The Munk Debates Read online

  Along with ensuring the security of a population in an intervention, you also have to help build a government, so that when you leave, you’ve left the country in an improved state. You have to develop the country in question, so that when you leave, the people there have hope for the future. The capacity to go into a given country and do that sort of work does not exist in the international community.

  Finally, the countries that comprise the international community simply do not have the collective will to conduct an enduring operation. We are conditioned by one-hour TV shows where you have a cataclysmic event followed by fifty minutes of events that sum it up before giving you a happy ending. We cannot expect the same results in an intervention operation. The reality is that all of those missions become enduring missions that go on for generations. Populations don’t have the robustness of will to accept collateral damage, and that is dangerous because it leads to what we in the military call “TV tactics.” This means shaping your tactics so that they appear better to the folks back home.

  Let me conclude by saying that you might speak from the heart when you say we must do something, but the reality is that the international community and most of the countries that comprise the international community simply don’t have the capabilities, the ability to develop strategy and institutions, and most importantly, the robustness of will for the kind of intervention operations we are talking about.

  BRIAN STEWART: Thank you all for those tremendous opening statements. Let’s examine some of them.

  General Hillier, is it true the military is uneasy about intervention missions? They’ve had bad experiences in the past, but how much is it perhaps the resistance of generations of officers to developing a core intervention force, or to develop the required skills? How much might the military be acting as a sea anchor against international efforts to address intervention?

  RICK HILLIER: I don’t think that there is a core obstacle to intervention operations in most military forces. I think soldiers have realized that once we declare that we must do something, that declaration turns into some action or idea that quickly deteriorates and becomes a responsibility left to the soldier. So you have the soldiers carrying the weight of the mission, and they have precious little support. I should say that though I’m wearing a suit and not a uniform, I’m here as a soldier. And as soldiers we know that we’re going to do our job. We’re trained, structured, equipped, and prepared to do our job one small mission at a time. What we do worry about is that we don’t have the capacity to take that small operation and turn it into a long-term stable structure that will last after we leave. Those capabilities, and the public will, are not there.

  Where is, for example, “government in a box”1? Which organization in our world, in our country, in any country actually, has a deployable government-building battalion designed to do what was done in World War II? I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about a trained, built, cohesive military that you deploy into Darfur, into Afghanistan, in order to help build the kind of government they need to sustain their country after we leave.

  GARETH EVANS: Are you saying there is no capability in the entire international community to provide the 5,000 troops that your colleague Roméo Dallaire advocated for so persuasively and that would have made a difference to 800,000 lives in Rwanda in 1994? Are you saying there’s no capability right now in an international community that has a military inventory of 11,842 helicopter units at last count, but has been unable collectively to supply twenty-two of them to the peacekeeping operations in Darfur, knowing they would make one hell of a difference to the effectiveness of the human protection operation on the ground? There may be a lack of political will, I don’t disagree with that, but capability? Come on, this is a straw man.

  RICK HILLIER: There is a problem with strategy, there is a problem with the robustness of will, and there is a problem if you have capability but simply don’t have the will to use it. So yes, there may be some helicopters available, but they are useless if they’re not in Afghanistan or Darfur. It’s virtually the same thing as not having the capability.

  Even in missions for which countries have signed up you still cannot find the troops, the helicopters, or the equipment to do the job on the ground. Yet hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on other things which are not related to humanitarian intervention.

  BRIAN STEWART: Does not intervention occasionally work? Remember the British marines, the Royal Navy going into Sierra Leone to back up UN troops in 2000, or French forces going into Côte D’Ivoire in 2003? Haven’t there been times when troops from Britain or France have been able to move quickly and put a lid on the violence?

  MIA FARROW: Right now a European Union force is deployed effectively on the Darfur/Chad border.

  RICK HILLIER: I would say the jury is still out on the effectiveness of the EU force deployed on the Darfur/Chad border. It is a temporary calm in one area, but will it last? The question is, will it achieve anything greater than a temporary calm, and can it be maintained long enough to get some good out of it? What I would say about Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast is that one nation leading, not an international community effort per se, is the key. And, as in Darfur, you have to ask, is that change actually going to hold? We all hope it does but it’s certainly not guaranteed, and the fact is there was already a structure or participants in place in those areas that wanted to see the conflict resolved. That doesn’t exist in Sudan, where the government itself doesn’t want to resolve the issue.

  BRIAN STEWART: John Bolton, you raised a very interesting ethical question in your presentation that some might find a slippery argument. And that is that we, the world, have not put sufficient pressure on the giants, China or Russia, when they abuse human rights and when they go even further into state-sanctioned murder. So the dilemma is whether we ought to take on the small powers if we can’t take on the big ones.

