The Munk Debates Read online

  SAMANTHA POWER: First of all, Niall and Charles, go back to Rwanda, which is the greatest emblem of UN failure.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: And the United States under the presidency of Bill Clinton —

  SAMANTHA POWER: Well, this is my point. It was the Belgians, a democracy, who withdrew at the first sign of casualties. It was the United States, under President Clinton, who went to the UN Security Council and insisted on the withdrawal of peacekeepers from under General Roméo Dallaire. Why? Because the United States was afraid that if the peacekeepers stayed, the U.S. would somehow be called upon to act.

  The only countries currently willing to send peacekeepers to Darfur as part of a UN force were authorized to do so because of belated high-level diplomatic pressure on China, which finally acquiesced in the importance of a peacekeeping force. The only countries that put boots on the ground in Darfur are developing countries, and most of them are not fully democratic nations.

  The central problem of creating an alliance of democracies is that democracies fundamentally are not interested in bearing the collective security burden of the planet right now. I think focusing on institutions is an alibi to dealing with these humanitarian challenges. You could create as many new institutions as you want, but unless you change the political priorities of these places, you’re not going to get anywhere. Think about the central challenges on the rise in the twenty-first century: global warming and terrorism. The very countries that we need counter-terrorism and intelligence co-operation from are countries that are not democratic.

  We’ve got to deal with the polarization that is tearing this planet apart right now, and we can do it bilaterally, but the more international legitimacy you have, the more you can pool resources from countries that don’t see their entire national interest at stake.

  Right now there are a hundred and seventeen thousand peacekeepers active in the world, and around twenty-one missions. All but two or three thousand of those troops are from non-Western countries. To think that it is only the developing world that is dealing with major humanitarian calamities is really to pass the buck.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The reason that hundreds of thousands died in Rwanda was not because of institutional deficiencies or that the Belgians did not step up. It was that the United States did nothing. Are you willing to support an American invasion of Darfur? If the answer is no, then you’re not serious; if the answer is yes, then let’s do it. We saved hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens who had been slaughtered by Saddam Hussein for more than a decade, and all we get from critics is that it was a war for oil. It was a war about Abu Ghraib. It was a war of liberation exactly comparable to what you want to do — or at least imply what you want to do — in Sudan. If there’s a country that will move the world it has to be the United States, given its strength and capacity. And if you’re serious about that you want to advocate more intervention, and not less.

  SAMANTHA POWER: Do I support a U.S. invasion of Darfur? I do not, and I’ll tell you why not. There’s plenty of things the United States can do in order to ensure that twenty-six thousand peacekeepers get deployed to Darfur within six months and that will allow the two million people in refugee camps to live tomorrow. Do I support U.S. invasion? No. Why? Because one sector of the American society is bearing the entire national security burden. The military is broken; we don’t have the readiness to respond to anything that hits us on our own shores.

  Would I be in favour of waging a third war in eight years against an Islamic country? No, because it would undermine the U.S.’s national security interest and the interest of the refugees. The only thing worse than the atrocities being perpetrated against people in Darfur is when you combine atrocity and jihad and inflict upon the people in Darfur what we have inflicted upon the people of Iraq.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’m not in favour of another invasion, but unless one believes that the United States is willing to act and that America is justified in acting, I can’t see how you can be serious about protecting the people of Darfur. Just a few days ago new trouble has erupted in southern Sudan because of the discovery of oil there. If you want to be serious about Sudan, which is protected by China, you have to be willing to act seriously.

  LYSE DOUCET: Niall, you advised John McCain on foreign policy. How would you advise John McCain on China?

  NIALL FERGUSON: It’s extremely difficult for the United States to contemplate any kind of unilateral or even multilateral military intervention now in Sudan. That’s partly because the military is overstretched, and that’s why John McCain very sensibly argues that one of the things that he would do as president is to increase the size of American military forces. But the critical point here is to ask ourselves about the shape of the strategic world to come.

  Let’s look ahead. At the moment it’s Africa you worry about, because the population growth is creating a Malthusian crisis there. In a forty- to fifty-year time frame, it is China. China is scrambling for natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa, and the effects of their presence in Africa will pose a major challenge to the strategic security of not just the United States, but all developed economies.

  We need a president who understands these geopolitical shifts of power, and who realizes how high the stakes are going to be in the next four to eight years. This is the new world. Arguments about who was right and who was wrong over the invasion of Iraq are in some ways irrelevant. The clash over commodities is as big an issue as the world has ever confronted, and I don’t hear any credible answers to the question of how the United States will deal with these challenges from Barack Obama. John McCain, on the other hand, is very clear. He sees the strategic ambition of China in the Far East, just as he understands the way in which Russia is using its energy power to intimidate our allies in Western Europe. These are the issues that are really going to be critical in this next presidency. You cannot afford to have a novice dealing with issues of this importance.

  LYSE DOUCET: I’m going to pose a question from the audience. Richard, I’ll direct this to you. “Mr. Obama wants to talk, but this is a tough world. Can he throw a punch if need be?”

