Sara Bloomfield: Welcome to the Museum. It's great to see a
wonderful audience here. I'm Sara Bloomfield,
the director of this institution, and it's
my great privilege to welcome you today on
behalf of our partners the United States Institute
of Peace and the Brookings Institution. At
this museum, our most important message is
not just that the Holocaust happened but that
it didn't have to happen, it was preventable.
And we remind the public every day that the
Nazis were in power for eight long years before
they began the mass murder of Europe's Jews.
So how different would the world we live in
today be if we had heeded those warning signs
from the 1930s? Perhaps if there had been
something like R2P, would that have made a
difference? This symposium and the report
that we will release publically today will
take a critical look at the evolution and
the application of the R2P doctrine, which
as we know is starting to emerge as an important
international norm guiding many countries
in how they treat the issue of genocide prevention
and response. However, here in the United
States, this issue is not well known. And
in keeping with our mission as an educational
institution, one of our goals is to explain
the concept of R2P to a broader audience while
also taking a hard look at how well it has
worked in practice and perhaps offering some
practical suggestions for how the US government
might strengthen the application of R2P. I
want to thank the members of the R2P working
group many of whom are with us today. You
can see a list of all of these distinguished
people in the back of the report. But I'd
like to acknowledge them. Each of them as
you can see represent various fields from
formal government officials, academics, journalists,
business leaders, and policy analysts from
across the political spectrum. And as you
can imagine with a group like that there were
many passionate disagreements, always respectful.
But there was broad consensus around one issue
and that is that we must rededicate ourselves
to a greater focus on prevention. I want to
0:02:31.d360,0:02:36.650
acknowledge your partners over the last 18
months, the Brookings Institution and the
US Institute for Peace. We are delighted to
have with us today Martin Indyk the Senior
Vice President of the Brookings Institution
and Jim Marshall, the President of USIP. And
we're grateful to both of these institutions
not only for their partnership but for lending
the full weight and influence of their institutions
to this issue. To promote further conversation
on our topic today, each of our organizations
will also be live tweeting using hash tag
R2P and at the handles on the slide behind
me and in your programs. And finally I want
to acknowledge two prominent Americans who
co-chaired the working group and co-authored
this report. Both of them have been great
friends to the Museum, they are deeply dedicated
to the mission and known well to all of you.
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright's
distinguished record of public service need
not be repeated here. You all know it. But
I would like to give a personal plug for her
remarkable and eloquent book Prague Winter.
Ambassador Richard Williamson is a nonresident
senior fellow with the Brookings Institution
and has served in several major positions
under both Presidents Bush and President Reagan.
We have worked with Secretary Albright and
Ambassador Williamson on a variety of projects
over the last several years and I want to
take this moment to again thank them for their
tireless commitment to our bold aspirations.
So in a minute we're going to hear from co-chairs
for discussion moderated by David Ignatius,
the respected columnist for the Washington
Post where he writes about a range of international
issues. But I just want to leave you with
one final thought. Next year is the hundredth
anniversary of the beginning of World War I,
which as we know helped set off a century
of genocide and mass atrocities. In the aftermath
of that war, President Wilson said quote "We
are not put into the world to sit still and
know. We are put in it to act." Of course
the world has changed dramatically in the
last century but I believe those words resonate
more than ever today. So please join me in
welcoming our panels to the stage.
David Ignatius: So I'm David Ignatius, a columnist for the
Washington Post. I want to thank Sara Bloomfield
for that wonderful introduction. Just to repeat
we have an opportunity this morning to hear
about the fruits of a year spent studying
the question of how the Responsibility to
Protect can become more meaningful and powerful
in the world. It was sponsored by three wonderful
organizations. I want to repeat them because
the work they do is so important: the US Institute
of Peace, the Brookings Institution, and the
Holocaust Museum. I want to turn to the two
co-chairs of the working group who guided
this study, former secretary of state Madeleine
Albright and ambassador Rich Williamson who
was America's special envoy to the Sudan during
the Presidency of George W. Bush that has
a distinguished record beyond that and ask
each of them starting with Ambassador Williamson
to give this audience a sense of what after
a year of study they have concluded about
how to make this R2P not just a doctrine but
a reality and a basis for action in the world.
So Ambassador Williamson, please start.
Richard Williamson: Thank you, David. First I 
want to thank those
of you who were interested in coming here
today. I want to thank the three institutions,
especially the Holocaust Museum and Michael
Abramowitz for being so helpful. I especially
want to thank my friend and colleague Madeleine
Albright who has been a terrific collaborator
on this and other things. I just want to take
a slight step back. The United States like
other countries first should be driven by
a desire for their own national security.
That should be the dominant claimant, then
other vital interests many of them economic.
But what has made the United States different
was not only that it was founded on a belief
in human rights, but in the last 100 years
we have allowed it to animate our foreign
policy. And America is best when it allows
that to happen. And our interests are served
and the world is more secure. When I was up
in New York as ambassador for special political
affairs I dealt with peacekeeping and became
familiar with what was going on in the Eastern
Congo and in Sudan. And I was continually
shocked about the capacity of man's inhumanity
to man. Then when I was special envoy to Sudan
I spent time in Darfur and Chad and South
Sudan visiting every time with refugees who
had gone through horrific experiences. I came
to believe that what President Clinton and
Secretary Albright did in responding to the
crisis and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and
Kosovo was important not only for that region,
for Europe, but for United States and the
world. When President Bush joined the consensus
for the Responsibility to Protect in 2005,
the United States agreed to this concept and
I felt it was valuable to try to help strengthen
it, which is why I sought out Madeleine to
join me in this effort. The Responsibility
to Protect isn't the answer but hopefully
it can contribute by being an emerging norm
that gains greater acceptances by governments
to make it easier for the decision makers
to do something early when these crises break
out. Anyone who has had the privilege and
honor of being in the Situation Room with
the President wrestling with these sorts of
decisions know they are always tough. They
are case-by-case. You can't do everything
but just because you can't do everything doesn't
mean you shouldn't do some things. And the
Responsibility to Protect and the implementation
of a Genocide Prevention Task Force that Madeleine
chaired with Secretary Cohen tried to lay
out steps that can be taken to make it easier
to give early notice to make a difference.
So I think that's why we both believe in R2P
- all three pillars - trying to get the United
States to have the political will to help
lead with others to stop atrocity crimes before
they become too horrific and the death despair
and agony becomes too great.
David Ignatius: Secretary Albright?
Madeleine Albright: Sara mentioned that it's 
about to be 100 years
since the beginning of World War I. And she
quoted Woodrow Wilson. I am a person that
was born in Czechoslovakia, a country that
came into existence because of Woodrow Wilson
and the Fourteen Points and the real ideas
of self-determination and that people should
live in their own sovereign countries. I left
Czechoslovakia during World War II and came
to the United States when the communists took
over and I wrote a book about what really
happened in terms of the beginnings of World
War II and what were the warning signs? And
one could say, nobody sitting in this room
however would say it, is that we didn't know
what was happening during the Holocaust. We
now know everything that's going on everywhere
as a result of information technology and
our capability of being more knowledgeable
about the internal affairs of other countries.
And while what happened with Czechoslovakia
from a war-weary England and France led Neville
Chamberlain to say "Why should we care about
people in faraway places with unpronounceable
names?" And that is something that I think
echoes in our own approach as we look at the
various issues that are out there in the world,
trying to figure out when we do know what
is going on somewhere whether we should care
about people in faraway places with unpronounceable
names, and what is the responsibility of the
international community - having kept in mind
very much what Rich said about what our national
security issues are. Is there a way that the
international community that was not able
to prevent World War I and World War II whether
there's something that can be done now to
protect those and prevent the kinds of things
that lead to examples of never again? So this
is a very practical approach. We do understand
that it's a difficult concept and we are going
to talk about that. And one of the reasons
that we wrote the report and we're so pleased
that everybody is here - I'm really blown
away by the number of people that are here
- because we think that it is not a fully
understood concept that needs to be seen as
part of an international norm that is in the
process of evolving and having all of you
understand it, and question it and question
us, will we hope lead to the evolution and
understanding of the concept. And David, thank
you very, very much for being here with us.
You and I talked about this and I'm very pleased
that you-respected is an understatement when
one talks about what you are able to do in
your writings. Thank you very much.
David Ignatius: I'd like to just stay with the report for
a minute so that we give the audience a little
flavor of what's new in it, and I want to
ask you about two particular aspects that
your working group ended up recommending as
a way to make these three pillars on which
R2P is based. If you don't know the literature
the three pillars are: first, every state
has a duty to protect its people from genocide,
ethnic cleansing; second, the international
community has a responsibility to assist states
in doing this; and third, in the absence of
the first two, countries have to be ready
to take action under the charter and this
report says we need to implement those three
pillars more aggressively but there are two
things that caught my eye in your report and
I want to ask you about them. Maybe each of
you could comment on one. One is greater use
of the International Criminal Court, the international
organization of legal action that can move
early against specific people so that you
don't get to the stage where wholesale military
intervention is required. And second, the
use of technology, the use of these modern
technologies that Secretary Albright mentioned
to give early warning of disasters that are
taking place that might not be understood
and make those visible to you and maybe each
of you could briefly talk about those two
innovative ideas. Ambassador Williamson, maybe
you could start with the ICC.
Richard Williamson: Sure.
David Ignatius: And Secretary Albright, maybe you could talk
a minute about the monitoring.
Richard Williamson: To me the issue on the ICC is the issue of
accountability. I think it's very important
and it's something in the last seventy years
the United States has taken some leadership
in. The United States took the lead in forming
the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials after they
effectively held some of the worst criminals
to account for those atrocities. There was
a presumption that this would continue. It
got lost. For example, after the Cambodian
Killing Fields no one discussed the need for
that. But then as the 20th century, the most
brutal, the most victims in mankind's history
- the pace picked up in the 1990s with Rwanda,
Bosnia, Kosovo. The United States took the
lead in helping form the ICTY, ICTR. Also
with the Sierra Leone Special Court and others,
the ICC is another manifestation. The last
three administrations two democrat, one republican,
no one sent the ICC up for ratification. There
are problems with it. But as our report says
it also is a vehicle that sometimes can be
very useful to try to get accountability.
The US allowed the referral of Darfur to go
to the ICC, contributed intelligence to strengthen
the case. Later when the African Union was
making an effort for a so-called Article 16
to stop that, the US went out, with President
Bush's authority, to say we will veto that
and that faded away. So I think trying to
continue to develop the principle of accountability
is important because in the end most of these
conflicts are not spontaneous combustion.
