Tom on Hugh's show
Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 1:15AM The transcript and audio are up.
I liked this last question from Hugh and Tom's answer:
HH: Dr. Barnett, putting Chapter 3 into context, imagine for a moment that after General Petraeus was done testifying today, you had a chance to make an opening statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee. What would you say in the first two or three minutes of that statement to them?TB: What I would say is that we really have to think more broadly about what we’re trying to achieve in the Middle East, other than just create a security force that’s able to generate enough security to kind of cover the tracks of our withdrawal, or to put enough names on doors inside of government buildings, and claim that we’ve built a nation along those lines, that we really need to commit ourselves, first and foremost, to creating the economic conditions by which Iraq brings itself up from this long, lengthy period of dictatorship, and now this seemingly also quite long period of violence, that it’s our commitment to connecting the Middle East up to the outside world on the basis of something other than oil, that’s going to get the kind of economic opportunity that puts 70% of a lot of these countries’ populations that are either underemployed, or totally unemployed, and don’t see futures to connect to. And it’s that kind of problem that gets you the 27 year old lawyer, married, father of two, who decides that his best connection to the future is to strap on a vest of dynamite and step onto a crowded bus and blow himself up. It’s that kind of despair, ultimately, that we’re attacking, and Petraeus knows that, because Petraeus is a huge believer in the notion that you’ve got to create stakeholders. And stakeholders are mostly about economics, not politics. It’s mostly about economics, is giving people a sense that they have a future that they can wait for, a future that’s going to be better for their children than it was for them. And unless you put those hands to work, and connect people to those dreams of a better future, you’re going to face the kind of despair that radical ideologies can come in and take advantage of, and you’re not going to solve this problem. So I would caution everybody in this process to admit to the fact that there is no exiting the Middle East, until the Middle East connects to the outside world.
Reader Comments (11)
"the key thing for us is not only to propose the necessary new rule sets. . . but to get buy-in from the rest of the world as to the utility and the logic of those rule sets."
The world already has a rule set on global security - set out in the UN Charter. If the Charter is thought to be out of date, there is an official amendment procedure. Article 108 requires the amendment(s) to be adopted and ratified by two thirds of the UN membership, including all the permanent members of the Security Council.
The RoW might want to know why the UN system is being ignored.
the UN is especially good at one thing: indictment. when the court of world opinion is clear, the UN can indict you. there were many indictments of Iraq, by the way.
after that the UN becomes less useful, based on a very out-of-date model. every country gets an equal vote. human rights violators sit on the Human Rights Committee. a lot of corruption. etc.
Tom mitigates this by proposing the G20 as a functioning executive, especially for turning loose American military power. this adds economic power to the UN's one tiny state, one vote (eg, Macedonia).
politically bankrupt states, like North Korea, Sudan, Iraq, Haiti, and Zimbabwe do not deserve the 20th century style protection of 'sovereignty'. with the indictment of the UN and the buy-in of the G20, they can (and maybe should) be rebuilt. rebuilding 'states' like these with buy-in from the world is not classic preemption because such 'states' are not functioning as it is.
Somebody has to go and remove all the people who are hindering economic connectivity. They are hindering it via politics, not economics. They have their hand out for bribes to give a political permission, though they might call it an economic one.
Go into any ME country and try to build economic connectivity and half the roadblocks you run into generally fall into the category of people who say roughly "I'm the big man and you won't do that because without my permission I'll send guys with guns to your door and they will stop you." Such figures may or may not wear a uniform or be a formal part of the power structure but the transaction is the fundamental political transaction.
The other half of the roadblocks are that obtaining justice when you are robbed, beaten, or some of your people are killed is conditional on how many palms you grease and the system is highly opaque. You never know whether you've paid enough.
This is why I've always like Tom's idea of a 'NATO-East' to provide such a set of rules. It follows from the too many chefs principle---which the UN is, great promise that it showed, crippled by.
When I was first starting college(1997) I read On the Origins of War and the Preservation of the Peace--one of the books I cut my teeth on--- and some of its lessons have stuck with me. That may be why I'm always such a jerk when it comes to this economic determinism stuff. There's lots of reasons for why people become terrorists and decide to fight wars, and many of them have nothing to do with economics.
That said, I think Tom provided a great counter-point to the 'accepted wisdom' of the current media environment. Problem that is Iraq cannot be solved only by force of arms or only by political deals. It needs all three.Security and economics, quoting Tom here, will likely push the third(politics and legal rules).
But entrusting this(fixing the economic sphere and the security sphere) to the UN? No way. Too many countries simply vote their interests instead of what's right(including the US). As long as you tie legitimacy to that broken institution you're always going to have either nothing done or something really fraked up done.
Case in point: There are billion$ going into the Iraqi Army trying to build security. However, a lot of the money is being stolen by the Iraqi Generals and Colonels because that is all they know. Logistics is also a big problem for the Iraqis because much of the guns, bullets, and food are pilfered before they get to the trigger pullers. How do we establish a standard of honesty and rules for the Iraqi Army? Without them the Iraqi Army won't ever be able to sustain itself.
Maybe we can discourage young men from terrorism by getting them jobs, but without laws, law enforcement, and the subsequent security the jobs won't last and the connectivity won't come.
The RoW might want to know why the UN system is being ignored.
SM suggests the US ignores the UN system because: "politically bankrupt states, like North Korea, Sudan, Iraq, Haiti, and Zimbabwe do not deserve the 20th century style protection of 'sovereignty'."
In much earlier comments, TB emphasises the inadequacy of global governance was becoming apparent to the US, but climaxed on 9/11. But is this really an argument that the UN rule sets are inadequate; perhaps instead they been fatally flawed from the outset by being unenforceable. There was no global Leviathan to enforce them. For example, despite economics being fundamental to the world the US was not prevented from taking the dollar off the fixed exchange rate system in Bretton Woods (UN) in the early 1970's, thus destroying a key safeguard to prevent another world war.
Article 108 of the UN Charter seems the way ahead.
So, if the problem is 'too many chefs', with those chefs being rather unscrupulous, the answer is more chefs?
In this instance I have to follow Doc's lead: economics moves this pile. When nations have to vote their economic life, as say China does with Nigeria and Sudan and Iran does, are they going to take a principled stand? Not often. So the sol'n to this is to open the process up to more nations who have to do something irrational(vote against their national wellbeing) and put it up to a vote?
That's not making much sense. What does make sense is something like teh African Union and NATO(origininal NATO). Small enough to be effective, un-crippled by economic concerns(for the most part), and making decisions that work based on the needs of the region.More UN oversight by more nations is not going to fix the bureautic inefficiencies that lead to the majority of the problems(we can't give Iran a clean bill of nuclear health because that'd piss off the Americans, can't do anything about Sudan because China will scuttle it as it threatens their energy needs.).
Okay, slap me around Sean. I'm a jerk.
One caveat: NATO and the UN have been coexisting for close to their entire histories. Other transnational groups (AU, NAFTA, etc) also fit in well. Dr Barnett's thinking (G20, NPTO, etc) isn't necessarily opposed to your own.