‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’

Every generation is vulnerable to imagining itself either uniquely blessed or uniquely cursed. And for an understandable reason. After all, it is simply human nature to attach more importance to the time in which one has been fated to live and die than to either the past or the remoter reaches of the future. Add to this the fact that, historically, the turning of a century, let alone the turning of a millennium, has usually been the occasion for extremes of both optimism and pessimism about the human condition, and it is hardly surprising that over the last decade or so, one school of writers and activists has suggested that the human race stands at the verge of a new era of justice while another gloomily discerns in our collective future chaos, war and environmental catastrophe.

About the pessimists, there is little of great interest to say. Of course, they may be right, though probably only in the narrow sense that all civilizations, including our own, are just as surely mortal as each of us is as an individual. But by and large, at least in their North American variant, such writers as Robert Kaplan, Samuel Huntington, and Thomas Homer-Dixon often come across as little more than updated, inferior versions of such pre-World War II conservative European “declinists” as Oswald Spengler and Jose Ortega y Gasset.

It is the stance of the optimists that is both more interesting and, at least for anyone who can attain a certain critical distance from both the secular millenarianism and what William Pfaff once described as the “vocabulary of optimism” that is the American national style, more perplexing. This belief in the radiant future has coalesced not around a religious faith--although there are elements of displaced religiosity in both its vocabulary and its intolerance for either criticism or self-criticism--but a secular one: the human-rights movement.

Anyone doubting that the Enlightenment project, and its American descendant, the Wilsonian approach to foreign policy, are alive and well at the millennium need only read the preface that Mary Robinson, formerly president of Ireland and now the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, wrote to “In Our Own Best Interest,” the new book by William Schulz, the director of the American branch of Amnesty International. “All human rights for all,” she writes, “this should be our common call to action. I am convinced that by combining our action and determination, by building partnerships between governments and civil society, international organizations, and the media, religious and academic communities, we will succeed in realizing the vision of the future which the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] first called for half a century ago.”

This is stirring stuff, to be sure, but it does not--and this is putting the matter charitably--stand up to the most cursory intellectual examination. For who are these governments, religious groups, media outlets and international organizations in which Robinson puts so much faith? We know the answer, of course. She has in mind the international liberal good guys: the United Nations, the liberal Western democracies, environmental groups, “enlightened” religious denominations like the Unitarian Universalists of which William Schulz is past president, and foundations like Ford, Rockefeller or Lannan.

But much as Robinson would seem to want to pretend otherwise, civil society does not just consist of Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Doctors Without Borders (emblematically, Schulz includes a comprehensive list of such groups as an appendix to his book), but of the Pakistani religious schools in which the Taliban was shaped, the Israeli settlers’ movement in the occupied West Bank, and thousands of business lobbyists from K Street in Washington to the halls of the European Commission in Brussels. And the views of a government like China’s are surely at least as important as those of the governments of social-democratic Scandinavia. Indeed, if the benchmark of a civil society organization is to be the number of private citizens who actively support its cause then the National Rifle Assn., with its millions of members, has a far better claim to be taken as the model than Human Rights Watch. Perhaps even more important than these cognitive confusions--this egregiously virtuous brand of wishful thinking masquerading as thought--is the question of why Americans (or, for that matter, the citizens of other rich countries whose views, unfair as this may be, count for far more than those of the vast majority of the people of our world who live in the poor world) should care. It is this question, that, to his great credit, Schulz tries to address in “In Our Own Best Interest.”

As the director of the only major grass-roots human-rights organization in the United States (groups like Human Rights Watch have relatively small popular constituencies and rely on their reports from the field and lobbying skills to try to influence the policy debate), Schulz is particularly well situated to be able to analyze both what has been successful and what has been unsuccessful about the human-rights wave of the last 20 years. And unlike so many human-rights activists, he does not simply blame outsiders--short-sighted politicians, an ill-informed public, a commercialized, dumbed-down media--but turns the focus inward, toward activists like himself.

“Nearly every movement to change the world,” he writes, “frames the benefits of what it offers in both visionary and practical terms .... Except, more often than not, the human rights movement.” By this, Schulz means that the human-rights movement must not simply speak in ethical and legal terms but, as he puts it, offer “compelling practical reasons why respect for human rights is in the best interests of the United States.”