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Based on Senator Obama’s extraordinarily skilful campaign, I think the answer is self-evidently yes — and I speak as a person supporting Senator Clinton. He’s run a terrific campaign tactically and strategically, and he’s shown that he’s tough enough to dish it out with senior Democrats. Now he’s taking on McCain one on one, and it’s very impressive. Is he tough enough to be president? Yes. Anyone who survives the presidential marathon ought to be tough enough, unless they happen to have won by one vote in the Supreme Court and their father was president.

  I want to make a quick comment on Darfur. Samantha’s right, nobody’s advocating U.S. troops on the ground for all the reasons she said and many more. But the United States proudly led the fourteen-to-nothing (China–abstaining) resolution in the Security Council that was going to send peacekeepers to Darfur, after which we did nothing to implement it. Each time someone asked the president why we weren’t doing anything in Darfur, his answer was “It’s the UN’s fault, they don’t have any helicopters.” They need maybe twenty-five helicopters. We could supply them, and there are many other things we could do. Final point, I find it ironic that you would instruct Samantha, who wrote the definitive book on Rwanda, about the Clinton administration’s failure to act in that region. As a person who served President Clinton with pride, I can tell you that it was a low point of the administration.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The point I wanted to make is not a partisan point. It is to say that those who care about these humanitarian crises have to step up and be serious. Pushing it off on institutions like the UN, which have been proven ineffective time and again, or on peacekeepers who often are corrupt and involved in rape and other criminal activity, which is even more horrific than the diseases it’s trying to cure, is a serious mistake. I’m not in favour of invading any nation. I’m saying if you’re serious about peacekeeping, show us
and make a case.

  LYSE DOUCET: We have another question from the audience: “To what do you attribute the kind of emotional appeal that Senator Obama exerts on people all over the Western world?”

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I think Senator Obama’s appeal is remarkable and a tribute to his astonishing skills — his intellectual nimbleness, his attractiveness, and his ability to rise from obscurity in three or four years to dominate the American scene. I would attribute all of those qualities and achievements largely to him. There is of course another element. America has been looking for a long time to atone for one of its greatest sins, which is without a doubt slavery, Jim Crow, and racism. When Colin Powell was flirting with the idea of running for the presidency in the 1990s, there was a tremendous outpouring of support. I think many people in America would love to see a vindication of the civil rights revolution, and in some way an expiation of our sins in the past, by having an African-American as president. I know I would like to see the United States reach a point where an African-American is president of the United States. The question, of course, is which African-American? Thomas Sowell, an economist and philosopher and one of the most astute writers in America, who himself is African-American, raised that issue in a column just a few weeks ago. He said he would support someone of his race if they were the kind of person who reflected his values. People have talked about race being an issue in the campaign, and obviously it is. There’s a finite number of Americans who would not support a black candidate. I think there’s also a finite number of Americans who would like to support a black candidate, all things being equal. I’m not sure which of those numbers is the larger, but I would hope and expect that the latter is a larger number, and I think it would be a great thing for America. The fact that Senator Obama is the front-runner in this campaign is going to raise that issue front and centre, and I hope that we’ll come out of this election with a healthier understanding and perception about race in America than we did at the beginning.

  LYSE DOUCET: We have a question from the floor from the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff.

  MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: This is a question for the Republican side. You have raised the issue of moral seriousness and you’ve raised the issue of humanitarian intervention, and you’ve said if you’re serious about Sudan you should go. What I’m unclear about is the principles that John McCain, or the Republican side, would use to decide when and where and how to intervene when there’s ethnic cleansing, genocidal massacre, or — as we’ve recently seen — a regime like Burma forbidding the entry of food aid, resulting in the starvation of its citizens. What are your criteria for intervention?

  NIALL FERGUSON: John McCain was recently asked the same question by Matt Bai from the New York Times Magazine, and he gave, I thought, a very thoughtful reply. He made it clear that the United States could not randomly or universally intervene in humanitarian catastrophes because of the crucial need to have the support of the American electorate for action taken involving the lives of American troops. The American electorate is not about to become a global cop intervening in any country whose leaders are performing horrendous acts against its population. That would be a completely unrealistic and utopian project. National interest has to be a factor, and public legitimacy has to be a factor. I think John McCain understands that there is no other way in which a responsible and experienced politician could make that kind of decision. You have written about this subject as eloquently as anybody I know, and have grappled with this fundamental dilemma of democratic politics over the last decade in a way which I’ve found profoundly influential and moving. We do empathize with the plight of the people of Zimbabwe, a country not mentioned this evening. We, I hope, feel abhorrence towards Robert Mugabe’s authentically evil tyranny in that country. But can we credibly imagine any American president, regardless of his partisan allegiance, sending troops into that country to be accused, as he inevitably would be, of a neo-colonial project? This is a difficult thing. Humanitarian intervention calls for judgement on a case-by-case basis, and I think John McCain has shown clearly he understands that.

