense, military order, which becomes supreme, can temporarily defer international law. Accordingly, military judges replace civil courts and, in the name of National Security, the president – as the civil leader of the military – embodying unrestricted powers. It is no news that today the underlying principle of justification is whether or not a particular action takes place in the name of national interest, this very interest being defined by the power that pursues it. In this context, the term "terror" is pollinated with "war". Consequently, "war" allows all civil rights to be suspended.

Podhoretz: Concerned Americans must smoke Hillary out -- put pressure on her to speak, speak, speak on every issue under the sun. The more she talks, the more likely it is that she will blunder. Blunders help destroy a candidate. In addition, Republicans need to look outside Washington for a candidate who can run, credibly, as a reformer.

Podhoretz: I don't think the first Clinton presidency will be an issue in 2008. It took place in another century both temporally and in terms of just how radically things have changed since 9/11. Hillary is a danger to the country not because of the Clinton presidency but because of her own record as a Senator -- a 96 percent liberal voting record.

Podhoretz: I think the danger is this: All the elements of the War on Terror will be chipped away, bit by bit. The Patriot Act will be revised in accordance with the ACLU's demands. The foreign policy of the United States will become extremely tentative because of Democratic concerns about America acting alone and requiring U.N. approval for every major action. The War on Terror will be prosecuted, but tentatively and with an eye toward pleasing the New York Times. And that will put America in great danger.

 

FP: Melrose Larry Green has written a book arguing that the Clintons belong in prison.  Do you have any particular insights on Chinagate, the way the Clintons used the IRS to punish their enemies, etc?

 

Podhoretz: Listen, as much as I disliked the way Bill Clinton turned the White House into an ethical sewer, I don't think that will have any bearing on Hillary's campaign in 2008. She won't get a single vote from those whose minds were made up against her in the '90s. But for everyone else, those years are either remembered fondly or not remembered at all, and trying to tag her with misbehavior more than a decade old would be a political calamity for her opponents. She needs to be defeated by invoking her liberal voting record and challenging her on the more unpopular aspects of her philosophy -- how she opposes tax cuts, for example.

This seems to me a real hodge podge. Tax cuts here just not understood at the root.

The Journal stands out from other apologists. Its June 14 editorial -- a tour de force of distortion not unlike many a liberal New York Times editorial -- is worth detailed dissection. While celebrating Rove's nonindictment, the editorial asserts that the evidence against Libby "comes down to nothing more than the fact that Mr. Libby's memory of conversations with three reporters differs from that of the reporters themselves."

False. In fact, Libby's sworn grand jury testimony and earlier statements to the FBI are contradicted not only by the three reporters but also by the testimony of at least two White House officials (evidently including Cheney), two CIA officials and an undersecretary of state -- not to mention the introduction of Libby's own handwritten notes and other documents.

Bhutan’s democratic puzzle
Dharma Adhikari

Indeed, reclusive, scenic Bhutan has frequently earned positive media spin for its efforts in preservation and modernisation: a culture untainted by modernity, the "land of the thunder dragon", a Buddhist Shangri-La that champions the royal philosophy of "gross national happiness" rather than gross national product, the only country to ban smoking, a country with almost two-thirds of its land under forest cover … not even openDemocracy is immune to the charming spin (see the article by Bhutan's foreign minister, Lyonpo Jigme Thinley, "Globalisation – the view from Bhutan" [25 October 2001]).

His racist motives became all the more apparent when in 1989 he issued a cultural decree called driglam namzha that promotes "one nation, one people". This anomalous edict makes it mandatory to everyone, irrespective of ethnicity and culture, to eat, sit, speak and dress the way the ruling Drukpas do. He introduced Dzongkha, a Tibetan dialect as a national language, and banned the teaching of other languages in schools, including the related Nepali language.

In the end, the key to Bhutan's future lies with New Delhi, but three other powers – the European Union, the United States and the United Nations – must also put pressure on India to initiate a genuine democratic process in Bhutan. The western democracies should be able to persuade India, the world's largest democracy, to side with freedom and dignity – not injustice and suppression – in the dragon kingdom.