They are the result of powerful people, either
trying to stay in power or get to power and
willing to open the gates of hell to do that.
Will accountability change it? Maybe some
cases. It will make it a more expensive decision.
And that's good, just like the R2P concept
is not an answer but hopefully is a step forward
to ending these types of terrible situations.
David Ignatius: Secretary Albright, do you want to talk a
little bit about monitoring?
Madeleine Albright: Well first of all let me just say on the accountability, it's a very essential point but the other
is frankly that we've talked about is that
the War Crimes Tribunals as well as the ICC
is a way to have individual guilt assigned
and collective guilt expunged, which then
makes it possible for people to deal with
teach other. So there are various parts of
it and I think that while it's not perfect
and there are a number of different ways that
people are looking at whether it's an inducement
for people to behave well or actually a way
for them not to because they don't- there's
no immunity and so anything that is new has
its issues as it gets worked out, but I'm
very glad that there has been an evolution
kind of in this whole concept of international
norms on it. The monitoring is interesting
because what is, first of all, none of this
can work without the cooperation of nongovernmental
organizations that are on the ground that
can really help to provide information very
quickly about what is going on. What we do
now have the technology is a two-edged sword
in many ways in terms of our new societies.
In this particular venue, I think it is a
very positive one because with people first
of all are able to transmit information very
quickly through mobile phones which there
are many more than landlines in the developing
world. And also with photographs that they
can take. All the various video equipment
that even the simplest places have and the
monitoring makes a big difference because
then it isn't just kind of hearsay but allows
people to know what is going on. It does create
a need to act, however. That may be I think
from the perspective of this report is positive,
but there are those in some places who would
prefer not to know. But I do think that it,
there has been an entirely new way of knowing
what is going on.
David Ignatius: Should readers of your report begin thinking
about a world where we have blue surveillance
drones over key crisis areas monitoring the
possibility of terrible mass atrocities and
getting word to people who can act?
Madeleine Albrigth: We actually do, over Mali, that's what's going
on and I happen to think that, if they are
used for surveillance, I think is a very important
part of this. And I do think the more we know
the more equipped we are. We still come down
to the question of then what? But I do think
also if people begin to recognize that they
are being watched, I think that that in itself
may be also a help in preventing.
Richard Williamson: Yeah and we've seen George Clooney and John
Prendergast's effort with satellites to keep
the Sudan border region viewed and it's very
helpful I think especially, just to refer
to Sudan, when you've got government sometimes
both in Juba and Khartoum that won't let international
NGOs go there or the U.N. so you don't have
on-the-ground observers. So yeah, it's an
additional tool to be used.
David Ignatius: I want to turn to the really difficult question
that R2P discussions raise and that is whether
and how to act in difficult situations. We
might do that by just looking at developments
since 2005 when the R2P concept was endorsed
at a U.N. World Summit and since then we've
had atrocities in Darfur, in Sri Lanka, in
Libya, which we'll talk about more in a minute,
and most notably recently in Syria. And these
have all been difficult problems for the international
community to respond to in a decisive way
that would stop the atrocities. They are tests
of R2P but you'd have to say that they haven't
been successful so far so let me ask you to
address those tough questions that we're facing
in our real world and offer some thoughts
about them. Secretary Albright? You want to
begin?
Madeleine Albright: Well I think what is 
important is to go back
to as you described the three pillars because
I think that people automatically think that
we're going to militarily intervene somewhere.
The military intervention part is the last
step not the first steps. And I think that
the areas that have been the most difficult
are the ones where not enough attention has
been paid early on. Nobody can speak about
Darfur better than Rich Williamson and I think
that is partially a lack of recognition of
various elements on the ground including desertification,
movement of a lot of refugees, so I think
that we have not seen the early signs. Sri
Lanka has been a very long, ongoing, complicated
issue where we haven't been able to get any
purchase over either side, frankly, whether
it's the Tamils or whether it's the government
are trying to figure out how to get at it.
Where we have been successful and I think
it's interesting in terms of Kenya where in
the set of elections that took place in 2008
led to a lot of violence and then we were
able to figure out how to get some international
action in there to try to not only diffuse
the violence but also set up a procedure which
allowed the next elections to--and had an
international negotiator, Kofi Annan went
in in order to do a lot of diplomatic work
and then worked in order to not have this
happen again. The same as in Cote d'Ivoire
where in fact the person that was elected
couldn't take office. The guy that was the
incumbent didn't want to leave. Again there
was international attention to these areas
ahead of time and did not require an on-the-ground
intervention. And so one of the things that
we wanted to point to as success stories are
those where the first two pillars are used
or looked at and the ones that are failures
is where you haven't been able to get in early
enough or haven't seen the signs early enough.
Which leads to this issue of the Atrocities
Prevention Board that does in fact set up
a system within our government where some
early warning systems then yet transmitted
through our government and then into the international
community.
David Ignatius: Ambassador?
Richard Williamson: Thank you, I just reinforce some of what Secretary
Albright said. I think one of the difficulties
with people looking at the Responsibility
to Protect is the assumption that you will
have robust action right away. And as we try
to emphasize, just like the US, if you use
Secretary Albright's words, has a large foreign
policy toolbox. There is a large toolbox of
what can be done to respond to these types
of crisis. And the earlier intervention is
both the cheapest and least kinetic. And Kofi's
role in brokering the post-election with Odinga
and others was a good example of it, Cote
d'Ivoire a good example of it. I think Libya
has a whole bunch of lessons to be teased
out but as you know there continues to be
a genocide in slow motion in Sudan. There
are terrible atrocities in Syria and I'd rather
say that just emphasizes why those of us who
believe that it's both in our security interest
and consistent with our values to stop these
spreading atrocities need things like the
Atrocity Prevention Board, need things like
the commitment of Congress, need things like
organizing the bureaucracy of the US government
better to respond, and working most importantly
with international partners to help us. The
real lesson there is just we have to do better
and it's going to take a while but progress
has been made I believe.
David Ignatius: I just want to push a little bit harder on
the question of Syria because that's taking
place before the world's eyes right now. We
have what appear to be documented allegations
of the use of chemical weapons against civilian
populations. We have allegations by the government
of atrocities committed by the rebels and
we have a situation in which the violence,
loss of life, potential dissolution of the
country move forward every day and despite
the heroic efforts by Kofi Annan and his successor
Lakhdar Brahimi as the international communities
representatives we have no apparent movement
toward any diplomatic resolution. And I just
would say how should the R2P community view
this? Not simply the terrible bloodshed but
the political difficulty of dealing with it?
Madeleine Albright: Well I do think it is obviously the most difficult
situation that is out there at the moment
and decision makers are in fact wrestling
with some solution. I have to say I'm trying
in my own mind to figure out how we got there.
And I do think that a lot of it has to do
with what happened in the Arab world generally.
And if I might say last winter I was in a
meeting. I was having a public discussion
with an Arab and I said, "It's the winter
so we can't talk about the Arab Spring. We
can call it the Awakening." And he got furious
at me and he said "That is such an insult.
The Arabs haven't been asleep all this time."
And I said "So what would you call it?" And
he said "Arab troubles." And I said "What
about Arab opportunity?" So just kind of those
four phrases indicate the different thinking
about it. And I don't-- I'm not trying to
obfuscate here but I think basically for whatever
reasons we didn't fully understand what was
happening across the Arab world. That did
come as a surprise. I think that needs to
be looked at with some clarity and a real
objective approach to it. But I believe that
what happened in Syria is a part of that.
Having met both Hafez Assad the father who
was nicknamed the Lion but was more like a
mule and his son, Bashar Assad, for whom when
I met him I always thought that one and one
made two but two and two never made four,
so kind of trying out figure out what they
were doing. And so there was that issue and
then I think, frankly, people's minds were
somewhere else and were not if I might say
so - it's very hard as a former decision maker
to criticize those in office - but basically
whether not enough attention was paid. I think
that part of the issue here and this is the
difficulty of R2P is to analyze whom you're
going to help. Who are the people? And part
of it has to do with the pillars again because
it is the responsibility of a leader of his
country, it's usually his, to in fact protect
the people in that country. That is the responsibility.
To care about the people, the territory and
the way of life, so the opposite was happening
is happening in Syria. So then I do think
the international community, and not the United
States but the international community, as
a whole has really failed in trying to find
the right tools to deal with it. And the US
is not the only member of the international
community. And that leads to one of the major
issues with R2P that I think we have to recognize
and that is that it requires the approval
of the Security Council. And having been there
and done that on Kosovo, where it was clear
that in the Security Council that the Russians
were going to veto that, we took it out of
that cul-de-sac and put it with NATO. And
so I do believe that R2P is a very, very good
international community approach, but personally
I never believe we should get stuck in a cul-de-sac.
David Ignatius: Well said. Ambassador?
Richard Williamson: Thank you. These are really tough decisions
made more difficult by the fatigue of the
American public as a result of overreach from
the Bush administration and the poor events
in post-conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I would have wished we had been more leaning
in on Syria. But if I could I think one of
the lessons of Syria is when you don't act,
the cost. There has been a bleed with 600,000
Syrian refugees in Jordan, a critical ally,
where the king was already suffering with
other issues because of the Arab Spring. There
has been a bleed with refugees into Turkey
and two instances where there actually were
missiles filed into our NATO ally, where we
have certain treaty commitments if it gets
out of hand. Lebanon has been affected; Hezbollah's
involved, Israel is threatened. It's become
a proxy war for a rising Shi'a Tehran against
the Sunni states, the Gulf States that are
friends and allies. And the casualties have
gone up. President Obama here at the Holocaust
Museum in April discussed how genocide and
ethnic cleansing are a national security threat.
I think we're seeing that today. Hopefully
it will inform smarter people to think through
this and also as they weigh difficult decisions
keep that in mind because the costs in Syria
are tragic for the over 100,000 people who
have died and even more who have been wounded.
It's a tragedy that's going to be ongoing
for a long time and probably a functioning
failed state for a while. But it's a tragedy
because of US interests that have been compromised
and challenged and may yet force us to take
action that will be more expensive than if
we'd begun a long time ago.
Madeleine Albright: Could I just add I think that the points that
Rich made about being tired, and I refer back
to my opening statement. The British and French
were exhausted from World War I and they had
lost a whole generation of young people. Their
budget was a mess. Their military infrastructure
was questioned, and Neville Chamberlain decided
that in fact he would do anything for peace.
And they made a deal over the heads of the
Czechoslovaks with the Germans and Italians
and that country was sold down the river.
