Use of Force and Legitimacy

Good Morning everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. We are here for a discussion of such daily and interesting issues as when should we use military force, what should be its purpose when we do use it, and who should decide? Those are the kind of issues that are, in fact at the top front of the policy makers down the street, the policy makers across the Atlantic, and across the Pacific. As we confront crises in North Korea and Iran and continue to deal with the consequences of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq and whats happening in the Middle East. As we try to figure out how we deal with terrible challenges we see in Africa and Darfur, in particular. The issue of when to use force, how to use it, and who should decide, remains very much on the forefront of our daily lives. And our purpose this morning is to start providing some answers to the question of when to use force and who should decide. About when the use of military force is appropriate and when it is not; how it can be made legitimate when it is decided that it necessary to use force. The purpose here of the public panel is a start of something that we are going to spend more time on behind closed doors. Many of us in this room will continue the discussion for the next two days of a final effort to, if we don't reach consensus, at least know where the major fault lines lie internationally. We have a group of folks from all around the world who have participated in the last two plus years in a series of bilateral dialogues that the Brookings Institution has sponsored with folks in Europe, with the Russians, with the Chinese, with people from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Mexico, and Latin America in order to start getting at these questions. Now, we are bringing a whole group of those participants together, first to start discussing some of these issues publicly but then behind closed doors for the next two days. Brookings has been fortunate to have received funding from a variety of institutions across the United States, from the Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as well as from international organizations like the European Commission in order to be able to do these workshops. We have been fortunate as a group here at Brookings. Jim Steinberg, when he was still the director of the program, and I started the project and continued to lead it, and a number of Americans have participated in each of these workshops. Susan Rice from Brookings, Ed Lucke from Columbia, Walt Slocum from Kaplan and Drysdale, Bruce Jentleson from Duke University, David Shepard from Northwestern University, Anne-Marie Slaughter from Princeton, and Paul Stares from the U.S. Institute of Peace form the core American group together with Jim and myself to conduct this dialogue with people from around the world. Through it all, let me note the excellent and extraordinary effort of Anne Kramer who has put not only this meeting as usual together but every other one in her internal way in order to figure out how to do this without anyone noticing what it goes into getting that many people into the same room at the same time in the same place from that many different places of the world. As I said, we have had these bilateral dialogues with folks from around the world. We have learned a lot from these sessions, and we hope to come to some conclusions. Jim and I have already come to some conclusions, and that is where we are going to start off here today. Jim, who, as all of you know, was the Director of Foreign Policy Studies and Vice President here at Brookings and before that was the Deputy National Security Advisor to President Clinton, is now the Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin. Jim will present the main findings of our project so far. Then we will have three people who have in way or another participated in our efforts in the past to comment on it. I can't think of three better people than those we have here. Francois Heisbourg, who, like Jim, was once my boss, though a longer time before that when he was Director of the IISS in London and is now the Special Advisor to the Fondation pour la Recherche Strat»gique in Paris. Edward Mortimer, formerly a reporter and columnist at the Financial Times and for the past, what is it, almost 10 years? Eight years. Eight years, he has been Director of Communications to the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and in that capacity has helped draft many of Mr. Annan's speeches and statements, many of which have dealt with this very issue of how to use force and how to legitimize it. Ambassador Alfred Dube, currently the Managing Director of Lazare Kaplan in Botswana, is one of Botswana's most senior and esteemed diplomats, serving as his country's Ambassador around the world including in the U.K., the Soviet Union, and from 2000 to 2005 at the United Nations. I have asked the speakers to be concise in their remarks. They will; I am sure. We will have a discussion among ourselves, and then we will open up for a discussion with you here in the audience. With that, why don't I turn it over to Jim for his first reflections? Thank you, Ivo. It is very nice to be back. This is familiar, warm surroundings. I want to join Ivo in thanking the sponsors of this work and the participants for what I think has been a really remarkably interesting and enlightening set of conferences. It is a fairly unique kind of exercise that we undertook here, and I appreciate the fact that people were willing to stay with us through a long process, but I think it has produced a lot of interesting observations and insights. What I want to do this morning, as Ivo said, he and I have reached some conclusions about this, but I don't really want to focus on our own views about this but reflect a little bit on the series of dialogues that we have had and what they revealed about this broader question about the role of force in the international system. I think it is important to give this a little context. We started this project back in 2002, 2003, in the context of the intense international and domestic debate over Iraq and also in the context of the Bush administration's National Security Strategy which focused in an important degree on the question of the use of force and particularly whether the rules governing the use of force needed to be revised in light of the post-9/11 security environment. What was clear at that time was that there both an intense and pretty vitriolic debate both within the United States and