[Peace-discuss] The Aptly Named Anne-Marie Slaughter

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

  The Aptly Named Anne-Marie Slaughter

May 15, 2014
Steve Breyman, Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator 
<http://greenshadowcabinet.us/member-profile/7563>

    /"Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful
    and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to
    pure wind." ~ George Orwell/

*Rise to Prominence*

Anne-Marie Slaughter had a successful academic career at elite 
institutions. After receiving degrees from Princeton, Harvard Law, and 
Oxford, she taught law at the University of Chicago and Harvard 
University. She was the first woman Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at 
Princeton. Slaughter is currently President of the New America 
Foundation, a centrist DC think tank (Google's Eric Schmidt is chairman 
of the board of directors which includes Fareed Zakaria, Steven Rattner, 
Jonathan Soros, Francis Fukuyama, and James Fallows). /Foreign Policy/ 
named her to its annual list of the Top100 Global Thinkers in 2009, 
2010, and 2011. Slaughter lectures widely, is a member of the Trilateral 
Commission, and pens a monthly column for Project Syndicate 
<http://www.project-syndicate.org>.

Slaughter, an international law and international relations specialist, 
is best known to the public for her essay "Why Women Still Can't Have It 
All 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/>" 
in /The Atlantic/, a discussion-stimulating piece ("by far the most 
popular article ever published in that magazine" according to Wikipedia) 
that she later turned into a TED talk. The essay sprang from her stint 
as the first woman Director of Policy Planning at the State Department 
(2009-2011), a job once held by George Kennan. It was, according to 
Slaughter, her "foreign policy dream job," which she left for work-life 
balance reasons (she was mother to an unruly teenager) and because 
Princeton, like most universities, limits professional development leave 
to two years.

She did something courageous early in her career: as a student, 
Slaughter was part of the team headed by her mentor Abram Chayes that 
helped the Sandinistas 'successfully' sue the US in the World Court for 
supporting the Contras and mining the country's harbors. The Court ruled 
in 1986 against Washington on all sixteen counts, but the Reagan 
administration refused to acknowledge the court's jurisdiction. US 
Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick dismissed the Court 
as a "semi-legal, semi-juridical, semi-political body, which nations 
sometimes accept and sometimes don't." Numerous attempts by Nicaragua to 
have the UN Security Council enforce the ruling were vetoed by 
Kirkpatrick. This instance of righteous action is a rare occurrence in 
Slaughter's career.

By 2003 she was splitting hairs in a /New York /Times op-ed 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/good-reasons-for-going-around-the-un.html> 
over whether the invasion of Iraq was "illegal" or "illegitimate." The 
piece was a stomach-turning attempt to justify the invasion while 
appearing to uphold respect for multilateralism and international law. 
"Overall," Slaughter concluded, "everyone involved is still playing by 
the rules. But depending on what we find in Iraq, the rules may have to 
evolve, so that what is legitimate is also legal." This after admitting 
earlier in the essay that Bush initiated Shock and Awe by his lonesome, 
without allies or UN approval, which she---the renowned international 
lawyer---fails to rightly describe as a crime against humanity and a war 
crime.

*Reflecting on Five Years in Iraq*

The occasion of the fifth anniversary of the invasion found Slaughter 
whining 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annemarie-slaughter/stop-gotcha-politics-on-i_b_92593.html> 
about how Tom Hayden and others had misinterpreted some overly nuanced 
position of hers about preemption. Her real lament was that "gotcha 
politics on Iraq" outside the Beltway overshadowed what any fair-minded 
establishment observer should see as an Excusable Foreign Policy Error 
<http://www.opednews.com/articles/Inside-the-Fanciful-World-by-Steve-Breyman-Democracy_Empire_Hegemony_History-140503-34.html>. 