Tuangou, or team buying, aims to drive unprecedented bargains by combining the reach of the internet with the power of the mob. It is spreading through China like wildfire. The practice originated in online chat-rooms but has quickly inspired several specialist websites, such as 51tuangou.com and www.teambuy.com.cn. Zhang Wei, who helped to set up teambuy less than six months ago, says the site has 10,000 registered members.

Team buying turns haggling, a tradition in China, into an art-form. That such aggressive consumer behaviour has arisen in a country without much of a consumer economy and weak individual rights is less surprising than it might seem. In the countryside there are more and more organised protests against government corruption and dictatorial landlords, with even poor people using technology like the internet and mobile phones to help. Now their urban, middle-class brethren are adopting their tactics—if only for shopping. However, if China's economy ever slumps, urban consumers could use their organisational skills to confront the government directly. Beijing might be watching the spread of team buying with trepidation.

Fighting rebellion the wrong way

Jun 29th 2006 | BANGKOK AND BULACAN PROVINCE, PHILIPPINES
From The Economist print edition

The Philippines and Thailand are getting increasingly keen on waging “war” on domestic unrest

THE boundaries between rebellion, terrorism and criminality can be fuzzy in South-East Asia. Rebels supposedly struggling for local self-rule or a juster society may be enriching themselves through extortion and kidnapping. And factions within such insurgencies sometimes help or are helped by terrorist groups with bolder aims—like creating an Islamic “superstate”—and deadlier methods than those the rebels might adopt.

This makes it hard for the region's governments to know how to deal with insurgents. Their stock response has often been to launch a new “war” on them.

So it is not encouraging that, in recent days, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines has given her security forces a two-year deadline and an extra 1 billion pesos ($19m) to wipe out the communist New People's Army (NPA). Nor does it augur well that Thaksin Shinawatra, the equally embattled prime minister of Thailand (see article), has just given his country's army chief, Sonthi Boonyaratglin, “full authority” to quell a two-year-old Muslim insurgency in the country's southern provinces.

Given the blurred boundaries between rebels with a local cause, terrorists waging global war and self-enriching criminals, signing peace pacts with insurgents' leaders is no guarantee of peace. But the so-far successful peace process in Indonesia's Aceh province shows that governments tend to achieve more by making sincere efforts to discuss local grievances and rein in their armies than by letting slip the dogs of war. As recently as 2003, the Indonesian government was still trying to quell separatism in Aceh with force. Only after a new president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, came to power and accepted the need to make a political deal, was an agreement struck that has led to the rebels disarming and to peace in the province.

Commentary No. 188, July 1, 2006

"The Worries of the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq"

But the most extraordinary segment of the cable needs to be reproduced in full: "More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate."

Shredding documents? If the United States evacuates? Obviously, the Iraqi employees are remembering Saigon in 1975 as Vietnamese employees of the U.S. embassy and armed forces struggled to get on departing helicopters. Are we already coming to that point? It seems some of the Iraqi employees of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad think so, and the U.S. ambassador is so informing Washington.

THE COURT'S STUNNING HAMDAN DECISION.

Congressional Record

by Cass R. Sunstein

The issues in Hamdan were technical and difficult; reasonable people can disagree about the proper interpretation of the key provisions. But the reason for the immense importance of the decision is neither technical nor difficult. That reason can be found in the Court's insistence on clear congressional authorization for the creation of military commissions--and in the broader implication that even in the domain of national security, the president must pay close attention to what Congress has and has not said

5 wrong justices Updated 6/29/2006 11:25 PM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this

By John Yoo

As commander in chief, President Bush has the authority to decide on wartime tactics and strategies. Presidents Washington, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR settled on military commissions, sometimes with congressional approval and sometimes without, as the best tool to punish and deter enemy war crimes. Bush used them to solve a difficult tension: how to try terrorists fairly without blowing intelligence sources and methods.

John Eastman
The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, enacted last December, gives the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., exclusive jurisdiction to review habeas-corpus petitions from the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay. The act also expressly provides that, other than that court, “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider . . . an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . .” Legislative word-smithing does not get much clearer than that. Equally clear is Congress’s authority to restrict the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court; Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution describes that the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is subject to “such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Conservatives don’t want The New York Times to be “fairer.” They want it to cease to exist.