Schulz’s analysis of the human rights movement’s predicament at the millennium is incontestable. But despite the establishment of certain new norms in international law that have already led to the ad hoc international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and that will soon, with or without American participation, give rise to an International Criminal Court, and the ripple effect on the judicial systems of some Western democracies that inspired the arrest of Gen. Pinochet in Britain in 1999, it would be hard to make the case that these normative triumphs have done all that much to make the world a better place. Indeed, the fact that in Africa so much attention and so much hope has been lavished on the supposed success of the International Tribunal for Rwanda during a three-year period in which 2.5 million civilians are estimated to have died in the war in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo suggests that this judicialization of the world may not be the advance for civilization its supporters claim.

In fairness, unlike so many of his colleagues, Schulz does not attempt to do so. And yet he shares the extremely optimistic assumption--at times it can seem like the human-rights movement’s equivalent of the doctrine of the Resurrection--that, as he puts it, 4,000 years after the Code of Hammurabi, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights constituted a definition of rights that “nearly everybody active on the international scene at the time acknowledged applied [to every human being].” The problem, as Schulz doubtless realizes but chooses to downplay in his book, is that it is one thing for a government to sign an international treaty and quite another for it to actually consider itself bound by that treaty in moments of crisis. After all, the same regime that launched the genocide in Rwanda signed the U.N. Genocide Convention. And there really is no reason to assume that governments that have chosen to commit evil acts are going be dissuaded by a treaty or a finding in international law anymore than a street thug is going to be dissuaded from mugging someone because it is against the law. Only the absolute certainty of punishment might accomplish that. The equivalent in international law would be some form of world government. But as Schulz himself points out, “at least for the foreseeable future, respect for human rights will remain largely a matter of compliance by governments or armed opposition groups. It will remain largely a matter of ... perceived self-interest.”

“In Our Own Best Interests” wrestles mightily with the need to make this case from self-interest, but the best one can say is that a charitable reader may feel that Schulz has managed to eke out a draw in the contest. He is to be congratulated for confronting the hard questions straight on, and for refusing the consoling fiction, much beloved of activists, that, in the words of one of Schulz’s friends when he described his book to her, “O what a shame to think that we need selfish reasons to care about our fellow human beings.” For this alone, the book is of lasting value. But unfortunately, it does not fulfill Schulz’s principal intention in writing it by making a case for Americans to see global human rights as being in their best interests. To say this is not to claim that human rights abuses abroad have no consequences for Americans. Countries that violate human rights tend to be unstable (though not always, as in the case of Malaysia), tend to be unsuccessful in addressing poverty (though again, not always; think of South Korea during the period of military rule) and tend to be contemptuous of other treaty commitments (though not always; think of Israel, whose conduct in the Occupied Territories has not affected its behavior on other issues).

On the most fundamental level, Schulz’s book seems to recapitulate George Soros’ argument that the political goal of democratic societies like the United States’ should be to do everything in their power to encourage pluralistic, rights-respecting “open societies” and put as much pressure as possible on “closed societies” to change. But the problem is less, as Schulz seems to imagine, getting people in America and other developed countries to care--though he is right to see this as a goal worth striving for--and more figuring out what to do about human-rights abusing regimes. Here Schulz is uncharacteristically vague. He sees the argument for military intervention, but, quite rightly, he sees its pitfalls, both moral and operational. He welcomes changes in the law but realizes that the law without force is a largely hollow instrument. As a result, having set out to write a hard-headed “practical” book, Schulz is unable to provide a roadmap for the future not in terms of how much people should care but of what they should demand that their governments do.

In a way Schulz finds himself in a very American trap. He seems to believe--again, the formulation is William Pfaff’s--that human beings and human society can be transformed by human will: that if people care enough, a solution will be found. But it is not clear whether this is true. To make this point is not to side with radical conspiracy theorists like Noam Chomsky who, in book after book, claim to see in the human-rights movement some new disguise for American imperial hegemony. Anyone masochistic enough to want a taste of this kind of arrogant fantasy-mongering can turn to Chomsky’s latest effusion--”A New Generation Draws the Line.” Chomsky writes these books from his study in Lexington, Mass. (far be it for him to have done any actual reporting on the ground in Kosovo; that might have sullied his perfect confidence in his own views), and the over-researched, under-experienced result is an object lesson in the perils of being an armchair radical. Suffice it to say that an unfortunate reader will discover that because the United States behaved badly in East Timor and supported the Turkish government’s war against the Kurds, its actions in Kosovo can’t possibly have been anything other than in the service of the nefarious interests of the military-industrial complex. Reading Chomsky, and contemplating just how prolific he continues to be, one weeps for the trees.