    "Hayden's post and many other commentaries surrounding the fifth
    anniversary of the invasion are a microcosm of the problem with our
    Iraq policy as a whole. The debate is still far too much about who
    was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion and far too
    little about how, in Obama's formulation, to be as careful getting
    out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. That does not mean that
    those of us who were wrong about Iraq -- with whatever nuances,
    explanations, and justifications we might care to offer -- do not
    have a great deal to answer for. We do. But it does mean that until
    we can fix the mess we are in, everyone who cares about what happens
    both to our troops and to the Iraqi people should force themselves
    to face up to the hard issues on the ground rather than indulging in
    the easy game of gotcha.

    I'll start by offering a metric for how to assess any candidate --
    and any expert's -- plan for Iraq. The test for the best policy
    should be the one that is most likely to bring the most troops home
    in the shortest time (to stop American casualties, begin repairing
    our military, and be able to redeploy badly needed military assets
    to Afghanistan), while also achieving the most progress on the goals
    that the administration stated publicly as a justification for
    invading in the first place: 1) ensuring that the Iraqi government
    could not develop nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction
    (done); 2) weaken terrorist groups seeking to attack us (this goal
    was based on false premises then, but is highly relevant now); 3)
    improve the human rights of the Iraqi people; and 4) establish a
    government in Iraq that could help stabilize and liberalize the
    Middle East. No policy can possibly achieve all of those goals. But
    the policy that offers the best chance on all five measures is the
    policy we should follow, in my view. And applying those measures to
    concrete policy proposals is the debate we should be having."

For Slaughter, the "problem with our Iraq policy as a whole" was not the 
sum of the ongoing and disproportionate application of historically 
destructive military force, Petraeus's lethal counterinsurgency 
doctrine, house raids, daily instances of "Collateral Murder 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0>," Abu Ghraib, porcine 
contractors snorkeling up ill-gotten gains while wreaking havoc, untold 
corruption both public and private, conspicuous incompetence 
<http://original.antiwar.com/steve-breyman/2005/09/01/a-question-of-competence/>, 
or a hundred other glaring and irreparable flaws. It was that critics of 
the war needed to "face up to the hard issues on the ground."

Slaughter has the audacity to lecture her critics through a set of goals 
the achievement of which she fails to see is made impossible by the 
continuation of the war. It's stunning, and telling, that her metric 
relies on the disingenuous post hoc war aims of the Bush administration. 
She counsels renewed destruction of Afghanistan (which foreshadows 
Obama's two surges, and which she surely recommended while in office). 
She does not see that to "fix the mess we're in" is an invitation to 
endless occupation. She fails to understand, as a large number of us who 
opposed the war in the first place did years earlier, that immediate 
withdrawal <http://www.antiwar.com/orig/breyman.php?articleid=7095> was 
the only sane Iraq exit strategy.

*Libya as Strategic Interest*

Slaughter was back in 2011 with several essays defending NATO's air 
campaign against Gaddafi, and the US role in it (several months after 
she quit Hillary Clinton's State Department to return to the academy). 
One 
<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/18cb7f14-ce3c-11e0-99ec-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk> 
of them celebrated the toughness of liberal interventionists like her 
who pushed the bombardment of Gaddafi's forces not just "for moral 
reasons" but also for reasons of "strategic interest." She defines 
strategic interest in this case as support for "democracy and human 
rights." "This value-based argument," claims Slaughter, "was 
inextricable from the interest-based argument. So enough with the 
accusations of bleeding heart liberals seeking to intervene for strictly 
moral reasons." It's bold to argue via omission that the invasion of 
Iraq---or the overthrow of Gaddafi---was not about oil (a word that does 
not appear in the essay). The interventions Slaughter supports tend to 
leave other peoples' hearts bleeding.