By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 06.30.06

Conservatives don’t want The New York Times to be “fairer.” They want it to cease to exist, or at least, to cease to be influential, because they believe it is engaged in a task that, because it isn’t expressly conservative, is de facto liberal. (They also forget, or pretend to: The man running the Times, Keller, came out in favor of the Iraq War when he was a

Has Neoconservatism Failed or Succeeded? Part One

But Francis Fukuyama, a self-proclaimed former neoconservative, is doubtful that America’s use of force against Islamic jihadism will succeed. But what are the alternatives?

but we have to remember during this same timeframe, it was liberal social engineering that did away with segregation. I mean, it’s a vast improvement.

That created the environmental movement, 96 percent of which is good, the other 4 percent of which went crazy; revived real feminism, 97 percent of which is good, 3 percent of which went ditzy, had some -- and the list can go on as you well know.

But the Freedom House indicators -- and these were started by Eleanor Roosevelt and I know you sort of downplay it a little bit, but it was a pretty good index.

FUKUYAMA: You know, I think Libya probably would have happened, even without the invasion of Iraq, and you know in general, I think Bush did shake up the Middle East in many ways and there’s more discussion in Egypt now than there would have been otherwise, but the people, by and large, that are winning that discussion are Islamist. The liberals, you know the few liberals in the Arab world, I think are on the defensive.

But I guess the larger critic in my book is that the democratization is actually a part of larger package and a larger strategy meant to deal with September 11th and radical Islamism and I just think that the major components of the Bush doctrine got things wrong. I mean, it was based on the idea that you have to preemptively go and get terrorists, which is fine, if you are dealing with Osama Bin Laden, but that wasn’t Iraq. Iraq was not a terrorist organization and I think the idea that America would be able to use its margin of superiority, its hegemony, and see that legitimated by the rest of the world was also a mistake.

WATTENBERG: I want to read you something you wrote and then I want to try to expand this discussion. You signed a letter along with others of high profile geopolitical types, which read “Even if the evidence does not link Iraq directly to the 911 attack, any strategy aimed at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”. Your comment or your remark.
FUKUYAMA: You’re right, I signed that it was probably a week after the September 11th attack. Everybody was very emotional and, you know, wanted to do something and then I had a year and a half to think about things and, you know, the whole argument about the rights and wrongs of actually intervening against Iraq then presented itself and I started thinking about it. So, I don’t know, I guess, I don’t understand this idea that somehow you’re not actually allowed to sit back and weigh things pros and con and change your mind about...

FUKUYAMA: First of all it is a pretty complex intellectual tradition starting 50 years ago with people like Irving Crystal, Dan Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

you are suggesting is this; that the word neoconservatism has become poison and I see it around AEI. A lot of people who used to say I am a neocon, now say “I don’t want to mess with it; I’ll just go to another label”. And the one you suggest, correct me if am wrong, is Wilsonian realism.
FUKUYAMA: Realistic Wilsonian.

American foreign policy is actually quite toxic in a lot of regions of the world, particularly in the Middle East, and in a certain sense, the harder we push on that, you know, I mean at this particular juncture, the more pushback we’re going to get and so in a way we have to work out an outflanking strategy through allies, through other indirect approaches.

I think we’ve been distracted by an overestimation in general of the terrorism problem. There are big issues in East Asia. I think, actually it’s the rise of China and somehow making sure that that’s peaceful that’s probably going to be the central geopolitical issue of our generation and we ought to pay a little more attention to that. We ought to pay attention to Latin America and to other parts of the developing world, which I think again, we’ve neglected.
On a more general level we need -- I have this idea in the book called multi multilateralism. I don’t think the United Nations is going to solve any of these big cooperation problems that we face, but if you look at the global economy, we proliferate cooperative institutions all the time to manage orbital slots for satellites and internet domain names and a whole range of things, and I just think that the Iraq war in a sense proves that we are under-institutionalized; that we need more mechanisms out there by which you can get legitimate...

that’s the reality of globalization; we’re all in this thing and we’re tied together economically and culturally in a lot of different ways and we have worked out pretty good institutions in each individual country. Liberal democracies have elections, parliaments, presidencies; all that stuff is pretty well worked out, systems of accountability, but we really don’t have any accountability between countries and ways of cooperating legitimately so that people actually do things, you know, because they think it’s right to do and not simply because they’ve made a narrow calculation of self interest.