between Americans and important partners around the world about this question, and that while many of us were struggling to see whether there were common positions that could be developed in the United States, it didn't make a lot of sense for Americans to come around an answer to some of these questions if we were going to find ourselves deeply at odds with the rest of the world. Obviously, the troubling experience with the Iraq debate helped frame that. The idea was as we pursued the internal domestic debate about the right strategy and the role of force was there some way to try and connect that to how others were seeing the question and to find out whether there were any common bases for going forward. Our work on this was informed by the fact that although there was a lot of criticism both at home and abroad of the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy, particularly the role of preventive force, some of us who had worked in previous administrations and actually had to grapple with this issue in other contexts, felt that in some respects the political debate over prevention was not doing justice to the deeper real questions. From our own experience, both Ivo and I in the Clinton Administration and some of the other members of the American side where we had seen the preventive use of force or debates about it in the context of humanitarian intervention and also dealing with the problem of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, we all felt that the debate was becoming very caricatured and not getting deeply into the questions based on real world experience. So, we launched this project, and quite fortuitously, as Ivo mentioned, the Secretary-General also launched the project through the high level panel which grappled with similar questions. We were fortunate during the course of this project both to work with people involved in the high level panel discussions and, in fact, pursue a parallel track. Since the report of the high level panel came out during the course of these discussions, it also helped frame some of our own debates to whether the high level panel got it right in the way it looked at the question about the role of the Charter, how to think about the Charter and their use of force, particularly preventive force, in the new international system. What we hoped to answer through these dialogues was whether there was any agreement first on the broad question of whether there was a need to rethink the basic rule of governing the use of force in the international system; and then if, in general, there was an openness to have that discussion, under what circumstances might we want to think about different rules or different approaches to the problem of use of force, what should those rules be, under what authority should the decision of the use of force be decided and the like. It is probably not a surprising but I think an important conclusion that on the basic question, there is really quite a remarkable and broad consensus that the nature of changing the international system does require a rethinking about the role of force and the use of force in ways that are quite different from the way the problem was thought about and focused on at the time of the adoption of the Charter. In two important respects, the world has changed. The character of the threats we face are different than an international system which was largely preoccupied with state to state aggression and one which had to deal with a whole new set of challenges ranging from terrorism to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to environmental damage. Also, the growing interdependence of the international system made it important to develop new approaches, the fundamental question of what goes on within a country matters more and more to those outside the country, and therefore the way in which we think about sovereignty and both the responsibility of the state vis-á-vis its own internal affairs and the responsibilities of the rest of the international system when things are going awry in the state had changed. And so, on that basic level, I think we found, with minor exceptions, that there was a fairly broad sense in which at least the need to rethink the question was something that was broadly accepted. Interestingly, the leading wedge into this was not what had prompted this whole debate, namely terrorism and security threats, but rather the fact the evolution of thinking around the world on the question of humanitarian intervention. In some respects, the one thing that had gotten pretty well accepted, at least as a matter of principle, by the early 21st Century was that, at least under extreme circumstances, there was both a responsibility of states to avoid extreme humanitarian crises either through neglect or their actions and a corresponding right of the international community to deal with that problem. So you have a fairly broadly accepted set of principles reflected in the conclusions of the high level panel but also more broadly in the evolution of customary international law and the attitudes even of countries which historically, and even during the late 1990s, had resisted that. The fact of this broad acceptance, at least in the cases of genocide and other extreme humanitarian crises, state sovereignty was conditional and, in fact, opened up a broader debate about more generally under what circumstances should sovereignty be seen as conditional and particularly on security cases. It is also clear that this evolution of thinking in the international system in almost all of our interlocutors, how they saw it, not surprisingly, was driven by their own experience. And so, while you might think based on historical experience that in Africa with a strong tradition of resisting the idea of outside interference because of the colonial experience and the move to independence, because of the enormous challenges that Africa had faced in the late 1990s, actually there was a quite broad acceptance among our African interlocutors, reflected in the founding documents of the African Union, that under a number of circumstances, sovereignty is conditional. Clearly, that was a reflection of the experience beginning of Rwanda and some of the other great humanitarian crises of the 1990s. But the same sense that rethinking was being driven by actual experience I think was true for most of the people with whom we engaged in this topic. For example, when we talked to our Russian counterparts about these issues, we actually had our dialogue in Moscow right after the attacks in Beslan, and it