And I think that we need to recognize, and
Rich said it, is we are tired from the War
in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan. And people
feel that we have not paid enough attention
to things in this country which I happen to
believe. And the question then is how do we
have a national discussion about this? Are
we in fact in danger of what I've called the
inkblot spread of Syria and its longer term
effect on our strategic interest. Or do we
in fact legitimately spend a lot of time thinking
about what is going on in this country? And
so I return on the following thing which is,
President Clinton said it first and I said
it so often it became identified with me - "We
are the indispensable nation," which we said
at a time that Americans were also tired from
the Gulf War and too many years of not paying
attention to the United States. There is nothing,
nothing in the definition of indispensable
that says alone. It just means the United
States needs to be engaged, and I think and
I deliberately said the international community
has failed on this. It is the United States
needs to be a part of this but we do not have
to respond to this all alone and R2P is not
just America in there. And therefore we need
to do more in terms of recognizing what the
problems are and that it's an international
responsibility, and that is where I think
we need more action and we need to have a
discussion in the United States about what
our national interests really are.
David Ignatius: There is a big takeaway in what you both just
said that war weariness does not absolve a
country's moral responsibility to act. I want
to turn to a question that I think is rarely
raised in discussions of R2P but is one that
has interested me for some years and I'm going
to characterize it as the moral hazard problem
that goes along with an international commitment
that there's a Responsibility to Protect.
And by that what I mean is there is something
that I sometimes call the power of the weak.
By that I mean the ability to start conflicts
that you can't finish - hoping, believing
that the international committee will come
to your rescue when you are at death's door.
We have seen bits of this in many countries
as you know and I want to ask you how you
think sensible people involved in the R2P
debate should deal with this question to make
sure that this international commitment isn't
taken by people to do things that if they
had to be entirely responsible for themselves
and their communities they might not undertake.
Ambassador Williamson?
Richard Williamson: Well, especially as you know there has been
a great deal written about the events that
led up to NATO's intervention in Kosovo in
that context with the Muslim community and
the Christian community. I think that you
see that in a number of U.N. peacekeeping
operations. Slightly different than the initiation
of atrocity crimes but it is a challenge.
It's case-by-case. It's difficult. There is
no one-size-fits-all. Remember Hammerskjöld
once wrote when he was asked about U.N. peacekeeping
if we should have a permanent force and he
said, "Well the challenges are so different
case-by-case you need to make each one tailor-made."
So I don't think you can come out with a simple
rule of how to handle it, but it's something
decision makers have to be aware of, and frankly
the US has a particular responsibility. When
I was sitting in the Security Council and
everybody would talk about, and I'm sure Madeleine
had this, "We've got to do this. We've got
to do that." I'd raise my hand and say, "We?"
Because others were volunteering the only
country that had the power for lift and other
things to make it happen. So there are unique
responsibilities and opportunities with our
status but I don't think you can have a rule
that will fit all. You've got to be aware
of it. You've got to be aware of the best
way to intervene. You've got to be aware of
the need to have other countries involved
with you. You need to be aware of the broad
participation, but sure, one of the factors
is to the extent in some circumstances you
might have political minorities. Not ethnic
minorities, political minorities who see initiating
violence as a way to get the international
community to enhance their situation. And
let me just say finally we see that in Syria
where when there's talk of a conference people
try to change the facts on the ground and
commit even more intense atrocities to enhance
their political position. It's just a reality
that decision makers have to be aware of and
the United States has a particular attentiveness
if we're going to be effective.
David Ignatius: Secretary Albright, what would you say to
someone, a political minority that starts
a fight they can't finish? Is there a thought
you have on that?
Madeleine Albright: Well we've obviously all kind of thought about
this, one, when we had to deal with it and
then in a more thoughtful academic way. Let
me just say that what I find interesting,
and Rich as pointed out a lot of the issues,
is part of what makes an ethnic group or minority
fight normally is that there is something
that they have been deprived of within the
nation state that they are in. But also then
there becomes a dynamic within the group itself
as to who is tougher, who is really standing
up, who is somebody who is a compromiser or
whatever. I think that's the hardest part.
And I can only tell you, you mentioned Kosovo,
the time that I spent in Rambouillet dealing
with the Kosovo fighters, one of whom is now
the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci,
and part of it was the extent to which he
was willing to make a compromise on something
but some of the other people would say no,
no, you're just giving in. So the question
is, and I don't know whether this is at all
possible, whether there is a bit of a bargain
before you ever begin to support X in saying,
"I will support you or we will, the international
community, but the price of the support is
that when you've won you will actually not
do the same thing to the people you just defeated."
And while we're speaking of Kosovo, they like
me there.
David Ignatius: We like you here, too.
Madeleine Albright: There is a whole generation of little girls
called Madeleine. But the bottom line is that
I spent a lot of time telling the Serbs what
they couldn't do to the Kosovars. I have been
back to Pristina and what is interesting to
me when I went initially during the bad period,
what you saw were the Orthodox Churches that
were doing well and the Muslim Churches that
were surrounded, the Mosques, that were surrounded
by barbed wire. When I went back to Pristina
the opposite was true and I said to them,
"This is impossible." I spoke in front of
the National Assembly and said, "You cannot
do to the Serbs what they did to you." The
question is whether one could have some kind
of a reconciliation discussion before we ever
support it. I don't know whether it's possible
because the dynamics that you talk about Rich,
that somebody for political reasons has to
be tougher. And what I regret about Syria
is that because it's taken so long, the most
extremist factions in many ways now are able
to say, "Look, nobody helped us." And so that
is the issue, but easier to talk about in
theory than practice.
David Ignatius: Interestingly, the main message our Deputy
Secretary of State William Burns seems to
have delivered on his recent trip to Cairo
to the new ruling regime is the need for inclusiveness.
Don't try to push the Muslim Brotherhood into
prison, underground, out of politics. Be inclusive.
I want to conclude with one question and then
we're going to turn to the audience for your
questions so be thinking. That is what in
some ways is a great success for the R2P doctrine
but in other ways illustrates its limits and
that is Libya. And I'd like to ask each of
you to comment on Libya both in the sense
that people who were on the verge of annihilation
in Benghazi were saved because of intervention,
yes, but because there wasn't a responsibility
to rebuild built into this doctrine adequately.
From every account that I hear and read Libya
is really a mess, I mean security, and normal
life just don't exist there now. Help us to
think about Libya both as a success and as
a challenge.
Richard Williamson: Libya was fascinating for many reasons. Among
them being it was the first time in the Security
Council they actually invoked the words "Responsibility
to Protect" in a resolution dealing with this
crisis, and then voted to authorize an intervention.
Two, we learned or relearned both the effectiveness
and limits of our NATO allies in carrying
certain things out. But another thing I think
we've learned is that in the calculations
of getting involved, part of it has to be
the post-conflict situation. And whether we're
looking at Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya we
shouldn't give ourselves very good grades.
And you can't come in and walk away and expect
magically a society that's been torn apart
- or in the case of Libya Balkanized for over
30 years even their military down to platoons
were by tribes, never integrated, no civil
society - to all of a sudden find a reconciliation.
And I think we have to keep learning and getting
better, and one of the things I take out of
Libya is in addition to the serious discussions
and deliberations where the President decided
to go forward in March of 2011, I think it
was or '10, to support bombing. There probably
should have been more discussion of the responsibility
when the change happens and hopefully working
with local players, the United States and
others can help them to start taking a path
toward reconciliation. The division, the Balkanization
between Benghazi and Tripoli that's been there
for centuries is more acute. The violence
out in the oil area to the east is worse and
we've had instances in the last two months
where there have been demonstrations in violence
and militias taking over even government buildings
in Tripoli. Getting rid of Mr. Qadhafi was
not the end story, it was just the end of
a chapter and we should have stayed more engaged.
Madeleine Albright: I think that it is fair to say that we live
in an unbelievably complicated world where
easy answers do not come, and the bottom line
is the Libya issue did come up during our
discussions and we asked each other was it
going to help the R2P concept or hurt it?
Because it really was the first time, as Rich
said, that it was included in a resolution.
I think that I hope the message that comes
out of this discussion is that this is just
one way that we and all of the international
community is trying to look at some kind of
tools to help solve increasingly difficult
situations. We are living in an entirely different
world than the kind I grew up in and the nation-state
aspect is more complicated. The existence
of a variety of ethnic groups, the different
tools that are available, and I also think
that it is much easier to sit here representing
no one than myself than to actually try to
deal with these issues. Because what happens,
and both Rich and I have been in the Situation
Room, as far as I know you haven't, is that
basically you sit there and you put forward
issues and argue is this good or bad? What
happens often is there are so many people
that can tell you why not to do something
because this will be this and that will be
that, but then you don't do anything and if
you are the United States you are damned if
you do or damned if you don't. And I think
that the question is you have to do case-by-case
and the "doability" aspect of it, and you
have to think about the unintended consequences
of either the decisions you make or the ones
you do not. There is no President that ever
gets a clean slate. There are the carry-overs
on it, and I can assure you that whether I
agree with them or not, there is nobody that
sits in their offices trying to make stupid
decisions. They are trying to look at what
the various aspects are and you do get kind
of dragged down by saying we'll go in there,
but it's going to take a zillion dollars and
it will take many years and you still will
not have accomplished anything. If there is
ever any lesson that I learned, however, we
cannot be our normal Americans of saying done
it, been there, over. It is not true in the
Balkans, it is not true anywhere. And I think
that we do need to understand that there is
a commitment after whatever. And that the
R2P exercise is one of trying to get our heads
around whether there is some new way of dealing
with this.
David Ignatius: So let's turn to the audience if you would
wait we have microphone runners. I see a hand
raised there. If you could please identify
yourselves, keep your questions short so I
don't have to be rude and interrupt. If you
have a question for a specific member of the
panel please direct it to that person.
Sara Federman: Hi, my name is Sara Federman. I'm a doctoral
student studying corporate accountability
for mass atrocities, looking at those issues.
Secretary Albright, you both can answer, you
were talking about the ICC as the criminal
court focuses on holding an individual responsible
to expunge the collective. And also I feel
like the Responsibility to Protect is actually
moving us towards a collective accountability
towards this rather than saying there are
certain individuals responsible for all this.
I know this is so complex and I guess I would
like to hear what you both have to say about
holding the collective more accountable and
is there a way to do that that doesn't create
cycles of just shame and retribution?
Madeleine Albrgith: I don't know how to answer that. It's interesting,
I hadn't put that together. I do think it's
a combination of it. I do think that not everybody
- when we say it's "collective," it's collective
responsibility by the international community
to do something and one would hope a collective
way that those who are fighting might think
more as a group, but ultimately what we have
seen is that often the individual guilt is
something that has been a result of "X" political
leader thinking that he can do better by whipping
up anti-"X", not just being proud in your
own group but curdling into hate of another.