FUKUYAMA: Well you know, if you look at historical revision, clearly in the short run I think it’s all going to be negative. You go to Europe, right now neocon means American fascist or something even worse. I suspect -– well, first of all it depends on what happens in the Middle East. It could be the all these good things will actually materialize in the next few years in which case neocons will resurrect themselves. And even if that doesn’t happen, there may be an even longer term logic that’s unfolding that we don’t perceive right now that will make people in 25 years say, “Well, you know, these people actually were onto something and maybe it wasn’t so absurd after all.” But I think certainly in the short run it’s a name that is going to have to be lived down rather than one that will define American Foreign Policy in the near term. And I think Bush administration in its second four years has actually been moving steadily away from those ideas.

Now, let me ask you, don’t take 20 years; take 50 years, or 75 years. Don’t you think this it’s entirely plausible that when the Frank Fukuyama of the year 2075 looks back on what happened, they would say “Garlands go to the United States of America for having promoted the values of democracy and (unintelligible) liberty around the world”?
FUKUYAMA: I certainly hope that will be the legacy. I think there is a powerful base to build on and I guess the reason that I have been upset over the last few years about American Foreign Policy is that we have done a lot to undermine that legacy in a certain sense, just on the level of ideas and what Americans seem to stand for around the world.

WATTENBERG: That would be my ticket is McCain/Lieberman, but McCain -– but McCain would not agree with what you are saying. He is a serious pro-freedom hawk on Iraq, notwithstanding the fact that he’s objected to, a lot of what Bush has done.

Why Anglos Run the World
Peter Coleman

Urged on by the Quadrant editor, the late H.W. Arndt, Veliz expanded his lecture into the book The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America. Although it was well received, it was soon, as it were, put to one side. Then suddenly, quite recently, it enjoyed a revival. In his new polemic The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century ( Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, about $90), James C. Bennett sums it up: “Veliz is to today’s emerging Anglosphere what Tocqueville was to nineteenth-century America.”

A major factor has been the flourishing of the internet, which hardly existed when Veliz gave his Latham Lecture. In a few years the communications revolution has destroyed the tyranny of geography and has privileged the English language in world affairs and consolidated British civilisation (in the quasi-Hellenistic sense) on a scale undreamt of in past generations. Bennett calls this the Anglosphere. There is also a developing Hispano-sphere, Lusosphere, Francosphere.

All the characteristics which conservatives have criticised will turn to their advantage—especially individualism (“rootlessness”) and a passion for innovation (“radicalism”). He quotes Veliz:

“We are very much in the middle of an English Industrial Revolution that is scarcely more than two centuries old and shows no symptoms of weakness or decline. On the contrary, vigorous relentless change remains the characteristic sine qua non of the modern industrial ambit, and the resulting immense flow of major and lesser innovations ceaselessly adds complexity and diversity to the leading countries of a world that is certainly not tottering on the brink of dissolution.”

“We have both the physical power and the moral prestige first to preserve the precarious peace of the world and, for the longer term, be the focus and example for a liberalization of the problem areas in their turn, and a genuine world community. If we grasp our opportunity, we may be in a position, to paraphrase the Younger Pitt, to save ourselves by our exertions and the world by our example.”

The new and growing markets are in the old British colonies of Asia and in North America. India is especially significant as the largest English-speaking country in the world, a potential superpower and a liberal democracy, partly shaped by Britain, that is now refashioning itself as an Anglosphere power.

Niall Ferguson’s War of the World is shot through with a negative view of progress and some dubious socio-biological thinking.
James Heartfield

Author and historian Niall Ferguson has a reputation for iconoclasm. He nearly gave up studying history to write angry op-ed pieces for the Daily Mail, so overwhelming did he find the left-liberal consensus in British academia. But his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) established the Thatcherite Scotsman as someone who was prepared to challenge the self-lacerating gloom of post-colonial academia.