had a very profound impact, I think, on the thinking about that question. So you had a sense in which, though there was a lot of criticism by many at the time about President Bush's strong sense about our right to deal with the problem of terrorism wherever and whenever it was found, in the post-Beslan context, it is not surprising that many Russian thoughtful observers, as well as the political climate, saw a right and a responsibility to deal, including preventively with the problem of terrorism. Similarly, I think we saw in our discussion with our Chinese counterparts, that some of their own experiences with internal challenges had led them to become more sympathetic to the idea of intervention. Interestingly, there was one element of our dialogues where there was a different view, and that was largely with our Mexican interlocutors. Thereto, I think you can say that the individual experience of the country was very much reflected. On the one hand was Mexico, not largely having to deal with the kinds of threats or not focused on the threats that our dialogue focused on . terrorism, weapons of mass destruction . but also still very much influenced by its own complex history with the United States. Unique among the dialogues we found among many of our Mexican counterparts, though not all of them, was a much more traditional view about the importance of sovereignty and the need for very, very limited derogations from that protection for the rights of states to be left alone, in effect. As I said, one of the things that helped propel this was the conclusions of the high level panel which not only accepted the idea of humanitarian intervention but also accepted, very specifically and explicitly, that the nature of the new threats required a new approach to the preventive use of force and accepted the basic premise that the Bush Administration had put forward which is that the nature of some of these threats, particularly with the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, meant that the old rules requiring an actual or imminent attack could not be necessarily the right answer in today's world. The high level panel also posed what then became the second big focus of our discussions which is accepting the broad premise that there may be circumstances now where we need a more accepting approach to the idea of preventive use of force, how should that be decided and by whom. Clearly, the high level panel, not surprisingly, indicated a strong if not absolute requirement that absent an imminent threat, preventive force should only be used with the authority of the Security Council. This, obviously, became an important source of discussion among our interlocutors throughout these debates. Again, individual experiences of countries and regions very much shaped the thinking. So, again, somewhat counter-intuitively in the case of Africa, you find that the Constitution of the African Union accepts the proposition of the legitimacy of intervention by the African Union even in the absence of a Security Council resolution. In my judgment and I think from our discussions, reflecting the fact that the Security Council had been ineffective in dealing with the problems of Africa particularly in the 1990s. Similarly, we found in the case of our discussions with our Russian counterparts, also a strong sense that while Security Council authority was desirable when possible, it shouldn't be an absolute bar by any means on acting. We had a continuum around this question. Again, in the case of our African counterparts, where there was an emerging regional organization, a great willingness to put the locus of responsibility on the regional organization rather than on the UN. Here, the transatlantic debate about this was particularly interesting, a debate which well predated the post-9/11 environment, the debate that we, within NATO, had in the context of the 1998 Washington Summit and the Kosovo intervention which was in the absence of a Security Council resolution, a NATO decision to act was an adequate basis for the use of force and the ironic debate that took place just at the moment when NATO was intervening in Kosovo, a deep division within NATO countries on the question of principle in the NATO Concept of Operations that was adopted in 1998 about whether we should accept that as a matter of principle or just see this as a one-off event. I think in our discussions with Europeans, there was recognition that there would be a need, at least under some circumstances, to act without a Security Council resolution. I think what is important and emerging in our discussion is a recognition that, given the limitations of the Security Council, while the first best choice is for the Security Council to act and a great interest in trying to figure out how to make the Council more responsive to deal with these new challenges, there were fewer and fewer advocates for an absolute bar against acting in the absence of a Security Council resolution. But at the end of the day, after a lot of discussion and broad acceptance of the idea that there are circumstances now in which the old rules need to be changed and the old institutions may not be adequate to deal with those, we got over the in-principle hurdle and yet, when applied to specific cases, there were deep doubts about whether, as a matter of practice and in terms of the efficacy of this kind of intervention, whether in fact this should be an important tool. That is to agree in principle that it is right, but then as we worked through a number of actual cases like the case of Iran and its nuclear program or other quasi- hypotheticals that we discussed in our deliberations, most of interlocutors found that when push came to shove, the downsides of the practice of preventive use of force were almost insurmountable barriers. So you have a curious development in which what one would have thought was difficult, accepting the principle of modifying the rules of the Charter and the traditional longstanding use of force, that intellectual hurdle, but the matter of practice is one that suggests even if we accept, in principle, the idea of greater preventive use of force, that there is deep, deep skepticism, especially outside the United States but almost universally, that would actually work in practice. When we framed the issue about both legitimacy and effectiveness or efficacy of the use of force, it came back on itself, which is to say that in some ways, looking at the very practical question of efficacy then raised questions about its legitimacy. That is, if you found in