She's giddy about the early progress of the successor regime (much 
better than the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, she thinks): 
"The National Transitional Council 
<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d5c8fff6-ce5a-11e0-99ec-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ViWIrOy4> 
has a draft constitutional charter that is impressive in scope, 
aspirations and detail -- including 37 articles on rights, freedoms and 
governance arrangements." Her incaution and enthusiasm for military 
action (on behalf of both values and interests) doesn't merely stand out 
now, it was notable then too. Slaughter then blasts those of us 
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-in-africa-somalia-mali-and-the-war-powers-resolution/5319069> 
who complained that NATO's bombing onslaught exceeded the pertinent UN 
Security Council mandate (consequently souring the Russians and Chinese 
on any armed United Nations-backed intervention in the Syrian civil 
war), and that the Obama administration ought to have abided by the 
loose strictures of the War Powers Resolution.

    "The sceptics' response to all this, of course, is that it is too
    early to tell. In a year, or a decade, Libya could disintegrate into
    tribal conflict or Islamist insurgency, or split apart or lurch from
    one strongman to another. But the question for those who opposed the
    intervention is whether any of those things is worse than Col
    Gaddafi staying on by increasingly brutal means for many more years.
    Instability and worse would follow when he died, even had he
    orchestrated a transition.

    The sceptics must now admit that the real choice in Libya was
    between temporary stability and the illusion of control, or fluidity
    and the ability to influence events driven by much larger forces.
    Welcome to the tough choices of foreign policy in the 21st century.
    Libya proves the west can make those choices wisely after all."

It's not "too early to tell:" Libya has indeed disintegrated into the 
chaos of tribal militias, armed Islamist groups and criminal gangs. It's 
not possible in this essay to assess whether Libya is better off without 
Gaddafi than with him. It's clear however that "instability and worse" 
has followed since his downfall made possible by NATO aerial 
intervention. That was evident virtually immediately, we do not need to 
wait a decade.

On a deeper level, the 'better off' question is not the right one, 
especially for international lawyers. The flippant 
attitude---'regardless of illegitimacy or illegality, let's wait till 
the dust settles and the blood dries before passing judgment'---is 
common to Slaughter's popular foreign policy analyses. It betrays an 
unprincipled ruthlessness prized in Washington that explains her rise to 
and continued prominence. Transparently imperial US international 
policy, whether in Iraq, Libya or Ukraine, requires dressing up. 
Slaughter is a leading member of a class of professional apologists: the 
imperial costumers.

The "real choice" in Libya was between letting Libyans solve their own 
problems and great power intervention on behalf of domestic elites soon 
overrun by forces NATO could not control. There was no "illusion of 
control:" it's precisely because the West could not control Gaddafi that 
he had to go (recall Reagan's bombing of the despot's desert tents in 
1986), Tripoli's rendition of the Arab Spring provided the opportunity 
and excuse. Note the absence of similar interventions in Egypt, Bahrain 
or Tunisia. NATO's "ability to influence events driven by much larger 
forces" is today close to zero.

*Iraq Ten Years in - Re-Roll the Film*

On the tenth anniversary of the George W. Bush's aggression against 
Iraq, Slaughter was party to one 
<http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112701/iraq-war-10th-anniversary-symposium> 
of several loathsome public displays of ersatz contrition (or worse) by 
pundits and policymakers, writing:

    "Looking back, it is hard to remember just how convinced many of us
    were that weapons of mass destruction would be found. . . . I now
    see the decision to invade Iraq as cynical, tragic, immoral, and
    irresponsible to the point of folly. I do not think that the
    thousands of U.S. and allied lives lost were lost in vain: Only time
    can tell what Iraq will become; how the Iraqi people will look back
    on the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the ensuing ten years of
    violence; and what role Iraq will play in the larger Middle East. It
    is very difficult to imagine any transition from Saddam to
    post-Saddam without some violence and political upheaval in a nation
    as fractured religiously and ethnically as Iraq. But in hindsight,
    the U.S. decision to spend tens of billions of U.S. dollars; to
    ignore all knowledge, planning, and expertise about Iraq with regard
    to what should happen when the bullets stopped flying; and to ignore
    the opposition of many of our closest allies in deciding when and
    how to take action is virtually indefensible. And I could not in
    good conscience look an Iraqi widow, parent, or child in the eye and
    tell them that the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost served a
    larger purpose, which is a burden that every American who did not
    actively demonstrate against the war must carry.