Now with War of the World, his new book which is accompanied by a Channel 4 series of the same name, Ferguson promises a bold new theory to explain the reason why the twentieth century was so bloodthirsty, and why it ended with the victory of the East, not the West. His rival TV history-men – Simon Schama, Tristram Hunt, Michael Wood and David Starkey – had better run for cover.

The Nazis’ eugenic policies are already well-described, and Ferguson is not offering anything new in showing that they were modelled on US segregation laws (see Elazar Barkan’s Retreat of Scientific Racism, 1991).

Those historians have tried to get beyond the explicit rationale for the Nazis’ anti-Semitism to understand how it gave an ideological form to a campaign against the left, the working class, redirecting anti-capitalist sentiments into racial scapegoating.

To characterise the twentieth century as a century of violence, though, is to describe only one part of it, and not the most important part, either. The violence that rises to the surface is primarily a reaction to the stronger trend towards social progress. The real story of the twentieth century is one of rising living standards, an astonishing increase in the population, based on an equally astonishing growth in productivity. What is more, this material progress was accompanied by social and political progress, greater freedoms and the growth of democratic movements, notably towards self-government in the developing world, Africa, Asia and the Far East.

One blind spot in the narrative of the Second World War, which is the major part of the book, is Ferguson’s unwillingness to grant any role to the popular armies of liberation that took on the Wehrmacht. The Italian partisans who liberated northern Italy, only to be left in the lurch by the Allied forces, are unmentioned; the Greek resistance, which liberated much of the country before the Allies recruited the Greek fascists to fight them, are dismissed in a sentence; the Yugoslav partisans who pinned down 10 German divisions are cattily annexed to Stalinism. Equally, Ferguson tends to dismiss those Indonesian, Burmese and Indian forces that allied with the Japanese to kick out European colonists as dupes, when in truth they went on to liberate their countries. These genuinely popular contributions to human emancipation do not fit Ferguson’s miserabilist version of history

If there is tragedy in the twentieth century, it is that the old order viciously resisted every step along the way, waging war against popular democracy and national liberation, redirecting human productivity towards the mass slaughter of World War. But Ferguson reduces the positive side of human progress, not the least part of which is the great assimilation of ethnicities, to the reaction against it.

But gruesome as Japanese military occupation of China was, the dislocation of the European colonies in East Asia was the condition for the liberation of Indonesia, Malaysia, China and the Philippines. Here, Ferguson’s version reminds us of EH Carr’s description of the high Tory belief that the extension of the franchise to one’s servants constitutes a decline.

It is a concession he has to make because the accumulation of historical research is against him, as more and more atrocity stories are uncovered in the former colonies and in the Allied campaigns. That is because the old received wisdom, that the Allies fought the Good War – perhaps we could call it ‘Patriotic Correctness’ after Robert Hughes – is wearing thin.

Of course Ferguson is right that there is something creepy about the over-extension of the term holocaust, as in Mike Davis’ account of colonial Indian famines as Late Victorian Holocausts. But it will not do to insist, as Ferguson does, that the 1943 Bengal famine was unlike the Nazi Holocaust because it ‘began with a cyclone and the loss of imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, not with an order from Churchill to starve Bengalis’ (p414). In truth, it was not weather conditions that caused the famine but the British orders to buy up rice from the countryside to deny it to the advancing Japanese. The British suppressed news of broadcasts by Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the pro-Japanese Indian National Army offering to send rice from Burma to Bengal to relieve the famine – a news blackout that Ferguson continues to honour (3).

Similarly, it is one thing to point out that Stalin had ‘concentration camps’, but it is well-known that they were pioneered by the British against the Boers (the term was coined by the Spanish in the Spanish-American war in Cuba).

that violence reached its climax precisely in the clash of Empires, between the German and Japanese attempts to create Empires in Eastern Europe and the Far East, and the unwillingness of the French and British to suffer rivals and the subsequent rise of American power. The impossibility of reconciling imperialism and civilisation is the reason that Ferguson’s thesis ends up being such a bodge of socio-biology, misanthropy and rear-guard imperialism.

James Heartfield is a writer based in London. Visit his website here.