practice that there were very few circumstances in which it would be the right choice and practice to use force preventively, do you want to then enunciate a set of rules that would seem to license it? That is where we now come to the most important set of questions which is: Do we now need to formulate, having accepted the fact that the world has changed, do we need to formulate some either guiding principles or rules that would be restrictive but not prohibitory for using force? Here, I think a couple of things became clear which is, one, the more that we could identify some very clear norms that established a set of rules, the more I think there was a consensus that the violation of those norms would trigger the legitimate use of force and something where the costs might be manageable in terms of the downsides. So, for example, with the Genocide Convention and a clear prohibition against genocide, it may be hard to establish the factual predicate, but there is certainly a sense that having that very broadly accepted norm is a good basis. We talked a lot about whether the question of specific prohibitions in the NPT, for example, or more elaboration of the NPT might be another such norm which might legitimate the use of force. I think that really is now the question: Are we better off in a world in which we broadly accept that there are a limited number of cases where prevention is the appropriate response but still prefer to deal with this as a kind of case by case, we will know it when we see it, or do we need to begin to elaborate on the differences? Here, I think we don't find consensus. I think Ivo and I, in our own conclusions, have felt that it is important to do that, to not see this as something where we pretend to live by a set of principles that we, in fact, don't observe in practice, but it is, I think, part of the emerging debate which is still unsettled in the international community. I will stop with that. That is great. That is a wonderful overview of the richness of the discussion that many of you were not able to witness or participate in, but some of you did, and I hope you will find reflected within what Jim has said what we talked about. I certainly did. Why don't we go from right to left and start with Ed and then move on to Alfred and Francois? Jim is certainly a very hard act to follow, and I think, obviously, this is a debate that you have gone into very thoroughly and I think most of the points are there. Perhaps, it is useful to recall, historically, from where the UN comes at this. I think it is broadly true to say that from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, the biggest collective concern of members of the United Nations and the feeling of the raison d'Õtre of the organization as expressed in its Charter was to prevent interstate conflict and aggression by one or more states against another. There was an anxiety to look out for pretexts that people had used in the past or might use for infringing this taboo. Of course, there were cases, as we all remember during the Cold War when aggression occurred, and then because there was division within the international community, it wasn't possible to do anything about it. I think the debate that we are now participating in really began in the 1990s. It happened that at that period, it focused almost entirely on the idea of humanitarian intervention. The first big problem that presented itself to the world in the aftermath of the Cold War was the new world disorder. Of course, many very disorderly things had happened, but it was during the Cold War that either they were not dealt with by outsiders or they were dealt with on a one-off ad hoc basis which was deplored but allowed to pass. One thinks of East Pakistan in 1971, Vietnam coming into Cambodia at the beginning of 1979, and almost exactly the same time, Tanzania invading Uganda to get rid of Idi Amin. I don't think any of those were accepted as legitimate by the General Assembly, for example, of the United Nations at the time, but there was a sort of broader feeling of public opinion that, well, okay, it was wrong, but it was better that it happened than it didn't. If you look at what happened in the 1990s, the real argument was largely not about legitimacy of the use of force. The argument is essentially about whether anybody was going to do it. There was general breast-beating and soul- searching about the fact that it had not been done, particularly in Rwanda and to a lesser extent, Bosnia, although in Bosnia, it was muddied by the fact that Bosnia had been recognized as an independent state and was a member of the United Nations during most of the time that the atrocities were going on. Then, of course, you got to Kosovo where it was felt by a lot of people that there had to be intervention in order not to repeat the previous mistakes. It was in that context that Kofi Annan elaborated . his doctrine is probably too grand a word . his reminder to the international community that national frontiers and national sovereignty were not, in all circumstances, the last word and that if very large numbers of people were being killed, there was a likelihood that somebody would feel obliged and entitled to intervene. His case has always been, and I think it had to be because he is the spokesman and representative of the only organization we have that tries to provide rules and procedures for this kind of thing. He always took the line that it would be much preferable that these things be decided by the Security Council. But he was caught in March of 1999 by the fact that here was an intervention in a case which he had prefigured and warned intervention might be necessary, but it was done without the authority of the Security Council. So he goes to the General Assembly in September of 1999 and says: Look, I am not saying that this was good, and none of us feel good about the fact that it was done without a resolution of the Security Council, but the Security Council should take care. It shouldn't presume on its authority because if it is not able and willing to deal with a crisis like this, somebody is going to take the law into their own hands. That gave rise, of course, to the Canadian Government setting up the Evans-Sahnoun Commission and the coinage of this brilliant term, responsibility to protect, which I think does actually bring you much closer to the heart of the argument because it isn't really an issue about rights. It is a question of: Who is going to do it? Whose job is it to do it? In what circumstances can you get away with not doing it and in