So I think it's that combination of the collective
responsibility of the community to do something
about it, but I do think that one would find
individuals, certainly it was true in the
former Yugoslavia as well as in Rwanda, of
people that were specifically responsible
for stirring up the hatred.
Richard Williamson: If I could just comment on that briefly. Again
it's somewhat a case-by-case situation. In
South Africa, Mandela made a determination.
He was negotiating a transition and he couldn't
sit across the table from the white apartheid
government to negotiate a path to sustainable
peace and a new era if there was a threat
of harsh justice. So he made a decision that
we're going to have a truth and reconciliation
commission so victims can record what they
went through so they could never be denied.
Perpetrators would be identified. And there
is a certain punishment in that but he would
not set up a court and it's worked. You have
victims of apartheid who are now police commissioners,
etcetera. My only point is that it is going
to have to be case-by-case because I used
to be asked by my friends in the ICC and International
Justice during my tenure in Sudan about accountability,
and I said, "Look, to me it's pretty simple.
If you can hold those most accountable and
bring them to justice great, but if it's a
question of justice for saving lives I'm going
to save lives." And I was involved in getting
Charles Taylor out of Sierra Leone because
we thought there would be 10,000 that would
die in the next few weeks if we didn't during
the Bush administration. But these are not
easy questions. They can be gray, they can
be difficult, and I think when you're talking
about other sorts of collective responsibility
you have to have those factors in as well.
David Ignatius: I want to call on Martin Indyk from the Brookings
Institution, he's one of the co-sponsors of
this report, and then the woman who sitting
directly behind him in the white sweater.
Martin Indyk: Thank you very much, David. On behalf of Brookings,
I want to say how delighted I am with this
collaboration of the Holocaust Museum and
the US Institute of Peace, and congratulate
both Madeleine and Rich and the other members
on the Task Force for a really compelling
report and a fascinating discussion this morning.
I wanted to continue this question of the
ICC. In particular in the case of Syria where
Assad and his henchmen are so clearly engaged
in crimes against humanity and the evidence
is manifested and just mounting. And yet the
International Criminal Court is not only not
engaged in any way but the threat doesn't
seem to be used either because the judgment
seems to have been made that it won't be helpful
in this case, but that the best way is to
get them to leave the country and therefore
there should be no invocation of the ICC.
And I wonder is that a problem more generally
that's developing now that precisely the kind
of concerns that you mention, Rich in the
case of Mandela, begins to vitiate the effectiveness
of the ICC?
Madeleine Albright: Let me start but I just think that there have
been questions generally, for instance you
dealt with Bashir and he's an indicted war
criminal and it doesn't seem to have helped
to get him out of office. That's one of the
things that people have talked about is he
then has no kind of incentive to stop because
he knows that he's already indicted. I have
to say I created a group of former Foreign
Ministers when I left office. One of them
is Lloyd Axworthy who is here and he can testify
to the fact that we I think it was already
two years ago that as a group, three years
ago, we called on the fact that the ICC should
come after Bashar Assad. There were those
who argued exactly that this is not a good
idea because then he has nowhere to go and
could one grant him immunity? But I think
that as that has also evolved that has raised
these kinds of questions. Is it an incentive
or a disincentive? I always find it uncomfortable
to talk about the ICC since we actually are
not members. I wish we were. And one of the
pressures of the international community is
always that there are people who take this
very seriously and the Canadians always do.
They have always pushed. I said this last
night, I say it again, the Canadians are the
most responsible international citizens. They
are always there. But I do think that the
bottom line is this is a hard issue to deal
with, especially for the way that you've parsed
it.
Richard Williamson: First, I want to say to Martin, thanks again
for Brookings' help on this. More importantly,
I hope the reports are right both for the
sake of the Palestinian and Israelis and the
US interest, and I wish you Godspeed on your
mission, which hopefully you will take up
soon.
David Ignatius: Martin, any comment on that?
Martin Albright: Been there, done that, right?
Richard Williamson: I think it is case-by-case in the case of
Sudan, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor
and I had frequent discussions. I was urging
him not to go forward with an arrest warrant
because I thought it would change the dynamic
and Bashir would stay in no matter what because
of the alternative. I think he took a very
credible position which that wasn't his problem.
He was going to follow the law. He went forward
with the arrest warrant. I think there was,
I have reason to believe there was pressure
in Khartoum that may have bet their behavior.
Unfortunately by March, 2009 the US let him
off the hook. So I think it might have been
able to be used in a positive way but instead
Bashir's continuing situation in power and
travel I think has weakened accountability
in the ICC. But I don't mean to cop out. I
do think it's a case-by-case. I think it was
very, very important that Charles Taylor became
the first African head of state who was brought
to justice by the Sierra Leone Special Court.
I think it had a profound effect on a lot
of bad actors. I do think as I went back earlier,
you have bad people making decisions to stay
or get into power. If there is part of that
calculation a high probability that you eventually
will be brought to justice, you are increasing
the bar slightly and anything to make it more
difficult for someone to make the decision
to open the gates of hell is a good thing.
David Ignatius: Because we're running out of time I want to
collect a couple of questions starting with
you and then you, Sir, in the white coat and
I recognize one other woman down two seats.
Those three and then we'll turn back to our
panel for final comments.
Barbara Dellow: Thank you very much. My question is this.
David Ignatius: Please identify yourself.
Barbara Dellow: My name is Barbara Dellow and I'm a mom and
I'm a nurse. And my question is this. It occurred
to me once that North America has three basic
countries, and that if you look at international
bodies like the ICC, it comes from the whole
world and there are continents like Africa
and Europe that have many countries. And I
became aware that different countries have
different notions of right and wrong, and
different ideas of justice. How can we ensure
that in international bodies the decision
making will be in keeping with the values
that we have? And how also can we be assured
that the outcomes after an intervention will
be respective of the national desires of the
home population?
David Ignatius: Good question. Sir?
Gret Stanton: I'm Greg Stanton, President of Genocide Watch.
I once served under Secretary Albright. The
question I have really is if a nation fails
to exercise its responsibilities to protect
its own citizens, then who should it be? Who
will take over that Responsibility to Protect?
You made one really I think very, very trenchant
point in one of your statements in which you
said, "In Kosovo we did not get caught in
the cul-de-sac out of the U.N. Security Council."
In other words, other coalitions may be needed
and I'm asking that specifically in regard
to Sudan and to Syria. Aryeh Neier has suggested
that a court be set up, a war crimes court,
a crime against humanity court, to try those
who are committing war crimes in Syria on
both sides. Why aren't we perhaps organizing
a coalition of the willing to wait for the
planes to land who are bombing the people
in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile and so
forth, and then sending cruise missiles to
destroy those planes?
David Ignatius: And madam, finally, down two rows I recognized
earlier.
Pauline Baker: Pauline Baker from the Fund for Peace. Sorry
for that. My question is an extension of Ambassador
Indyk's and that is there seems to be a growing
backlash amongst some countries against R2P,
first because they think it's an instrument
of the powerful in the world to control the
weak, but more importantly, I think in terms
of the ICC and the resistance to that, particularly
in terms of two sitting African heads of state
now who have been indicted and the difficult
thing of dealing with the Kenyan situation
where you have an elected president who is
now indicted by the ICC, and that has set
off kind of a debate within the African community
that this is unfair and unjust and discriminatory.
How do you deal with that? And how does R2P
become a more universally accepted norm?
David Ignatius: Good so there are three good questions: What
rules should prevail in the ICC? Who should
act if the U.N. won't? And then finally about
the backlash that we're beginning to see against
the R2P and any other concluding comments
that either of you had, Secretary Albright?
Madeleine Albright: Well let me say it's interesting. All three
of the questions and the other points that
have been made here really revolve around
the fact about what has happened to the international
system? Is it a functioning system? And again
to refer to my age I went to college sometimes
between the invention of the iPod and the
discovery of fire, but the bottom line is
that I grew up learning about the United Nations
system and looking at what the basis of it
was, which is the charter of the U.N. that
is based on a series of accepted laws and
norms in terms of the basic human rights and
that we are all the same. I won't go through
all that, but basically that we are a system
of nation-states. The U.N. is not a world
government. The nation-states continue to
have the power. But the system in itself as
a result of more and more countries that are
artificial countries created out of a variety
of ethnic groups. The information technology,
without going through it all has complete
complicated the whole aspect of how the international
system works. The existence of non-state actors,
a lot of people that in fact interpret the
charter in a different way. But I do think
that also what I find interesting is looking
at what happened in the end of the 20th century
and the beginning of the 21st in terms of
trying to sort out what new norms might be.
I think that clearly there's a lot of evolutionary
aspect of this. And on the R2P, I think the
questions have a lot to do with who actually,
let's presume we agree, that X needs to be
done in a particular country, who really carries
it out? There are questions as to whether
it looks like aggression by white countries
against countries that are predominantly black
or Christian countries versus Muslim countries.
And so there are those particular questions
which need to be answered. I happen to believe
that it has to be multilateral action, a coalition
of the willing of some kind of way that it
is not aggression by one particular country.
But these are exactly the kinds of questions
that need to be asked and trying to sort out
what is happening with the international system
because it is not the way it was and it has
many more players and it's much more complicated,
and we do know everything that's going on.
So that is why I'm very pleased that we actually
had this task force. We asked each other a
lot of these questions, and that we have put
this on the agenda because people need to
see it as an evolving concept that we're going
to need help in explaining.
Richard Williamson: Thank you. First with respect to the different
views on justice. I teach a course at Northwestern
University on US Foreign Policy and Human
Rights, and I try to emphasize that every
member of the U.N. has agreed to the U.N.
charter that does in paragraph 48 of its charter
deal with human rights and shared responsibility.
Two, they've signed the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights which is a pledge. So those
who want to try to move away from those standards,
and by the way, they were animated more by
US values than anything else. As I noted earlier
Eleanor Roosevelt was the Chair of the effort,
John Foster Dulles as well as seven other
international personalities drafted it. So
I think you just say you signed up for it.
You can't recreate it, change it, distort
it. You are going to be held to account to
these standards. Two, with respect to 
protecting if governments fail, I think it
was a great moment for America for President
Clinton and Secretary Albright when they made
the decision they did in Kosovo. It is better
to work through the U.N. because of the outreach
legitimacy buy-in. But you can't let one country's
own view of its own national interest prohibit
action when these sorts of crimes are being
committed. Yes, there's different views on
the ICC. In fact after Bashir, Bashir had
been kind of isolated within the African Union.