Despite what Chomsky imagines, the alliance between the international human-rights movement and Western governments is anything but dishonorable. It has succeeded, albeit inconsistently and usually in areas where large economic or geo-strategic interests were not at stake, in pushing governments to act. Kosovo was a perfect case in point. It is oversimplifying only slightly to say that the West waged war there because of exasperation with Slobodan Milosevic and guilt over its failure to act in Bosnia. Chomsky is too busy perfecting his demonology to accept this, but Schulz sees it clearly. The problem, however, is that though he may be right in insisting that force should remain as much an option in supporting human rights as “it does when it comes to protecting national security or promoting U.S. economic welfare,” the issue is what that force is being used for. For as Kosovo demonstrated, the issue in humanitarian war is at least as much what powerful states plan to do when the war is over as while it is going on. Are we to colonize--as we essentially have done in Kosovo and the British have done in Sierra Leone? Declare victory and get out--as we did in Cambodia? Or perhaps declare defeat and get out--as we did in Somalia?

“In dreams,” the American poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote, “begin responsibilities.” And surely human rights is the ultimate millennial dream. If Schulz is successful in his effort to get more Americans to see the centrality of human-rights concerns in foreign policy--and as he himself would be the first to admit--these are the questions that need to be answered, and soon. For as Michael T. Klare shows in his brilliantly researched, ably argued new book, “Resource Wars,” a new geography of conflict based on looming scarcities of water, oil, mineral resources and timber, is already being mapped out. And unfortunately, the areas of conflict--above all Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Indonesian archipelago and sub-Saharan Africa--are precisely those regions where the human-rights picture is dimmest and where, as Klare rightly emphasizes, most of those killed or maimed or uprooted (let us eschew that sanitized euphemism, “casualties”) will be civilian non-combatants.

Klare’s analysis is indisputable, but, like Schulz’s, his prescription, which he offers only as a brief sketch at the end of the book, is woefully unpersuasive. Having outlined in great and convincing detail the coming immiseration of large areas of the world and the subsequent political and social catastrophes that will follow in its wake, it comes as a surprise that Klare can seriously offer as a remedy some form of world control over scant resources, or, as he puts it, “a global system of resource conservation and collaboration.” His own scenario makes a mockery of such a suggestion, and the more one accepts his analysis, the more one is driven to reject his solution.

It may be that, uncomfortable though it is for Americans of good conscience to consider the possibility, the political, moral and societal challenges that confront the world at the beginning of this millennium simply have no solution. To suggest such a thing is obviously to repudiate the deepest and most enduring tendency in American thinking about the world, which is, whether in its right-wing or left-wing variant, Wilsonian. It was Wilson, after all, who insisted that America “puts human rights above all other rights ... [and whose flag] is not only the flag of America, but of humankind.”

The moral realism to which, at least implicitly, Schulz and Klare appeal, is quintessentially Wilsonian, though the 28th president’s name appears in neither book. But the question that needs to be asked is whether, if that is what lies at the core of their intellectual matrix, such a stance can justly be called realism at all. It is a commonplace of American political science to say that, apart from a few errant realists, like that survivor of white picket fence America, George Kennan, or that misplaced Wilhelmine bureaucrat, Henry Kissinger, we are all Wilsonians of one stripe or another. But if this is true, it is only true implicitly. Few American politicians, except in moments of great moral euphoria, like Kennedy at the Berlin Wall or Clinton as the bombs began to rain down on Kosovo, would really be willing to declare themselves Wilsonian in the full intransigent sense of a man who honestly believed that in the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, he was setting not just the United States but all the nations on the path to world government. Compared to such moral ambitions, the contemporary human-rights movement looks content with half measures.