what circumstances are you obliged to do it? But, of course, 9/11 arrives just on the eve of the publication of that report and shifts the argument and attention onto, first of all, self-defense against terrorism. You get this resolution in the Security Council with a very broad interpretation of Article 51 of the Charter which legitimizes the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, probably not what the people writing Article 51 had in mind, Afghanistan being a very long way away from the United States, but generally accepted as legitimate. I remember the only concern that many of us had at the time of the intervention in Afghanistan was the letter that John Negroponte sent to the Security Council which more or less was drafted as to claim a carte blanche to invade anywhere that the United States perceived a terrorist threat. Of course, already then there were some rumors about Iraq and there was concern: Yes, we all sympathize with the U.S. We understand that they need to use force Afghanistan. It is probably in the general interest that they do, but self-defense cannot be an unlimited or infinite justification what, in old-fashioned terms, would be termed aggression, and this notion of preemption perhaps is getting a little bit too expanded. Then in Iraq, you have a third shift of subject matter, if you like, because although there is an attempt and clearly the atmospheric linkage to terrorism and the aftermath of 9/11, the immediate focus of the argument is about weapons of mass destruction. We seem to have moved from a preemptive war which Article 51 doesn't quite legitimatize that has been understood to be reconcilable with, if you like, if the attack is really imminent and tangible, then you have the right to defend yourself to a preventive war where, in the words of the high level panel, the threat is latent and not imminent. The trouble is Iraq was such a very unfortunate case to try out that doctrine because the threat was so latent that even after scouring the country from end to the other, it couldn't actually be found. I sympathize with the authors of this study who feel, well, if the bathwater of Iraq is so filthy, then all kinds of babies are being thrown out without it being visible. The reaction to that is very strong, and it comes in stages. First of all, a lot of member states saying, hey, whatever the Charter is supposed to mean, it surely doesn't allow this kind of thing. Why isn't the UN doing something about this? After all, the Security Council famously didn't approve it. Why isn't the Secretary-General doing something about it? Why doesn't he convene a meeting of member states? The Secretary-General was not in the business of duplicating the institutions and the governing bodies of the UN by convening ad hoc meetings, but this Secretary-General anyway does have rather a predilection for high level panels as a way of moving the consensus forward, and I think this is one of the more successful examples, and they come out with these quite elaborate suggestions about the circumstances in which the use of force might be justified. They pretty much want to keep it in the Security Council, but if you look at the bit on regional organizations, you will see that they do suggest that it may not always be necessary to have the prior authorization of the Security Council. You do it, and then you go and get the authorization subsequently, leaving rather a big question, of course, of what happens if you go and the Security Council says, well, no, actually we think you were wrong. That is left hanging in the air. The Secretary-General realized that the criteria that the panel was putting forward would not fly with the Security Council in the present political atmosphere. So he put forward a rather more cautious suggestion. Why doesn't the Security Council just adopt a resolution which needn't be completely binding but could be a useful statement for themselves and everybody else for what the principles are that they would wish to be guided by in future cases where it may be necessary to use force or to authorize the use of force? When member states themselves come to consider the matter and produce the outcome document of last year's summit, even that has disappeared, and we find ourselves with simply a reiteration of what was already in the Charter. Is that good enough? Clearly, I guess the assumption that most people come to in a discussion like this is that it is not good enough because the interpretations of the Charter are so radically different. I think the underlying tension is the interest in legitimacy which is not an airy-fairy thing. It is realization that legitimacy is an important element if you want to do something effective. If what you are doing is not perceived as legitimate by many of the people affected, including probably by many of your own citizens, you are much less likely to succeed in your aims, whatever they are. But, on the other hand, an obsession with legitimacy or an endless quest for legitimacy might undermine the effectiveness of what you are trying to do or even lead to complete paralysis. One is left with a truism that any totally inflexible system is going to be disregarded in practiced. On the other hand, it seems . maybe I have been at the UN too long but I think on the whole . it is better to have strong disincentives to the use of force built into your international rules. The other thing is let us not forget that the issue is more often one of willingness to use force than it is of permission to use force. I think Darfur is a very eloquent example of this. The responsibility to protect has been legislated by the member states in the outcome document of the summit. But how responsible do they actually feel and how easy is it for them to actually do something to put that responsibility into effect when you have a case in which I see even the President of Nigeria now says is developing into genocide like Darfur? My conclusions, I am afraid, are a bit tame. I think we should all work harder on developing strategies for dealing with these various kinds of threat that don't involve the use of force. We should certainly try and get ourselves involved in these processes further upstream. I have heard David Hamburg say many times . he is a great expert on the prevention of genocide . by the time the genocide is happening, it is too late to prevent it. Genocide almost always happens in the context of conflict. So if we only do a better job of preventing conflict, and I think this probably applies to these other threats, we wouldn't be confronted