  JOHN BOLTON: No, I don’t think that’s the argument at all. Even the advocates of Responsibility to Protect don’t seriously believe that they can do anything about North Korea, which is a large prison camp, or Russia, or a number of other examples I could cite. This is an acknowledgement of a critical point, which is that any intervention has to be considered on its own merits, and the cost and benefits have to be weighed on their own merits. That’s why in the abstract, in my view, this discussion is essentially meaningless.

  GARETH EVANS: We’ve had more straw men erected here tonight than in seventeen showings of The Wizard of Oz. I mean, there was Rick’s little excursion at the beginning, and then we’ve had John Bolton saying the Responsibility to Protect is only about military intervention, and if you can’t engage in military intervention in some of these cases, then the whole doctrine, the whole concept, is meaningless. We’ve also heard that if we can’t deal with human rights violations of the kind that are occurring in countries like Russia and elsewhere, then the concept is again meaningless.

  But the point is that the Responsibility to Protect is only about a very small subset of the conflicts and human rights violations that are occurring in the world. It’s only when mass atrocity crimes are occurring or are anticipated that we invoke the Responsibility to Protect, and in those situations the repertoire of available responses is vast and extends across the whole range of diplomatic and economic pressure, legal prosecution before the International Criminal Court, and much else.

  JOHN BOLTON: I’m going to read two sentences, only two sentences, of the outcome document from the 2005 World Summit on this subject. Paragraph 139 states: “The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter [of the United Nations], to help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Cha
rter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in co-operation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” Now that’s clear, isn’t it?

  GARETH EVANS: This is the way you conducted yourself at the United Nations. You arrived with 400 amendments in your bag and you destroyed single-handedly the potential for consensus on a mess of other issues. You didn’t succeed.

  JOHN BOLTON: If you want to argue the merits, then let’s argue the merits. But let’s stop the personal attacks.

  GARETH EVANS: You did not succeed in destroying consensus on the Responsibility to Protect paragraphs in the World outcome document because they were remarkably clear. The paragraphs say three things: (1) that sovereign countries have the responsibility not to perpetrate atrocity crimes against their own people; (2) that other countries have the responsibility to assist them in creating the capacity to ensure that they will act that way if they are willing to do so; and (3) that where states manifestly fail to exercise that responsibility, then it’s the responsibility of the wider international community to step in under Chapter VII of the Charter.

  BRIAN STEWART: I’d like to change the direction slightly. Mia Farrow, a very serious objection was raised here, by both Rick Hillier and John Bolton, and that is that when countries decide to intervene, they are risking the lives of their own soldiers. And while the public may sympathize with these interventions at first, people often begin to question whether or not the intervention is in the national interest. Why is an intervention in a very faraway place like Darfur or Rwanda or the Congo in the national interest?

  MIA FARROW: Let’s not leap to the conclusion that an intervention means a military intervention, because there are myriad options before we arrive at that point. A military intervention would only be utilized if what I referred to as “sticks and carrots” failed. I have pages of things that an envoy can do. We saw the success of that just now — former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan travelled to Kenya to participate in negotiations to end the civil unrest there as the country was sliding toward something very ugly indeed. Kofi Annan was able to negotiate an agreement, and there was a cessation of violence in Kenya. So we’ve seen diplomatic intervention at work. Intervention doesn’t necessarily mean military intervention.

  Forgive me, with all due respect, General Hillier, but your insistence that any action must be a military invasion is a deeply flawed argument. You’ve ignored the nature of the African Union/United Nations Hybrid operation [UNAMID] in Darfur and its goals, and the nature of the negotiations between the United Nations and Khartoum. Those negotiations did result in United Nations Resolution 1769, which did result in a peacekeeping force that is there — albeit compromised — and I’ve spoken to military, private military, and U.S. military generals, and the troops there are sufficient in number. But they are undersupported and undertrained. Were they fully supported by the international community — and there are stipulations about African countries that the force must be African in character in African countries — they would be fully able, at 9,000, to do the job.

  RICK HILLIER: If diplomatic, financial, and legal measures and the rule of law were significant enabling levers, we wouldn’t be having this debate. It comes down to the fact that the vast majority of interventions occur because those measures simply don’t work. There may be the rare case when these measures are effective in a preventative manner. But more often than not it comes down to putting young men and women on the ground. And when you put them on the ground in compromised missions, you are putting their lives at risk without moral high ground, without being able to explain to them why. The military forces are not going to be able to assist the people on the ground the way they need to be assisted, and further, you’re not going to leave a sustainable structure behind that’s going to make life better for the citizens of the country. You’re probably going to make it worse.