It was his turn to be chairman, he didn't
get it. The only time he ever got unified
support in the A.U. was when the ICC did an
arrest warrant because A.U. passed resolution
to do an Article XVI and lift jurisdiction.
I was down in Addis meeting with the Secretary-General
of the A.U. and the head of their peace commission,
and they said, "You know, if you don't get
this Article XVI, thirty-three countries will
withdraw from the ICC." I said, "I'm from
the Bush administration if happens, have me
lead the line." Look, there's going to be
differences. You shouldn't get bogged down.
It is difficult work. It's case-by-case, I
think as I said earlier we should push back
when people selectively are distorting the
record of institutions. Most of the African
prosecutions went through the Security Council's
referrals. They weren't initiated at the Hague,
and of course there are African members of
the ICC, of the Security Council. Finally
let me thank David, but especially let me
thank Madeleine Albright not only for her
leadership. It's really awakened US foreign
policy in Bosnia and Kosovo but also her willingness
to join this effort on the report and thank
her for being such a good friend.
Madeleine Alright: Can I say this is what it looks like when
Democrats and Republicans cooperate?
Mike Abramowitz: My name is Mike Abramowitz and I am the Director
of the Center for the Prevention of Genocide
here at the Holocaust Museum. And it's a thrill
and an honor for me to introduce our keynote
speaker. We are really very pleased to have
one of the original architects of the R2P
concept here with us, the honorable Lloyd
Axworthy. And I'm also very pleased to say
that President Axworthy was also a member
of our working group; and Dr. Axworthy's distinguished
political career spanned 27 years. He served
in a number of cabinet positions in Canada
including serving as the Minister of Foreign
Affairs from 1996 to 2000. And in that capacity
he inaugurated the International Commission
on the Intervention and State Sovereignty
and went on to chair the advisory board for
that commission. Of course that was the commission
along with the other participants including
Gareth Evans who was also part of our working
group that really led to the whole R2P concept.
And we are really pleased to have Dr. Axworthy
with us today to give us a little perspective
from his perch as both a founder and from
his perch up north looking down on us here
in the United States on his attitudes towards
how the R2P norm has developed. I'd like to
give the podium to Dr. Axworthy. Please join
me in giving him a warm welcome.
Lloyd Axworthy: Well good morning everybody and I'm very pleased
to be able to follow on such a sort of erudite
panel which took care of most of the things
I wanted to say so it makes my job much easier.
I have a couple of disclaimers which are always
important. As Madeleine Albright pointed out
I am one of your Northern neighbors. I occupy
that part of the rock that is north of the
49. It's not always something that is warmly
greeted by an American audience because they've
been conditioned to weather reports that said
"Cold fronts moving in from Hudson's Bay,"
and laterally that we're trying to build pipelines
in Nebraska so it doesn't seem to always necessarily
garner wild hosannas. But it is a wonderful
place to be able to first be a neighbor of
the most powerful country in the world. And
to have had a period since 1812 when we burned
down Washington . . . Pretty compatible relationships,
in fact very warm relationships. And much
of what we do is often of course sort of a
ping-pong from the relationships that we have
with the United States because we are partners
in so many things, but also have had the opportunity
in our own way to think independently and
to try to complement and use our--in a sense--our
protection that we derive from being part
of North America and being under a very strong
security umbrella of the United States to
be able to push the edges out a little bit
and so that's what I want to talk about today
and how it happens. I should probably say
to you that if preceding rumors have reached
you about our views on foreign policy I want
to immediately explain what they were because
when I retired from foreign affairs I received
an invitation to speak to a group at Taiwan
University. I'd never been to Taiwan because
we weren't allowed to go and I thought this
is pretty nice even though there's a long
way to go, I was jet-lagged. And the talk
went pretty good, just explaining all the
variety of things that were going on that
we saw important until at the back a young
man gets up. Always these question periods
are the ones that kind of throw you off your
feet, and he said "Dr. Axworthy, you were
a Foreign Minister for close to five years.
You had the opportunity to work out relations
with the most powerful country in the world.
We live in one of the emerging powerful countries
of the world. Do you have any advice?" Well
normally in those cases I would have had some
smart foreign service officer slip me a note
with some kind of astute advice like "Shut
up, stupid" or something that would be relevant
but I was on my own. It was the first time
I had sort of flown with my own wings and
as you often do in those cases you go into
a kind of convulse of memory response. And
I said "Well in Manitoba we have an old saying,
'When you're in these situations it's like
making love to a porcupine.'" Now that didn't
translate into Chinese too well. So I'm not
sure people really understood the whole point
I was getting. And in fact the next morning
I went to one of these power breakfasts they
have and we got up at 5:00 A.M. to sort of
catch the markets. I came into the room and
I have to say if you read body language it
wasn't the necessarily the most warm and comfy
feeling I've ever had. So I said to my host,
"Look, have I committed some protocol problem
here?" And he said, "Well it may have something
to do with the headline in this morning's
paper." And I don't read Chinese so I didn't
bother to check it out and I said, "What did
it say?" "It said that Dr. Axworthy former
Foreign Ministry of Canada advised Taiwan
when it comes to dealing with its neighbor
across the straights that it's like making
love to a concubine." Now if you want me to
continue on that vein I'm quite prepared to
give you the entire context but I don't want
to have any of you think that the discussion
about R2P is necessarily related to that particular
little excerpt of foreign policy that I tried
to articulate. Never do it when you're jet-lagged
is the moral of the lesson, but it does, I
think, come to the point and it is a great
privilege to speak to a distinguished audience
and to follow the two co-chairs. Let me thank
them, thank the working group, thank the staff
of the working group, and thank the sponsor
institutions for having taken this very, I
think, important step forward in bringing
in an idea and the power of an idea into this
important American audience and to launch
a real discussion about how an idea converts
to ultimately to action. That's to me the
great dynamic of our world and I have been
inspired in part by being in this building
because if there was one of the heroes that
I put in the realm of those who have really
shown how they make a difference, it was Raphael
Lemkin who many of you would know was a Polish
lawyer who escaped the Nazis in the '30s;
resided at Duke University which shows that
universities do have a sanctuary purpose at
times. But in his own way began to accumulate
the evidence of what was taking place in Europe.
The leaders of the allied powers knew what
was going on but they never spoke publically
about it. Churchill always said, "It's the
crime that has no name." But Raphael Lempkin
and a small group of his students at Duke
and slowly a widening group across the United
States began to talk and use for the first
time the word "genocide". And I would say
that while the multitudes began to gather,
it was Lempkin's leadership, not only from
the academic point of view of studying and
analyzing and coming up with hard recommendations,
but then taking it to an activist point of
view that resulted ultimately in the Convention
on Genocide in 1948 which was one of the great
sort of milestones touchstones in terms of
our efforts to build humanity law in the world
as opposed to a law simply based on commercial
or national security transactions. So he is
a hero but what it proves it two things: one,
you can take an idea, you can take a concept,
you can take a position and eventually translate
it into something that becomes meaningful
and has a history to it. And secondly that
it was very inclusive. People weren't sort
of kept away. There were no boundaries. It
became something of a universal calling. I
think that is really to me the precedent that
often times I would follow in when we were
in the area of foreign affairs because I think
what we're talking about is having a game
plan, having a blueprint, having a work situation
that I think the panel before talked about
the necessity to look at case-by-case examples
and that's absolutely true. But you also have
the framework. You have to put those transactions
into a framework of law, a framework of organization,
a framework of standards and norms which Rich
Williamson referred to so that you have a
template to work from. You weren't reinventing
each time. You weren't trying to get a coalition
together each time. You weren't having to
sort of think things through and therefore
often times lose the moment, lose the opportunity.
I think probably for me speaking just personally
the most exciting period came at the fall
of the Berlin Wall when the liberals came
back into government, we came back into government
of Canada, I became the Foreign Minister under
Jean Chretien and we felt that we really had
to rethink that the old stratifications that
had been born by the Cold War in terms of
good and bad, East and West, red and black,
that now was the time to open up and to really
rethink a little bit of where we wanted to
go. And up to that point in time I had really
been a plumber. And I don't see the Secretary
of State serve the craft because he had some
bigger issues, but basically as a Foreign
Minister you're putting out leaks. There's
a problem here, there's a problem there, you're
set off to try to plug them so that you can
kind of keep things on an even keel. But there's
an old saying, "If you get too many leaks
the architecture has gone wrong." And that's
the way I began to believe that the fundamental
architecture that we were working with internationally
no longer fit. It's the whole idea of Galileo
that at some point in time you have to discover
a new reality and then change your lens, change
the way you think about things. And we sort
of began to build our foreign policy at that
time around the concept of human security
and this is really what it means. I will simplify
it, it's more complicated. It simply meant
that you put the security of people in front
of the security of nation states, not that
you avoid the others. We're still members
of NATO. We're still involved in all the military
alliances and defense alliances, but we felt
that we should begin shifting our resources
and our attention into what was increasingly
becoming broad based global risks and threats
to individuals. And, at that point in time,
it was the most impressionable and the most
dramatic was the issue of crimes against humanity,
atrocities, the Rwandas, the Srebrenicas,
what had been taking place in the Congo, what
had taken place in sort of parts of Asia and
Cambodia. And we couldn't believe that somehow
that an international system could stand fallow,
stand aside and watch millions of people--half-millions
of people--being murdered. I mean that just
did not fit sort of what we thought should
be. We had just come out of the Second World
War where the Holocaust had taken place, where
we said "Never again". We could never allow
that kind of murder. And here is the point
I think that's really important to emphasize
for those of you who are thinking about the
Responsibility to Protect. It very much just
focuses on the leadership that causes it.
I mean academics have spent a lot of time-
"What are the causes of mass atrocities and
genocide? Is it poverty? Is it ethnic strife
is a sort of variety of dynamics?" The reality,
I think, that Daniel Goldhagen has put in
his book, Worse Than War studying it clearly,
is that ultimately it comes out of some political
leader, either in government or outside it,
that really wants to exploit the preconditions
and channel them into becoming a focal point
that-- there is some group--religious, ethnic,
gender--that is responsible for this problem
and therefore the only way to do it is to
eliminate them. And that therefore R2P is
not one in which you are trying to convert
cultures of people. You are not trying to
change the broad sweep. You are simply saying
there's a bunch of individuals out there who
you can identify pretty clearly and their
cohorts and their entourages around them who
are taking the lead towards mass killing,
mass violation, mass rape. It's not a science.