    In the end, Iraq served as my political coming of age in the way
    that the Vietnam War was a coming of age for the generation ten to
    fifteen years ahead of me. Never again will I trust a single
    government's interpretation of data when lives are at stake, perhaps
    especially my own government. And I will not support the
    international use of force in a war of choice rather than necessity
    without the approval of some multilateral body, one that includes
    countries that are directly affected by both the circumstances in
    the target country and by the planned intervention. If the situation
    on the ground in a country is not bad enough to mobilize at least
    some of its neighbors to action, then it should not mobilize far
    away military powers.

    Iraq remains a country in pain. The United States will be paying its
    financial and human debts from the Iraq war for decades to come. If
    I could re-roll the film, I would stop the invasion. Instead we
    should mark a sober anniversary by reflecting on all that the U.S.,
    its allies, and the Iraqis have lost. We can only hope we have
    gained a lesson in humility."

There's nothing "hard to remember" about how easily academics and 
pundits fell for the distortions, exaggerations and inventions of 
Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Judith Miller. It remains a 
wonderment eleven years later. Had Slaughter been paying attention, 
she'd have seen it before in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic in the 
sixties, Cambodia and Iran in the seventies, El Salvador and Guatemala 
in the eighties, and Iraq and Panama in the nineties, Afghanistan and 
Iraq (again) in the aughts. And she'd be seeing it once more in Ukraine 
today. The song remains the same, only the singers have changed.

In her defense of NATO's action in Libya, and again here, Slaughter 
falls back on the 'there would've been violence anyway' claim regarding 
regime change in both countries. What this rationalization obscures is 
the significant difference in moral, political, and yes, strategic terms 
of indigenous vs. external regime change. The same goes for 
revolutionary vs. expeditionary violence. The legitimacy of a government 
brought to power by the intervention of foreign powers is inferior to 
that which took office through its own agency. Violence to topple a 
leader considered unfriendly by leading powers is not the same violence 
of domestic actors forcefully overthrowing an autocrat.

W's Iraq adventure was the "political coming of age" for someone---with 
advanced degrees in international relations---forty-four years old at 
the time of the invasion? This self-characterization unintentionally 
doubles as admission of extreme egotism, civic somnambulism, and/or 
ideological blindness that helps explain why Slaughter, despite her 
promises, repeats her mistakes.

Smart of Slaughter to take the long-view as to whether dead US soldiers 
and Marines died in vain. She'll lionize American war dead but not Iraqi 
war dead? Reversing Slaughter's valence, she could "in good conscience 
look an [American] widow, parent, or child in the eye and tell them that 
the . . . thousands of [American] lives lost served a larger purpose"? 
Slaughter fails to understand---perhaps because her political coming of 
age is so recent---that those of us who did actively demonstrate against 
the war (before the invasion and after) also carry the "burden" as the 
calamity took place in our names, under our flag, using our tax dollars, 
and with the lives of our fellow citizens.

*Stopping Russia Starts in Syria*

Slaughter's most recent column 
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/anne-marie-slaughter-on-how-us-intervention-in-the-syrian-civil-war-would-alter-vladimir-putin-s-calculus-in-ukraine> 
for Project Syndicate revolves around the devilishly clever idea of 
punishing Putin for his actions in Ukraine by pummeling Assad's forces 
in Syria. This course of action has myriad benefits, not least of which 
is that it would permit "Barack Obama to demonstrate that he can order 
the offensive use of force in circumstances other than secret drone 
attacks or covert operations." Presidents are not real presidents unless 
they send in the 82nd Airborne. Slaughter desperately misses the 
transparent application of American military violence (Afghanistan 
doesn't attract the press coverage it once did). The opaque, deniable, 
off camera variety won't cut it. War in the shadows disappoints.