Not so Robert S. McNamara and James Blight. “Wilson’s Ghost,” their new book, is not simply an homage to the father of the League, as the title suggests, but a daring effort to revive Wilsonianism for the 21st century. From the first page of the author’s note, the moral ambition of their enterprise is made apparent. McNamara writes that his experience as an insider--at the Ford Motor Co., as Kennedy’s defense secretary, as one of the architects of the Vietnam War, and as head of the World Bank--”has caused me to reflect on what went wrong in the 20th century that led to such wholesale killing of human beings by other human beings, and what might be done to prevent its recurrence.”

To say McNamara is a troubling figure is to state the obvious. He, after all, has made his own existential doubts about his role in the Vietnamese catastrophe a matter of public record. There is something of the Loyola in him--the faithful warrior who, after a spiritual crisis, turns to preaching the Gospel. But alongside his new humility, there is also the same arrogant sense of mission and certainty of purpose that marked McNamara’s career as a war planner and an international banker laying down the law to the poor world. Who with anything less than McNamara’s sense of self could really declare himself in a position to stop not just one war but the recurrence of killing in general? And who but McNamara could imagine that he could find some explanatory key, some geopolitical equivalent to the double helix, to the problem of what went wrong in the 20th century?

Strangely enough, while William Schulz, a Unitarian minister and lifelong human-rights activist is concerned with making an argument for human betterment based on self-interest, McNamara and Blight, the consummate insider and his collaborator, a professor of international relations at Brown University, time and again opt for the transcendental language of morality. “Empathy Now” is the short form of how the authors believe the United States should modify its policies toward both China and the Russian Federation. On their larger purpose, the language they employ is frankly religious. “Wilson’s Ghost” concludes with a question: “Don’t we have a responsibility,” write McNamara and Blight, “to redeem, in some measure, the lives of those who died violently in the 20th century?”

One knows what they mean, and while such language will doubtless be adduced by McNamara’s critics as yet another example of his unslakable thirst for self-expiation, it is more respectful to take his words at face value. After all, the questions such a stance give rise to are no less stringent. The first and most obvious is this: What supernatural hubris could lead McNamara and Blight to imagine that anything can be done to “redeem” the deaths of Verdun and Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago and the Algerian war of independence, Hiroshima, the Cambodian killing fields and the mission stations of Rwanda? To imagine that there is anything human beings could do, up to and including reducing the risk of nuclear war or mitigating the worst abuses of tyrants and torturers, to somehow “make right” or make less vain such horrors and sufferings, is either the most astonishing act of self-aggrandizing hubris or the blindest naivete. Nothing can make these things bearable to anyone with a conscience, and it is vainglorious and self-serving of McNamara and Blight to pretend otherwise. In a way, it is a pity that the moral context of “Wilson’s Ghost” is so questionable, because as a piece of policy writing it contains many recommendations of value. The critique of American unilateralism, both in the nuclear arms field and in deployments to stop or at least try to mitigate communal violence in the poor world, is particularly forceful and well-judged. But even here, the integument into which these arguments are fitted does not hold up the more one thinks about them. Above all, it is McNamara and Blight’s use of the figure of Woodrow Wilson, their hope, to paraphrase their argument, to succeed where he failed, that should arouse in any historically literate reader the most profound skepticism.

For the Wilson McNamara and Blight present is the martyred Wilson of legend, the president who almost brought peace to the world, and, seeing himself thwarted by no-nothing isolationists, all but committed suicide trying to persuade the American people of the rightness of his course of action. “During a cross-country speaking tour in the summer of 1919 on behalf of the treaty,” McNamara and Blight contend, “Wilson suffered a stroke, from which he never recovered. The Senate voted down the League shortly thereafter. Thus did his personal tragedy reflect that of his country and the world.”

Excuse me, but this is not history; this is hagiography. McNamara and Blight are of course aware that the Senate leadership offered Wilson a compromise in which it would accept the treaty on the League of Nations with certain well-defined reservations. Nonetheless, they present the conflict between president and Senate as that of a Jesus confronted by a Last Supper’s worth of Judases. More important, though McNamara and Blight clearly resonate to the vision of world government that Wilson harbored there is absolutely no reason to believe that the League of Nations, even strengthened by the presence of the United States, would have led to such an order. Quite the contrary, the British and the French were in no sense prepared to cede sovereignty, let alone give up control of their colonial empires. The contrast between what Wilson imagined would be the fate of the various German colonies and Ottoman provinces handed over to French, British and Belgian control (he thought they would be shepherded toward self-government), and their actual fate, which was to be subsumed into the various colonial empires, was an early demonstration of this.