It's an ability to pinpoint. And that to me
is a key to the R2P idea is that we've got
to find, and Rich used this word "accountability,"
because accountability can also mean deterrence.
Once you begin identifying it, boy, you can
get them. And the tools so that it wasn't
any accident that they in actual criminal
court began to move along that same humanity
law track as R2P. One was political. One was
legal. But they were basically founded on
the same individual that you were going after
the crimes against people, and you're going
to hold individuals accountable for those
crimes. You can no longer have, as I heard
in the Second World War, "The state made me
do it. I was simply doing my duty." Uh-uh,
when you make a decision about mass killing
and you launch it into operation, you're going
to be criminally accountable for it. And that's
where everything, the sanctions and the deliberations,
are really focused in terms of that preventative
angle that you want to find. So it really
is a way of saying we've got to eliminate,
I think as Raphael Lemkin said back in the
'40s, this idea that somehow you can get away
with mass murder on an international scale.
And that we could talk about all the collaterals
that come from it: flows of refugees, the
instability, the breakdown of cooperation,
and everything else. But the hard reality
is that what we're talking about is using
force as a way of gaining some political advantage
and that force results in intolerable, unacceptable
risk, and usually to the most vulnerable people:
women and children. If you looked at genocides
and crimes against humanity and what's happening
in the Congo, what has happened in Rwanda,
what is happening today in several countries
as it's emerging including Syria it's those
who are most vulnerable who ultimately pay
the price because they can't be protected.
And that's why in the discussion around as
we moved in the late '90s towards the concept
of how do you provide protection against risk
for large numbers of people and we were in
the security council at the time that Madeleine
began the initiative on Kosovo and we're a
full court that the Russians were not going
to agree. If you were a dictator and you've
used mass killings in the past as Stalin did,
you're not going to agree. Come on, let's
be realistic. Those who oppose it and those
who are kind of throwing up the flock balloons
are usually doing it for a reason. If you
look at who voted against the Rome statute
in Rome and if you looked at who in the General
Assembly debates in 2009 on R2P, it was five
or six nations and they just happened to be
run by people who enjoyed the extermination
and the intimidation and the criminalization
of people in their own countries as a pretext
for holding themselves in power. The decent
people, the rulers, the governors who simply
want to make things work, and it's hard enough
to do in any circumstance, were not out there
on the barricades. Africa, when we started
the whole initiative of protection of people,
we got elected to Security Council with about
179 votes from around the world because we
were campaigning on the agenda of human security
for protection of people. That was the largest
election of any country the Security Council
that ever took place. And this was not just
Europeans or Americans or a few others. This
was a campaign that drew that kind of full
scale attention. So let me focus in. So we
got involved in things like the International
Court, the Land Mine Treaty; and we began
to learn from it. And one thing we learned
is you can never bring about the normative
change that this report talks about if you
don't have a very large scale mobilization
of civil society behind you. It's hard to
do it from the top. It's hard to do it from
the side. You've got to be able to build a
political base amongst sort of a substantial
both in your own countries and on an international
front. And I would say that the importance
of the report in this case is reaching out
in a public way to begin to mobilize that
kind of support. And there are-- there is
the International Coalition for R2P which
is basically right out of New York and it
is probably the most advanced organization
working with civil societies around the world
to try to get their leaders to start signing
in. And they play the Center for Responsibility
to Protect in New York set up by American
foundations. So you're already involved. Americans
are already deeply, deeply engaged in this
issue in a lot of ways. It's just that the
word is not used. In this, I thought the United
States took an incredibly important step forward
with its Atrocity Prevention Board, but it's
kind of interesting that nowhere in that report
did they mention R2P. I mean they move around
it and they say "atrocities", "crimes", they
never mention "Responsibility to Protect".
It's a kind of a curious I suppose some public
relations person is saying "Oh, don't use
the phrase; it's going to get somebody mad
somewhere." But the reality is one of the
weaknesses is that the world's largest defender
of human rights is not using the concept of
R2P in a public way in the Presidential speech
and the written speeches. They used it before
the campaign. I was highly thrilled when President
Obama was first running for office there was
a three-piece spread in the New York Times
in which he referred to R2P four or five times.
Because Susan Rice and others had sort of
been part of the discussion that went on in
its establishment; but, they aren't using
it now. So if you want to take sort of a kindly
contemplative reflection from a Canadian,
start using the phrase. This commission has
done it. It's now made it publically acceptable
to start talking about the responsibility
of the international community to stop murder
in a mass scale. Stop rape in a mass scale,
stop extermination in a mass scale. That's
what it's about. Just another little piece
of history, so how did it emerge that way?
Well, this is not, again, some concept that
sort of emerged out of the sort of burning
bush. It was based on some probably the most
serious investigative inquiry into what would
be the basis for challenging the fundamental
concept of sovereignty that had been around
for about 300 years under Westphalia. And
all the international lawyers are going around
in Europe at the time and put this together.
And so, two major American foundations, MacArthur
and Rockefeller, paid for that research. I
mean this was exhaustive. We got mounds of
sort of any graduate students here who really
kind of want to get some good research already
done, it's ready-made. It was also based on
a broad international commission. This was
not a group of Methodist Canadians out there
on their knees. This was based upon __. Rashmi
Thakur from India who never believed in this
kind of stuff was on the commission. We had
an advisor group of sitting foreign ministers,
hard-nosed guys. Amr Moussa was on that, I
mean these were not pushovers. They weren't
simply saying "Does it work or doesn't it
work?" And it came down to the fact that after
Kosovo, which demonstrated to us that the
ultimate step in implementing a human security
agenda, in terms of protecting people when
the rubber hit the road, you might have to
use some military force. And Kosovo was in
effect a turning point on that and this was
I think as people have said with great credit
to Secretary of State Albright. I mean she
brought that issue to a head. For us as Canadians,
we thought that is really proving I was under
attack in my country by the right wing academics,
the realpolitik types saying "Oh, no, this
is all soft power stuff. It never will work."
Well, sometimes hard power had to be brought
in to play. But we needed to get a framework
to make it work so that it wasn't simply ad
hoc, it wasn't capricious, it wasn't sort
of happening waiting for the willing to come
together. And some of the questions that came
from the audience, it was based upon a very
clear set of criteria. Here is the basis if
you look at the commission report. Here are
the criteria upon which you determine grounds
for involvement. Here are fail safes. It has
to go through a multilateral body. But it
wasn't exclusively the Security Council. If
you look at the broad commission report, it
was talking that there are venues of the General
Assembly that you can use. There was an enormous
effort to say R2P could be used and is being
used by regional organizations. Perhaps the
most effective use of R2P right now is ECOWAS,
the Economic Community of Western African
and their leaders. Their Presidents get on
planes and fly to countries when they think
there's a military takeover or there's a disruption
and they do their best to try to provide exactly
what this report recommends, provide some
bolstering and buttressing to a regime so
that they don't crackle under the pressure.
So it wasn't exclusively that, but clearly
the importance of the Security Council is
that it is the only authority that can exercise
Chapter VII, which is the use of force. Which
leads, in terms of recommendation, and part
of the debate I think that should go on how
you should do it, of some form of U.N. reform.
The commission report, the commission that
we established in 2000 to begin to look at
this broad question of involvement included,
for example, the idea that the use of the
veto in the Security Council should not be
used when you're dealing with humanitarian-level
initiatives. It was set up in 1945 to protect
the interests of the five major powers in
the Security Council against aggressing against
each other. Why the hell are they using it
sort of to stop a force going into sort of
Darfur and why do you hold it up and why in
this case in Kosovo? Well, because there's
national interest. The Russians have their
sphere of interest. They still go back. They
are still going back to what they were doing
originally which is to push the boundaries
until George Kennan came along and said "Let's
contain them a little bit." That's not going
to change. So let's not get all upset that
the Russians are going to exercise a veto.
That's what they do in terms of protecting
those regional interests. But it means that
you don't get stymied as a result of it. And
the creativity that came out of Kosovo moving
it to another multilateral organization and
getting reinforcement by resolutions at the
Security Council on protection of people began
to give us a proper legal base for doing it.
So there was nothing sort of sacred or sacrosanct.
The key to R2P is that it is a way of amending
sovereignty. It's saying sovereignty is not
a divine right. It's earned right. You earn
it to the degree to which you protect the
people from whom you are responsible and,
if you don't earn it, your claim to sovereignty
becomes suspect. The question was asked, well
then who decides? Well that's a political
question and I think Rich, you answered that
way. You answer it by those who are best able
to. If you can get the regional organizations
in Southwest Africa to take the action on
that's great except many of them don't have
the logistics. They don't have airplanes,
they don't have intelligence. And so when
it comes down to looking at an America role
this is, once again, not saying we see the
United States out there doing the heavy lifting
on the barricades because the second concept
along with the involvement of civil society
is the involvement of a bunch of other countries.
There are 15 countries in the frames of R2P
at the United Nations today. We held a reunion
back in Sweden this April? Because the Red
Cross was involved; the U.N. TV was involved;
eight or nine countries including Chili, Mozambique,
Europeans, ourselves; and we simply had put
together a military force called Cherbourg
which was designed to be a quick reaction
force but nobody would pay any attention to
it in the U.N. so it kind of dissolved itself
around 2009 because that's the other part
about R2P. You're going to have to be able
to get there quickly, as we've seen in Syria.
I think this is just an off the top, I don't
pretend to be an expert. I think Syria could
have been stopped in the first six months.
I think that there-- if there had been an
active engagement; but, you guys are having
an election, the Europeans were having a fiscal
meltdown. Several other countries were-- there
was nobody taking leadership. There was nobody
out there saying "Hey wait a minute, this
thing has got portents and it's going to lead
to something really serious." Just let it
hang. And all the, I think the kind of work
that was coming at that time there just wasn't
that sort of--when you talk about "early
warning" you're not talking about somebody
writing a brief to the National Security Council.
You're talking about beginning to put together
the form of action that you want to take.
The kind of instant reaction you got from
the United Nations in Kenya to send Kofi Annan
to try to work out the post-election violence.
So those are the kind of things that I think,
when we talk about a United States role, first
there really is a leadership role because
no one argues--we certainly don't--about the
fundamental sort of base of human rights.