  BRIAN STEWART: But could one make the argument that one of the reasons diplomatic efforts fail is due to the generals who are saying, “We don’t want to intervene”? So there’s no looming threat of military intervention?

  JOHN BOLTON: The three states in Darfur are geographically the size of France. The distances are large, and there is no infrastructure. It is precisely because the African Union peacekeeping mission failed that people said we need an outside force; and yet in repeated negotiations over Security Council resolutions, the government of Sudan, supported by China, objected to the kind of UN force that many were calling for. Why is the government supported by China? Because China has large and growing energy needs, and it wants the oil and natural gas assets that are controlled by the government in Khartoum. So why is there a requirement that there be a joint command between the African Union and the UN? Joint command is a prescription for real trouble down the road, as was the case in Somalia. And why is there a requirement that the forces be predominantly African? Because the government of Sudan and its friends on the Security Council have consistently watered down efforts to have an effective UN peacekeeping force. This is the reality of the Security Council, and this is the reality of military action in Sudan.

  MIA FARROW: He’s right about the division in the Security Council and China. China has been propping up all of these regimes — Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan. China on the Security Council has been a major problem.

  BRIAN STEWART: But have you not been working at ways to shame China into action?

  MIA FARROW: I was surprised that I could write an op-ed that prompted China into action. That op-ed was published in the Wall Street Journal, and an article about that article appeared on the front page of the New York Times a week later because it prompted China to act.

  BRIAN STEWART: We did somehow slip over the point that I was trying to get at. The point is that eventually, in many of these cases, military force might be used. The question then becomes: what democracy is willing to risk the lives of their sons and daughters in a foreign war for a cause that is not in that country’s national interest?

  GARETH EVANS: The truth of the matter is that there is a national interest which is universally acknowledged: ensuring that fragile and failing states don’t descend into catastrophe, because if they do they put the rest of us at risk.

  We saw that, of course, with Afghanistan harbouring the Taliban. We’ve seen it potentially applicable to Somalia, with the harbouring of terrorists and the transit of weapons of mass destruction. Certainly, we’ve seen the potential and the reality in many of these cases around the world with the spread of refugee camps, health pandemics, drug and people trafficking, and all the things that impact upon us.

  I think we have to take these considerations into account in making the calculation of what is in the national interest, as well as take into account the moral interest that is unquestionably involved here and the public sentiment, which is clear every time you’re tested on these issues. If the public can see the nature of the horror that’s unfolding as well as a rational relationship between a commitment of this kind and a positive result, they’ll support it. And that’s because people are basically decent.

  JOHN BOLTON: Morality is important to all of us. But in many conflicts morality doesn’t come conveniently divided into two distinct sides. This is certainly true in Darfur, where the government in Khartoum has unquestionably been committing the bulk of the gross abuses of human rights and committing genocide, as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said, but the rebels are hardly free from blame, nor are they a cohesive force.

  When you say that national interest encompasses this broad abstraction, you’ve made national interest into an impossible distraction as well. America saw this concretely in Somalia in 1993 during the Battle of Mogadishu. Any American president has to make a wrenching decision when he puts young Americans in harm’s way, and morality doesn’t all come down on one side in that c
alculation either.

  MIA FARROW: Had we intervened in Darfur in some capacity in 2003 and 2004, it would have been a far more simple scenario, it would have been far more easily resolved before the rebel groups splintered. We did have a very clear bad, bad guy in that scenario.

  JOHN BOLTON: I must say, I’m reminded of members of the Bush administration advocating the invasion of Iraq. They also said how simple it would be.

  MIA FARROW: That situation was a fiasco.

  GARETH EVANS: Which side do you want on that debate, John?

  JOHN BOLTON: I was in favour of the invasion. You see, this is an argument that essentially says the use of military force is best only when there’s no national interest at stake, and when you think there is national interest at stake you shouldn’t use military force.

  RICK HILLIER: We see national interest articulated differently every single day by different people, who sometimes confuse those interests with values. And when that confusion takes place, the support that Gareth speaks of, the support of a population who see bad things being done and want to march to the sound of the guns and actually do something about it, that support starts to disappear quickly. Especially when (a) coverage of the situation disappears from TV screens and (b) the first bodies of those young men and women start coming back home. When a young soldier is on those dirty, dusty, dangerous trails, that nation must walk with him or her if they’re going to be successful in doing what we ask them to do.

  MIA FARROW: But when it comes to protecting an unarmed civilian population, I can’t believe I’m alone in that I would volunteer my children. I’m not talking about overthrowing a government or shooting every kid on a camel, I’m talking about defending defenseless civilian populations.