with these very, very hard choices. But, of course, there are always going to be cases where prevention has failed, however hard one may have tried. All I think I can say about that is that the consequences of war are literally incalculable. While probably none of us would be here if we were complete pacifists, I think that we all should not think that war is ever the easy option or should be anything but the extreme resort to an extreme situation. Thank you, Edward. That was concise and to the point, leaving me asking if the problem is the unwillingness by countries to use force, why do we constantly have, within our discussions, debates on how do you limit the possibility of using force which is what our rules are all set out to be. That is a tension, and that is the tension that we will come back to, I am sure. Alfred Dube? Thank you very much. I take my cue, I think, from Jim's presentation which really summarized very concisely the issues that have been discussed in the last several months. In my case, of course, it was an African dialogue only three months ago. I find that having listened to the summary, whatever I was going to say has already been said. Anyway, I think the important thing, and I will concentrate and I will focus on that part of the world where the last I looked, it was looking at what is wrong on the African Continent and what can be done in this context. I think overall the question of intervention to forestall or prevent a crisis situation is basically accepted in principle, but of course there are very divergent views on how, or if at all, you should do it. I think one of the greatest hopes that a lot of us had was during the period of 2003 to 2005 when the Secretary-General appointed a high level panel to look at world collective security and the reform of the United Nations as the international institution charged with maintenance of international peace and security. Now, f course, as Jim has said and Ed Mortimer here, we have had so many reports. We have had a high level report panel and the Secretary-General's own report coming out of that and the debates in the General Assembly ultimately ending with the high level summit that was held in September, 2005. In all of those, there were very clear and concise accommodations on how to deal with the question of intervention. There were very heated debates, and I consider myself to have been lucky that I was among the peers at the UN, debating these issues right across the board. It was very clear that we were all coming to this issue in particular from very different perspectives. I think in the African context, our biggest challenge has been in debating this matter in the context of the various conflicts that we have had on the Continent and the other international issues like terrorism that have certainly become issues of concern even within Africa but not of our own making. I think the examples of Tanzania and Nairobi, the bombings there are a perfect example of that, of a situation where we found ourselves or the two countries attacked over an issue that is not really African, an issue that is very external but nonetheless serious enough to have led eventually to 9/11. So, in this context, I think in the African context, the major problem or the major challenge is the use of force of intervention in the context of humanitarian relief. That, really to us is a very important issue, humanitarian intervention, because of all the conflicts we have had, whether it is a civil war internally, largely civil wars anyway, it has been a question of ultimately who are victims of the situation. They are largely civilians, not necessarily rising from being killed during the war itself but killed by disease, hunger, poverty. These are the fallouts of the conflicts we have had on the Continent. When you are facing that kind of situation, there is a very compelling argument to say: Can the international community just lean back and deal with the issues as business as usual, or should extraordinary measures be taken to at least protect defenseless civilians primarily? Also, even more serious is where you have a situation where the state itself collapses and there is no law and there is no order and there is actually a collapse of the whole fabric of government in that particular country of region. I think these are issues of very great concern to our Continent. The second issue is, over time, during the OAU days, you know in Africa, since we had the formation of the Organization of African Unity, there was a major cardinal phrase which was there was no interference in the internal affairs of the member states, and that became hijacked to a point where literally any government could make any excuse to make sure that if there was any internal explosion or internal instability, they would stand up and say: Well, this is our internal business; you have nothing to do with it, whether it is the OAU or the United Nations or any subregional federation. Now, as Jim pointed out earlier, it is very important and very significant that under the African Union Constitution Act, this principle has been acknowledged as having led, in fact, to the kind of situations that we had over the years. Now, in principle, the African Union fully accepts the principle of intervention, of course, under specific conditions in the event of a complete breakdown of law and order in a member state or in a region. Because of that and through the Peace and Security Council of the African Union, for the first time in a few years, we had a situation in Burundi where the AU took it upon itself to say we will take the first lead as the African Union, of course, with the support of the United Nations, with the support of the international community to actually bring in AU troops or AU forces to stabilize Burundi. That is how it started. Then, unfortunately, because of lack of resources, but there was a very beautiful transition from there to where things were taken over in a context with the United Nations. Burundi, I think was a successful attempt to deal with two issues: one, to prevent a state collapsing, and two, to provide humanitarian assistance and prevention of further killings within the country. That is all well said and done; it doesn't always work. Today, we are faced with a bigger challenge in the same context of Darfur where the African Union sent in the first monitors. When it didn't work, they sent in a force basically not really to stop hostilities but more to monitor what was going on and protect civilians. That is not quite working as intended. The African