Another deep flaw in McNamara and Blight’s argument is their conviction that the 20th century was “the bloodiest by far in all of human history.” This piece of received wisdom was repeated ad infinitum by aid workers, U.N. officials and journalists throughout the 1990s. I have been guilty of it myself. The short version is that while in World War I, the ratio of military to civilian casualties was 9-1, today it is one soldier who dies for every nine civilians. This may be true, and certainly compared with European wars in the 18th and 19th centuries, war in the 20th century has been particularly brutal. But if one includes in 19th century war, colonial wars, the picture changes radically, and the 20th century does not look so uniquely savage. Go back another century and beyond, to the days of the Middle Passage and the rest of that profit-making venture known as the slave trade, and the picture becomes even less clear.

Even in terms of European history, McNamara and Blight are on shaky ground. During the wars of religion in the 17th century, the killing of civilians was routine. But what was that gigantic European civil war that began in 1914, started up again in 1939, and really only ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, if not a war of religion, or, to use the more modern locution, ideology?

The problem with McNamara and Blight is that they are so transfixed by the horror of war that they scarcely pause to think about the causes of war. For them, it is mindless brutality, whereas in reality, war is brutal but almost never mindless or without reason. It is this same kind of ignorance, or, more properly, arrogant lack of interest in the real aspirations and real conflicts of peoples--some of which are intractable; some of which can only be resolved in blood and fire--that marked Woodrow Wilson’s doomed attempt to impose world government on a planet most of whose population lived in colonial servitude. McNamara and Blight doubtless mean well, but they are out of their depth.

They would have been well-served by reading Michael Howard’s brilliant essay, “The Invention of Peace.” In it, the greatest military historian of our time calmly and patiently lays out the real dialectic between war and peace both in European history and in our own time. His starting point is the remark of the 19th-century British jurist, Sir Henry Maine, that “war appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention”--the universal norm in human history. If for some human-rights activists, and certainly, to judge by “Wilson’s Ghost,” for McNamara and Blight, war is almost like a natural disaster or a species of folly, Howard is at pains to show how most human societies, though they varied in their bellicosity, were at least partly organized around war-making. In other words, there was nothing irrational about war; to the contrary, for millenniums it was inseparable from the social order.

Howard is well aware that this hegemony of the war-makers has ended, at least in the rich world of Europe and North America. “The kind of patriotism,” he writes, “that had enabled the peoples of Europe to endure two world wars now appears as archaic as the feudal loyalties that it displaced.” He refers, not without a certain ambivalence of tone, to the fact that the national flag “is no longer a symbol to evoke awe. At best it is the logo of a firm--Britain plc--whose function is to provide dividends for its shareholders.” But he adds that the erosion of state authority--by prosperity and globalization in the rich world; by the collapse of governing structures in much of the poor world--is as likely to augur more violence as a new Jerusalem of peaceful coexistence. For, Howard insists, since peace is not and never has been the natural state of humankind, it tends, paradoxically, to be only states that make peace possible. And yet the state is probably less powerful than it has been in several centuries.

What Howard shows is that it is peace and not war that is, as he puts it, “artificial, intricate and highly volatile.” And it is this recognition that seems so strikingly absent from McNamara and Blight and even from more grounded and tough-minded writers like Schulz and Klare who write as if once peace were somehow secured it had any likelihood of being maintained. And Howard cuts to the core of the wishful thinking of so many well-intended activists when he writes that “the establishment of a global peaceful order thus depends on the creation of a world community sharing the characteristics that make possible domestic order. [It] cannot be created simply by building international institutions and organizations that do not arise naturally out of the cultural disposition and historical experience of their members.” This is reality, and insisting otherwise, much as it does credit to those who are moved to do so, will not usher in a better, less bloody world, but only create false hopes among those who can least afford them--hopes that are certain to be dashed in the cruelest possible way.