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I want to point out the facts of Zimbabwe, which by the way I did mention. President Bush went to Johannesburg and stood next to Thabo Mbeki and said, “We will talk to Mugabe through you.” That’s not leadership. We all know that, only yesterday, President Mbeki did suggest for the first time that maybe things in Zimbabwe weren’t going so well. He did that because he suddenly discovered that the Zimbabwe refugees are destabilizing South Africa, which everyone knew was going to happen. So let’s get the facts straight here.

  No one is advocating military interventions in Zimbabwe. But it is the inability of this administration to know how to put together meaningful coalitions using existing international organizations that is the problem. That is the problem in Darfur, where you talk about the Chinese, and I completely agree with you about the Chinese, but they have changed under pressure. Who did that pressure come from? Washington? No — Mia Farrow. She had more effect in Darfur than the United States government.

  Mia Farrow wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about how supporting China as host of the Olympics in Beijing would be tantamount to supporting genocide in Darfur. Right after, director Steven Spielberg withdrew as the adviser for the opening ceremonies, and within three weeks the Chinese appointed a special envoy who came to see me in New York. I’m not making a point about Mia Farrow: I’m making a point about the administration’s lack of understanding. I’m responding to the points both you and Charles made about the administration’s diplomatic incompetence on all these issues. You just cited Zimbabwe and Darfur. I believe Senator McCain will be a better president if he’s elected than the incumbent — I don’t disagree with you on that point. It is Iraq that is the real voting issue. Collective action through existing international institutions is the key. Every nation in the UN voted for military intervention in Zimbabwe, and it wasn’t implemented. The U.S. has made no effort to lead a coalition to implement a resolution it helped draft.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: You say that Mia Farrow writes an article and as a result China sends a special envoy to talk with you, but how many people have been saying “Darfur” as a result of that piece?

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE: That’s because there’s been no U.S. government backup. The point is that international public civic action pressure, which Samantha has been a central part of, has had more of an effect on Beijing than Washington. That’s the core point.

  LYSE DOUCET: You both keep coming back to the centrality of Iraq as a deciding factor in the upcoming presidential election. But one issue that Canadians are worried about is what’s happening in Afghanistan. Do you see a problem with maintaining forces in Iraq when many are saying the same thing about Afghanistan?

  NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I do think the situation in Afghanistan is as important as the one in Iraq, though you would never guess that from the lack of coverage of Afghanistan in the U.S. media. There is a degree of stress and strain on the U.S. military and on the militaries of NATO allies, and that is precisely why John McCain has turned his attention to the question of how quickly we can improve our military capability. At some level it’s very simple: it’s about numbers. The United States did not have enough combat troops to successfully execute the national security strategy that it embarked on in 2002. That doesn’t mean that the strategy was wrong; it means that the means were not there. But I just want to take up a point that Richard has just raised. Seventy-five to 80 percent of the things that Richard Holbrooke has said tonight would have been relevant if we had been debating the re-election of George W. Bush. Bush cannot stand for re-election, so his record is kind of irrelevant.

  RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Not as long as McCain defends it.

  CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I find it interesting that Richard brings up the difficulties in Afghanistan as an argument against a Republican administration. Let’s remember what Afghanistan was in the 1990s. The attacks on the Un
ited States that came out of Afghanistan in the name of al Qaeda happened under the Clinton administration. What happened after the attack on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya? The lobbying of missiles into empty tents in the deserts of Afghanistan. What happened after an American warship, the Cole, was attacked? A classic definition of an act of war. The Clinton administration responded by sending FBI agents into Yemen to apprehend the perpetrators.

  That lack of response exposes the Democrats’ fundamental misunderstanding of the conflict in the war on terror, on the nature of the conflict with al Qaeda. The Democrats understood terrorism as an issue of law enforcement. When the World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, what was the Clinton administration’s response? To put a couple of miscreants on trial. President Clinton put the perpetrators in jail and thought that had actually addressed the problem. The current Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey, happened to have been the presiding judge in that trial, and not only was it a complete distraction from the war on terror, but Mukasey will tell you that because we granted the rights of ordinary Americans to these terrorists in open trial, al Qaeda learned about our intelligence from them. They learned from an open discovery process that we had been listening in on Osama bin Laden’s communication by satellite phone, and that phone was shut down within a day. When we compare the beauty of the world in the year 2000 — when the Democrats left — with our difficulties today, our opposition here is ignoring a central fact: 9/11 happened; 9/11 was an unprovoked declaration of war on the United States, which occurred during a Republican administration and which changed the world. The Bush administration had to respond to the attacks. From the ground up, the Bush administration devised an entirely new strategy of addressing an enemy which had up to that point been ignored because it had been seen as a criminal problem, as a law enforcement problem in the previous decade. The Bush administration created a new set of institutions to adapt to that war. When 9/11 occurred there wasn’t anybody in Washington or anybody in any administration — Democratic or Republican — who imagined that we would go another six months, or even a year or two, without a second attack. The fact that we have not had a second attack in six and a half years is not an accident. It’s not because al Qaeda had decided to unilaterally disarm. It’s not because al Qaeda accepted Jeffersonian principles of democracy. It’s because the United States confronted al Qaeda on the ground in Afghanistan, today in Iraq, and established institutions that have prevented a second attack. That will be the legacy of the Bush administration.