Union, unfortunately again, does not have the necessary resources to continue with a larger force in Darfur. However, in any case, this is not just an issue of Africa. This is a problem for which the international responsibility is responsible. But now we have a crisis situation where the Security Council having voted and passed the resolution to send in a UN peacekeeping force, the host government has refused to accept that. As you know, it was three months ago, Sudan had even asked the African Union to leave. Thank God, their reason has since prevailed. The AU is there, but the UN forces have been prevented. The AU has extended its stay in Darfur until the end of the year, but the question is what happens after that? There is another challenge that I want to come to. We have, for the first time, a case where the a permanent member of the African Union, a permanent member of the United Nations is saying I don't want you here, and yet by all reports that we have a very serious humanitarian situation erupting in that country which, at some point, the international community has to do something about. The question is: How? That will be very interesting in the debate today what ideas come out on that particular issue. This is the challenge that we have on the continent. I think really the other issue and my last point which we discussed in our last dialogue and which is a very important issue for which we should continue discussions, is the instability on that Continent is also caused very much by the proliferation of small arms which have caused mayhem on the Continent, more than weapons of mass destruction, simple small arms which have caused so much instability and so much killings. I think it is one issue that we need to discuss as to how this can be stopped. I think I will stop there for now and throw these issues to the panel. Thank you. Wonderful, thank you very much. I think there is an emerging theme here about the need seen by many to do something but the inability of the international community or actors within the international community to actually do it. It may be as challenging, figuring out what the norms are that we are trying to enforce as to figure out when the norms are violated, how do you, in fact, get that enforcement. Ivo, you have just been preempting me. Francois? This is what Americans do. That is right. Yes, it is a national habit. Seriously, Edward, you said at the beginning of your own remarks that this debate really arose during the 1990s. (A) That is true, but (B) there is a reason for that being true and that is bipolar constraints have been lifted, Cold War priorities no longer prevailed. Without the change of circumstances, we would not have had the opportunity to revisit the rules. Genocide did not emerge in the 1990s. Pol Pot was a great practitioner long before that, for example. That, of course, is another way of saying that the revisiting of rules and principles has to take into account the relationship with reality. We are not going to get very far if we don't acknowledge fully the nature of that relationship with the reality pushing and rules being modified as a consequence. In British case law, I think the statement is possession is three-quarters of the law. Is that correct? Nine-tenths. Nine-tenths, my goodness, that is pushing it. I wasn't going to say that performance is nine-tenths of legitimacy but performance is definitely more than half of legitimacy. Therefore, in reflecting on the rules, we would maybe have been better off by putting the requirement for performance higher up on our checklist rather than coming across the clash between rules and reality as we went down in our work. Now as a European, I will say that I am delighted that the work was rules-driven rather than not rules-driven, but still. Of course, our neocon friends were not in many cases against rules as such that they wanted to rewrite the rulebook, but they were wanting to rewrite the rulebook on the basis of a denial of reality. The result you get is, obviously, not phenomenal. So, what I would like to do in the next few minutes is, first of all, say a few words about the rules, that is the process part of legitimacy, if I can put it that way, and then the reality, the performance part. Rules; Article 51 has been mentioned. Article 51 has proven and continues to prove to be an extremely broad church. One of the reasons that makes it such an effective broad church is that you have the ex post facto requirement, that is you invoke Article 51, you don't have to go to the Security Council up front, but there is a presumption . well, not only the presumption but the text . that you have to render accounts to the Security Council. Sometimes that happens; sometimes that doesn't. But still, the proof is pretty much in the pudding. Indeed, there was, I think, a pretty broad consensus that we shouldn't be rewriting Article 51. Secondly, the UN Security Council; well, nobody, not even the most theological UN-hugging Europeans would say that you are not allowed to act under any circumstances outside of either Article 51 justifiable or without a UN Security Council mandate. In practice, we have seen two cases, one which was Kosovo because we didn't have a mandate to go to Kosovo. We had a basis, but we didn't have a mandate. We got the mandate ex post facto. The other example is Kolwezi, the Lubumbashi, the major Congolese city is taken over by Cuban-sponsored Angolese-Katangese folks back in 1978. number of hundreds of hostages are taken, both native and from the European population. The French, with American logistical support, decide to go in there on their own. Article 51? Well, not in the usual sense, and the interests of the French state were not at stake, just people were at stake, some of whom happen to be French. The UN Security Council was not convened. There wasn't even any time to do that. It was really a spur of the moment thing. Did anybody give us flak? A little bit; the Soviets were not too happy, but no, we didn't get flak because ex post facto, it was demonstrable that there was a true humanitarian emergency. That is very different from let us say in the NATO strategy, sure, it is better to have UN Security Council approval, but it is not absolutely necessary where you are, in effect, saying that the exception voids the rule. No, you don't mention the exception. You state the rule, and as is the case in life, if an exception arises, you have to be in a position to justify the exception. You don't simply cut yourself down by eliminating the rule by putting it at the same