But we are now talking about an international
system based on a human rights calculus. We're
not talking about just muscling. We're talking
about the fact that the rights that we assume
for ourselves other people now want to assume
and it's going to create a lot of different
action. Now Martin Gilbert, the great British
historian of Winston Churchill, said "R2P
is the most significant amendment to sovereignty
in the last 300 years." You don't have to
take every historian's calculation, but you
do have to say that it is providing a template,
a framework, based on serious law, based on
serious experience to set up a process by
which the United Nations and others can in
a very sort of clear cut and coherent way,
a coordinated way, come to grips with the
first alarming signs of murder or atrocity
taking place, get together with those who
have agreed that they will be part of a reaction
and that can vary according to the region
and the nature of the problem. Focus in on
the perpetrators who are primarily those with
power in government or those who are warlords
outside of it and really focus in on them
and say "That's how we get the sanctions to
work. That's where we focus the diplomatic
isolation. That's where we really focus."
Because, if I can just digress for a moment,
we were talking about what happened in Kosovo.
I was sitting at a table with the Secretary
of State in Germany somewhere and we were
talking about how you sort of bring the conflict
to an end and Milosevic was not negotiating
at all. I get a call from Louise Arbour who
was head of the Yugoslav Tribunal, told my
contemporaries that he had just been indicted
along with six of his people. What immediately
began to happen, and we have studied this
carefully, is that Milosevic began to lose
his political base in his own country. People
didn't want to be seen on the Christmas card
with him next year. He just began to get isolated
inside his pit. You can do those things. Political
leaders are not, sort of, transformers. They
don't roam around in a crazy way. They depend
upon a support base. They depend upon a framework
to make it happen. So, coming out of that
commission and going through the United Nations,
getting legitimacy along the way, has now
meant that it can be a practicing protocol,
as it was in Libya. It was a practicing protocol,
as it was in Kenya. It is the same concept
that was applied in Cote d'Ivoire; in fact,
earlier than that, it was used in East Timor.
It was used and I think and Kosovo set the
precedent for much of what happened. Except
now you've got a framework: a framework that
increasingly adds to its experience and its
knowledge. What you don't have is the politics
of it. You've got, sort of, the 2005 agreement
basically was a compromise. It eliminated
a number of the important elements that was
in the Commission Report that we had established
such as alternative decision making; such
as the fact that R2P could be applied wherever
there is threat of high-level, broad based,
risk and threat to civilians, which includes
natural catastrophes and moving things. That
was part of the report. And therefore, what
I conclude on, is to say that in addition
to honing the capacity, the early warning
capacity, getting the NGOs around the world
to be whistle blowers to tell you when something
is happening, beginning to look at what is
the basis for an early reactive force that
can be brought to bear within weeks not within
months? Getting to look at the question of
focused, directed sanctions against the perpetrators,
not against the people. Looking at the gender
relationships that are there because anything
to do in this kind of area has to have a large
gender component because they are the ones
both who are the victims, but also the ones
who would do the rebuilding the prevention
work along the way. There are a number of
very specific steps; but, it's not going to
happen if you don't build a consensus around
these issues and there is no more powerful
influential actor in the world to begin doing
that than your country. You have to start
talking about it as you're doing here. You
have to start doing some of the diplomatic
mobilization, you have to do some of the educational
work, and as people have talked about in this
report the new technology gives you the capacity
to mobilize not tens or hundreds but millions
of people around this kind of notion. And
it also begins to pose to you the question
how do we manage things in the next ten years
so that we're not simply every second week
faced with another catastrophe, another disaster,
another large movement of refugees, another
40,000 people being killed. It may be that
this is a template. If you unbundle R2P, and
apply it to other globally based threats and
risks, then all of a sudden you have a way
in which you retain sovereignty. Nation states
acting on their own, fulfilling their responsibilities.
But where they can't or won't or themselves
or their predators then there is a mechanism,
there's a way that's been established by which
you can trigger an action internationally
based upon the concept that we are accountable
and responsible. So there is if you look ten
years out and this thing has only been really
around the corner block for the last ten or
twelve years, then you begin to see that we
may find a way out of a system that really
is I think in a funk. It's dysfunctional.
It's fractured. You just name me one, one
single agreement that's been made in a coordinated
international way in the last three or four
years. Trade? Nah. Environment? Nah. Disaster?
Some. Dealing with what's going on? The only
one that came out of that whole exercise is
Libya. So we really are in a point where we
are kind of regressing in terms of our capacity
to provide forms of international connection
even though the tools are much better than
we've had. What we're lacking is that kind
of political sense and the leadership that
goes with it. And I think that to me the most
important thing about this report is it's--
I agree with this analysis, I think it's a
series of very fine recommendations; but what
it really is, is a call for action and that
to me is the most important thing. If the
United States can respond to that call for
action we will have a very different world.
Thank you very much.
Mike Abramowitz: Thank you very much President Axworthy for
those great remarks, very helpful. And now
we're going to go right into our final panel.
I'm very pleased to welcome to the stage an
outstanding group of former officials including
former White House speech writer and advisor
Mike Gerson, Healther Hurlburt the director
of the National Security Network, and Nicholas
Burns who had very many jobs in government
including under secretary of state. And I
also am particularly pleased to welcome my
friend and former colleague Susan Glasser
of Politico to moderate our final discussion.
So, panel, come up.
Susan Glasser: Good morning everyone and thank you so much,
Mike and thank you to all the previous speakers.
I think we've got both the hardest and in
some ways the most challenging part of the
program this morning which is I would broadly
define as ground truth what happens when the
big frameworks and ideas that we've been talking
about earlier this morning actually collide
with reality. And not just the reality of
the Security Council and the veto although
that's part of it, but what actually happens
on the ground. And I think practitioners was
the term given to all three of these very
distinguished panelists and that is a very
understated description for the enormous challenges
that each of them has faced at various points
in their careers inside of government as well
as thinking about them outside of government,
writing about them. So I am just looking forward
to the conversation and that's what we're
going to have this morning. So I'm going to
jump right in with everyone and start I guess
with the hardest problem that faces us today
which is Syria and to what extent each of
the panelists thinks that that represents
a challenge to even the basic idea of having
an international framework when we see the
political challenges that arise at a time
when certainly everyone, at least in this
room can probably agree, that a massive loss
of innocent civilian life is a consequence
of our inability to figure out some solution.
So please, Heather, why don't you start us
off and we'll just get going from there.
Heather Hurlburt: Well, first, thank you so much to the cosponsors
and to Susan for including in this very distinguished
company. And it's very difficult to follow
the two panels we've had already this morning.
It's very humbling. But I think one way of
approaching, Susan, the question of Syria
is by comparing Syria with some of the conflicts
that we tried to deal with before we had the
R2P norm and I think specifically Bosnia because
this is one that has come up in the media,
and it happens to be one in which I served
both in the legislative and executive branches
of government so saw it from both sides. And
I think the two similarities that I would
point out is that, for better or worse, we
are only two years in. And we tend to forget,
although those of us who lived through it,
and certainly the folks on the ground don't
forget how very long it took the international
community to come to something that could
stop the violence in Bosnia. And here I come
to the differences because in Bosnia we had
a regional legitimator, in fact two regional
legitimators, in the forms of the E.U. and
NATO. We had a future, a regional future,
that you could say to the warring parties
that you want to be part of this. And you
had, eventually, Rwanda as a recent motivator.
And this I mention because it goes to this
question of public opinion that where when
the distinguished earlier speakers did the
work of putting the R2P norm together, we
all those of us of a certain age and global
public opinion were very motivated by the
memory of Rwanda. Right now for all that we
talk about the greater acceptability of the
R2P norm, what motivates elite public opinion
in the US and other countries is Iraq. And
that points you toward a very different set
of lessons and frankly it makes it much harder
to see Syria through an R2P paradigm. Now
the good news, and I do think there is some
good news, is that two years into Bosnia we
were still fighting about whether it was legitimate
for outside states to be concerned about what
was going on on the ground. And what the R2P
norm I think has comprehensively changed as
Secretary Albright and the others said earlier
- no one can say they don't know what's going
on in Syria. The U.N. system is one of the
leading providers of undisputed information
about the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe
there. And we have tools like the ICC, like
the human rights body, that have been active
and engaged on Syria in a way that we didn't
have in the Bosnia context. Now that has not
saved a single human life which is a very
sobering thing for us fans of R2P to take
on. So I would sum up by saying that what
the comparison shows us is that the tremendous
amount of work that was done on R2P has changed
the terms of the debate but what it hasn't
changed or hasn't changed enough is the fundamental
power relation that Ambassador Williamson
talked about.
Susan Glasser: Ambassador Burns, I'd love to get your thoughts
on Syria and then we definitely want to go
back to Heather on this very provocative but
also very sad notion that it's an accomplishment
for the U.N. to provide information about
people being killed when it can't stop them
from actually being killed.
Nicholas Burns: Susan, thank you and it's also a pleasure
for me to be here and I really should start
by thanking the Holocaust Museum, Sara Bloomfield
and Michael Abramowitz for putting this together
with Brookings and USIP. And I think we should
all thank Secretary Albright and Ambassador
Williamson. It's great to see a Democrat and
Republican working together on a leading international
issue and they've done- they produced a very
important report. And for me the takeaway
is the Responsibility to Protect is an essential
element of international security in the 21st
century because people are being killed. More
than five million in Congo. More than 100,000
people in Syria. Not by interstate conflicts,
but by conflicts within their own societies
where their governments are preying upon them.
And one of the essential foundation stones
of this museum is to remember the destruction
of European Jewry. Certainly we need to remember
what happened in Rwanda, and we have got to
use that template to think about the responsibilities
that the United States has in the world as
the leading power in the world. And part of
it is to think about our self-interest and
that was mentioned this morning, always. But
part of it is to think about what is right
internationally and what our role is and mobilizing
the international community. So if we think
about Syria, it's very definitely complicated,
Susan, I think by the fact that, as President
Obama has said, we're just coming out of this
decade of war. We are looking in the rearview
mirror. We are trying to learn rightly the
lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan but in a way
I think our national debate in some ways is
imprisoned by them, and we've become immobilized.
And there is this presumption out there that
those of us who advocate action on a humanitarian
basis need to prove the case and those who
don't, don't need to prove it. And I think
it might be the other way around. And so we
created this dilemma I think where the United
States has to think very deeply about its
role in the world. It's no longer the bipolar
world of the Cold War. It's no longer the
unipolar led world of the Clinton administration
when I was working for Secretary Albright
but we're still the dominant actor. What are
our interests in Syria? We have a huge interest
in the humanitarian catastrophe that's developed
there. The numbers are really appalling, 100,000
people dead, 4.2 million people internally
displaced, 1.5 million Syrian refugees outside
of Syria in countries that matter greatly
to us, like Jordan and Turkey and Iraq. There's
an interest. It combines both the self-interest
and the global interest. A second interest
we have is a realpolitik interest. We should
want to stop Iran from becoming a dominant
country in the Middle East, but Iran and Hezbollah
and Russia are arming the Assad government
and there is no comparable counterforce opposed
to them. There could be. It could be led by
the United States with Turkey, with Saudi
Arabia, with Qatar and with some of the European
countries but it's not well led right now.