Parsing Putin's motives for annexing Crimea, Slaughter rejects the 
neoconservative claim that Obama's reticence to use direct US armed 
force in Syria emboldened Russia to grab the peninsula. She thinks it 
more likely that Putin wanted to redirect his public's attention away 
from the "country's failing economy." (Wasn't that what the Sochi 
Olympics were about?). She does not imagine that NATO expansion and US 
meddling in Ukrainian politics may have been factors. Unfortunately, 
Putin now has the upper hand, and "Western use of force, other than to 
send arms to a fairly hapless Ukrainian army, is not part of the equation."

    "That is a problem. In the case of Syria, the US, the world's
    largest and most flexible military power, has chosen to negotiate
    with its hands tied behind its back for more than three years. This
    is no less of a mistake in the case of Russia, with a leader like
    Putin who measures himself and his fellow leaders in terms of crude
    machismo."

It does not matter that American public opinion was solidly opposed to 
missile strikes against Assad or that Obama was unlikely to receive the 
congressional approval he sought. The ends justify the means for Slaughter.

    "A US strike against the Syrian government now would change the
    entire dynamic. It would either force the regime back to the
    negotiating table with a genuine intention of reaching a settlement,
    or at least make it clear that Assad will not have a free hand in
    re-establishing his rule."

Direct US military action in Syria would not have 
<http://www.nytexaminer.com/2012/10/neocons-to-the-front-five-reasons-to-not-intervene-in-syria-now/>, 
cannot, and would not resolve the conflict; its effects would be far 
worse than "crude machismo." Even the indirect sort---supplying 
currently preferred rebels with anti-armor and anti-aircraft 
missiles---will only prolong the suffering. Eliminating "Syria's 
fixed-wing aircraft" as Slaughter calls for would make Assad no more 
likely to negotiate with the al-Qaeda affiliates that make up the vast 
bulk of the armed Syrian opposition. She likely believes that downing 
Assad's air force can be done 'surgically;' she appears not to 
understand that even such an 'easy mission' would result in dead babies, 
collateral damage killed by errant missiles, crashing planes and 
misplaced smart bombs. Nor does she estimate the human cost of 
restricting Assad's "free hand" in the middle of a heartrending 
humanitarian disaster.

There's the small matter that a US strike on Syria without the backing 
of the United Nations Security Council would violate international law. 
Good lawyer that she is, Slaughter believes she's found a workaround:

    "[E]ven Russia agreed in February to Resolution 2139
    <http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2014/sc11292.doc.htm>, designed
    to compel the Syrian government to increase flows of humanitarian
    aid to starving and wounded civilians. Among other things,
    Resolution 2139 requires that "all parties immediately cease all
    attacks against civilians, as well as the indiscriminate employment
    of weapons in populated areas, including shelling and aerial
    bombardment, such as the use of barrel bombs...."

Too bad for Slaughter that Resolution 2139 does not include an 
enforcement clause; there's no 'by all means necessary' in the document. 
The Chinese and Russians would not permit that provision given their 
distrust of Obama following NATO's liberal reading of a similar 
Resolution concerning Libya. Slaughter conveniently never draws the 
connection (it would make demonizing Putin more difficult), yet proffers 
the same advice today. No matter, the US, and perhaps a European or NATO 
ally or two, could commence hostilities, get the job done, and only then 
evince concern for international law: "After the strike, the US, France, 
and Britain should ask for the Security Council's approval of the action 
taken, as they did after NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999." Such 
approval seems less forthcoming this time around.

"In Ukraine," thinks Slaughter, "Putin would be happy to turn a peaceful 
opposition's ouster of a corrupt government into a civil war." Apart 
from her problematic description of the opposition, this assessment 
conceals that Ukraine is a major Russian trading partner, and the main 
country through which Russia ships natural gas to Europe. Given the 
centrality of those gas sales to the Russian economy, and the near 
certainty a civil war would destroy pipelines and other infrastructure, 
it's fair to say Putin would not be "happy" with a Ukrainian civil war.