level as the exception. Performance; a lot of focus on new threats, Jim, you made, and you were quite right and we all did so. But it is not only the new threats which have arisen; it is also the change terms of doability of stuff, to use a Rumsfeldian word. Foreign intervention never was particularly easy. Forces of nationalism in Vietnam, for example, were a big problem. It was a very large military force. It wasn't simply communism. But new factors have arisen, and I would single out two. The first one is . this may strike some people here as a paradox or as something which can be definitely argued about . there is less asymmetry, not more asymmetry, in the conduct of warfare and the use of force. More people are acquiring weapons of mass destruction of the sort which a number of industrialized countries already had. The difference between having the Gatling gun and not having the Gatling gun at the end of the 19th Century has been very largely erased. Ask the guys who have to run the tech war in Iraq between the increasing sophistication of IEDs on the one hand and the targets of the IEDs. Technology spreads a lot easier. Knowledge is much more available. The financial and education barriers are much lower than they used to be in this respect even 20 or 30 years ago. What Alfred said about small arms also I think makes the point powerfully. In other words, irregular or unconventional or insurrectionary warfare of the sort we had to deal with Vietnam or Algeria 20, 30, 40 years ago, all other things being equal, has become more difficult because of greater symmetry, not more difficult because of greater asymmetry. The second big change in doability is all of us in the industrialized world . well, not all of us, the Japanese aren't there yet but the Europeans, nearly all, and the Americans . have, after the Cold War, gone into force projection. Force projection is priority in military terms. This makes a lot of sense, obviously since the Soviets are no longer in the middle of Europe. Force projection is expensive. It means going professional. If you are professional, you are competing on the labor market. The labor market in our countries is not at the same level as in Bangladesh or in Sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, our soldiers are increasingly rare because they are increasing costly. America could mobilize 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam. For a war which has been presented at least as important if not more important than Vietnam was in its own time . that is the war in Iraq . you can mobilize just barely, you can sustain just barely 140,000 soldiers. In the case of the Europeans, it is exactly the same. This has, for example, a consequence on UN operations not to mention other interventions. In 1993-1994, when we had the first big spike in the number of blue helmets, about 100,000 UN soldiers, more than half came from the industrialized countries. Today, we have a new spike, about 90,000, a bit more than 90,000, less than 10 percent of the blue helmets from the industrialized countries. Now, they come from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, you name it, and that is a very deep trend. Bottom lines, very quickly; bottom lines, if you are operating with rules, and we now move from the reality back to the rules. Even if you have rules, if you have a mandate, neocolonialism, that is putting in large numbers of soldiers and administrators for a long time to deal with a problem is a decreasingly sustainable option. We have been able to do so. We, the Europeans and, to a lesser extent, the Americans have been able to do so in Bosnia and Kosovo but because it is so bloody small. Kosovo is the size of Rhode Island. Afghanistan is the size of Texas. We are aiming . we, NATO . are aiming with 40,000 minus soldiers to do in Afghanistan what 30,000 soldiers barely achieved to do in Kosovo and what 110,000 soldiers from the Soviet Union, with somewhat comparable war aims I would add, did not manage to do in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. That is very bad news for contingencies like Darfur. Darfur is also the size of Texas. Whether there are any boots left in Britain, France, the U.S., Germany to send to Darfur, well, there may be a few but you will have to look very hard to find them. If that is the case, it is not the rules which are going to have to be rewritten. Duty to protect, responsibility to protect is excellent. All of you who mentioned that, you are absolutely right to mention it, but it is much more about organization. How do you organize the interface between the high costs, small numbers, high firepower assets of the industrialized world with the relatively cheaper, often high quality I would add, military manpower from the Third World? Now, we have some beginnings of that, for example, in the Congo in 2003, a quick in, quick out European Union operation followed by a much larger UN peacekeeping operation on the basis of the rules, Security Council resolution, all in very quick time, I would add. This is the sort of stuff I would argue the UN folks are going to have to be thinking much more about in the future than about rewriting the rules to protect, let us put it that way, the responsibility to protect. The second category is if you operate without rules, that is without a mandate, as has been the case with the Americans in Iraq, well, if you can avoid going somewhere where you haven't been invited, avoid going there. If you cannot avoid going there, you have to try to make it short. To take an extreme example of brevity, the Israeli attack against Iranian nuclear reactors. Israel said Article 51. Israel was roundly condemned by a unanimous Security Council. Unusual, the Americans voted against the Israelis. It was over even before it began, and it was successful. So it didn't really pose a problem. If you have to stay for a long time, you better be ready to pay the price, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, massive brutalization of these soldiers who have to resemble the enemy they are fighting. We all know the Battle of Algiers. You have been fighting it now for the last four years, three years. Rules are indeed essential, but the reality constrains us . Ivo, this is what you were suggesting at the end . much more considerably than one would want them to constrain us, even when one is considering rules-based operations. This obviously also applies to what we will talk about in the closed shop this afternoon on the nuclear side and proliferation aspects. Thank you. Thank you, Francois.