    "Putin may believe, as Western powers have repeatedly told their own
    citizens, that NATO forces will never risk the possibility of
    nuclear war by deploying in Ukraine. Perhaps not. But the Russian
    forces destabilizing eastern Ukraine wear no insignia. Mystery
    soldiers can fight on both sides."

Slaughter is unsure about whether NATO should risk nuclear war by 
deploying military forces to Ukraine? Is she calling for the deployment 
of NATO special operations forces as "mystery soldiers"? Heads of state 
should probably avoid soliciting parliamentary approval for such 
deployments as that would spoil the mystery. Would she have NATO mystery 
soldiers shoot it out with Putin's mystery soldiers?

    "Obama took office with the aim of ending wars, not starting them.
    But if the US meets bullets with words, tyrants will draw their own
    conclusions. So will allies; Japan, for example, is now wondering
    how the US will respond should China manufacture a crisis over the
    disputed Senkaku Islands.

    To lead effectively, in both the national and the global interest,
    the US must demonstrate its readiness to shoulder the full
    responsibilities of power. Striking Syria might not end the civil
    war there, but it could prevent the eruption of a new one in Ukraine."

Slaughter provides no guidelines for when the US should meet bullets 
with bullets, but it appears to be everywhere all the time lest it 
appear to appease tyrants. Obama was recently in Japan to reassure Abe, 
in a clear message to China, that he had Japan's back in disputes over 
the small rocky uninhabited islands. With her call for the US "to 
shoulder the full responsibilities of power" it's as if Slaughter were 
auditioning for the title role in a twenty-first century remake of /Dr. 
Strangelove/.

Despite the pious hope expressed in her mea culpa on the tenth 
anniversary of the invasion, Slaughter did not "learn a lesson in 
humility" from Iraq. She is not to be believed when she cries "never again."

    "Never again will I trust a single government's interpretation of
    data when lives are at stake, perhaps especially my own government.
    And I will not support the international use of force in a war of
    choice rather than necessity without the approval of some
    multilateral body, one that includes countries that are directly
    affected by both the circumstances in the target country and by the
    planned intervention. If the situation on the ground in a country is
    not bad enough to mobilize at least some of its neighbors to action,
    then it should not mobilize far away military powers."

Yet we have her advice about how to punish both Syria and Russia for 
Putin's behavior in Ukraine, a crisis replete with misrepresentations, 
misinterpretations, and misstatements emanating from Washington. And a 
crisis thus far lacking armed intervention approved by a multilateral 
body or neighbors mobilized to military action. Rather than an illegal 
attack on Syria or covert action in Ukraine, Slaughter should counsel 
her favorite "far away military power" to stand down.

Might Americans (and the rest of the world) sleep more soundly now that 
Anne-Marie Slaughter no longer sits around the tables of power in 
Washington? Maybe. There's also the prospect that she's become even more 
dangerous to world peace. Obama's foreign policy is made almost 
completely within the White House (the State and Defense Departments 
implement but do not make much policy in this administration). Obama's 
White House and Clinton-Kerry's State Department are highly attuned to 
criticism from Capitol Hill, and work feverishly to anticipate and head 
it off it through policies amenable to John McCain and Lindsay Graham. A 
high public profile was not possible during Slaughter's government 
service. Her frequent lectures, TV appearances and op-eds since 
returning to the private sector may propel her voice further and farther 
today than ever before. Her post at the New America Foundation provides 
the largest public audience of her career. The "About" section of the 
Foundation's website includes this statement: "Abroad, the United States 
has yet to fashion sustainable foreign and defense policies that will 
protect its citizens and interests in a rapidly integrating world." 
Should we listen to Anne-Marie Slaughter, it never will.

~Steve Breyman <http://greenshadowcabinet.us/member-profile/7563>/serves 
as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Ecology 
Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet./

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