And so I think the balance of the argument
has to be towards intervention, more affective
support for the refugees led by the United
States, and more effective aid to the moderate
rebel groups who need to take the fight in
this war to Assad. And if that doesn't happen
and I think you'll see - and there are I think
a couple of articles both in the Washington
Post and New York Times this morning - we're
probably looking at a very long war indeed.
We should try to want to stop that war. I
am very much with those people who believe
that the United States needs to lead more
vigorously, and needs to do more to try to
cope with this terrible war.
Susan Glasser: Mike, both Heather and Nick have raised the
specter of the experience of the last decade
not in terms R2P but in terms of the Bush
administration and the way it waged the war
in Iraq and Afghanistan as being the relevant
context to Syria as opposed to a humanitarian
framing. Do you agree with that and more broadly
what's your take on Syria?
Michael Gerson: I think that there's a definitely a political
context in which all this takes place. And
that is kind of national weariness with intervention.
If you look at the most recent Pew polling
on this topic you have 40 year lows in support
for various categories of global engagement.
That certainly is related to those events.
There is also a serious foreign policy debate
going on in the Republican Party about these
issues about the value of intervention. And
so you have a lot of factors at work here.
I point out, I want to get to Syria, but we
were dealing with Sudan, Darfur at the same
time we were dealing with Iraq and that was
a limiting context even then. When you're
thinking about intervening in the middle of
another Muslim country, in the middle of fighting
a battle in Iraq so that was a limiting factor
even then. So I don't want to deny that. But
I guess I agree with the earlier commentary
that we've heard all through this event, which
is important, is that the needs that persecuted
minorities in the world face and American
national interests are not determined primarily
by matters of psychology; they are actually
determined by interests and values. And Syria
is a case where we often talk about a conflict
between interests and values, and I don't
think it exists in this case. When we were
dealing with Darfur, a terrible humanitarian
crisis, but instability in Darfur meant instability
in Chad. Instability in Syria means instability
in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, along the Israeli
border and Syria is a proxy, increasingly
just a puppet of Iranian influence having
been supported by that influence. And so I
think we've got a real confluence of those
things here. But I want to be sympathetic
with the administration on this, having lived
through some of it - that's one of the lessons
of "formers" when we approach these things,
it's that they're not easy - is that the application
of the Responsibility to Protect in the context
of an active two-sided civil war is not an
easy thing, particularly when neither side
is kind of pure in this conflict. And that
I think is a context that we need to take
seriously. In general, I would just point
out more broadly that when you face the choice
between war and allowing impunity, the focus
needs to be on producing better choices than
this. That's one of the disappointing aspects
for me in the Syrian context is that this
began as a peaceful protest, in which, it
might have been possible to take a more active
role. But even there, I would just point out
because I don't want to be too harshly judgmental
on this, that it's hard enough to take action
when there are real atrocities. It's very
difficult to take action when there are prospective
atrocities down the road. That is something
that requires a lot of leadership and foresight,
which are not always easy to show in a situation
like this. And there is a tension at the heart
of some of these issues between the understandable
desire to use force as a last resort and the
desire to take early preventive action. Sometimes
early interventions can avoid terrible consequences
down the road - even avoid cycles of conflict
and revenge. One of my fears in Syria now
is even the triumph of the rebels would result
in terrible revenge. So early action can undermine
some of those dynamics but it's a very difficult
thing to do when the threats are prospective.
Susan Glasser: Ambassador Burns, let's go back to this question
of what's in the toolkit for someone sitting
in the White House, in a senior job in the
State Department as this is played out. So
you saw this during the Balkan War. You are
familiar with the Bush era debates and that
balance between what's a military tool in
the toolkit, what are diplomatic tools. Does
it help or not to think of something like
R2P as a legal resource in a situation like
that or ultimately is it really about politics?
Give us a sense of the mix as you're considering
what to do when a situation like Syria breaks
out.
Nicholas Burns: I'd agree with Mike that one of the problems
with Syria is that there is a risk of action
and there's a risk of inaction. Secretary
Albright referred to this when she was speaking
too. It's difficult for the President and
I have great sympathy for the President. I
very much support him. It's really difficult
to make this decision because you can see
the course of American leadership, you can
see why that would be in our interest to get
more involved, to try to help with this regional
picture to prevent an Iranian victory, to
prevent Iran and Hezbollah from teaming up
to strengthen themselves and to help our allies
that Mike talked about. But you can also see
that, I think you also have to see the risks
of inaction as well. If you don't act you
probably see that victory by the Iranians,
you see further suffering by the civilians.
The biggest question the President has to
answer is, "Is there a scenario that the military
can present that is achievable, that has an
end state to it, and that is affordable?"
It is very interesting to read this open letter,
a letter that was publicized by the White
House, that General Dempsey sent to the Congress.
This is obviously a very difficult action
to foresee. Arming the moderate rebel groups
is not as expensive or as risky as setting
up a no-flight zone so you've got to distinguish
between the two. But the President is going
to have to ask those questions. He's also
going to have to ask whether the United States
can rely on others to work with us and again
Secretary Albright referred to this. Responsibility
to Protect with the US in the lead does not
mean the US alone. And in this case I think
there are a large group of countries that
want the same ends as the United States and
Syria but don't have a leader. They are accustomed
to the United States playing that lead role
and that's not happening now as a further
complication. I think finally Susan, the President
is going to ask do we have the diplomatic
wherewithal? Do we have the ability to lead
on the ground? And I think in this case we
certainly do because we still in a political
sense are the most influential country in
the world. We have a legion of friends both
in the Arab world who want to be helpful here
and want the US to lead as well as in Europe.
So I would argue that if you look at that
balanced question what's the risk of action
versus inaction, I think that the weight of
action, the risks are stronger for us on inaction.
And this is a doable proposition that the
United States could be more active in supporting
the moderate rebel groups in trying to isolate
Assad and take away the great advantage that
he has now and the resupply by Iran, Hezbollah
and Russia.
Susan Glasser: It's interesting that most of your arguments
have made the very compelling geopolitical
case for where the US national interest lies
there. Do you think that the humanitarian
case just isn't sufficient to overcome the
public opinion concerns that Mike referred
to?
Nicholas Burns: Well I think in this case and interestingly
enough and this doesn't always happen, the
United States can't intervene everywhere and
it's not in our national interest to do so.
I think our national interests and the humanitarian
interests of alleviating the conflict actually
coincide. And for some Americans that humanitarian
impulse is going to be very convincing. For
others it's going to be the national security
argument. I think they're integrated and you
really need to make both arguments to the
Congress and the American people.
Susan Glasser: So Heather, thinking back you referred to
your time in government and the Balkans conflict
that erupted. In what ways do you think it
would have changed the US response, or would
it have been useful to you in your role, had
the world adopted something like the Responsibility
to Protect framework at that time? Or is it
better or worse to have a policy against atrocities,
to have an official US atrocity prevention
board and then to have atrocities occur while
that board exists or not?
Susan Hurlburt: I think there are a certain number of speeches
that I helped Secretary Albright get ready
to give about why we should care about what
was going on in the Balkans and maybe she
would have had to give somewhat fewer of them.
You know I was sitting here and thinking about
what were our successes and failures and where
the tools came from, and so I wanted to in
the spirit of bipartisanship mention a bipartisan
success and a bipartisan failure. And the
bipartisan success that nobody actually knows
about or talks about is Macedonia. And I was
just thinking but if we hadn't intervened
in Bosnia and Kosovo, if we hadn't seen two
sets of mass killings, would we have been
able to muster the will of both the US and
the E.U. to send troops to help keep a peace
in Macedonia? So that you were using that
part of the toolbox where you weren't firing
weapons but you were putting the parties on
notice that there were weapons that could
be fired. And with some difficulty first with
the Clinton and then the Bush administration
very successfully partnered with the E.U.
to prevent the kind of conflict that had broken
out in Bosnia and Kosovo from breaking out
in Macedonia. And that was done on the one
hand without the R2P norm, on the other hand
with the hindsight of years of violence in
the Balkans. One of my most searing memories
was of going with Secretary Albright to West
Africa just as the conflict in Sierra Leone
was winding down. And everyone understood
that there were continuing extensive regional
tensions that required a lot of outside support.
There was also a lot of excitement about Mali's
new democracy. And there was a lot of eagerness
in the administration and in Europe to support
the government of Mali and to support the
other countries of the region and as I say
it's a very searing memory for me that one
morning we were in the region, we picked up
our news clips back from the US -this was
in pre-iPhone days - and some member of Congress
had sort of inquired as to what the secretary
was doing over there, pouring more money down
a rat hole etcetera, etcetera. And so when
recent events happened in Mali, I thought
we had a decade to use all the non-violent
R2P tools and we tried to use some of them,
and we - the US - and we - the international
community - failed there across multiple administrations
and multiple governments. And so when you're
talking about that's a case where we had all
the nonviolent tools and we at least tried
to use them but as an international community
we failed.
Susan Glasser: Mike, would it have made a difference during
the Bush administration for something like
the Responsibility to Protect to be more enshrined
for there to have been an Atrocity Prevention
Board? Would that have done anything about
Darfur?
Michael Gerson: First of all, I'll point out that the administration,
the Responsibility to Protect was an internal
commitment of the Bush administration. Our
people helped produce the document and approved
it so I think it represented this spirit that
the President brought to a lot of these matters
and which I saw on issues like Darfur. I mean
at least the mythology of Rwanda is that there
wasn't enough high-level attention. If George
W. Bush had spent any more attention he would
have had to have quit his day job. He was
constantly on this issue. But this is the
source of frustration to some extent from
my own experience. We employed just about
everything you can employ in the toolkit when
it came to this, and tried to do it in a timely
fashion. President talked about Darfur as
a genocide. He ordered intelligence over-flights
of Darfur, declassified the photos within
weeks in order to call attention to what was
going on. We provided massive aid, over two
billion dollars in humanitarian aid, sixty-five
percent of the total. We pursued sanctions
against individuals and corporations. We worked
with regional organizations, equipping and
moving A.U. forces. The President, I heard
him on the phone trying to get NATO involved
and Chirac and others refused to get involved
in the matter. We gave tacit support to the
ICC. At one point threatened to veto an attempt
to undermine the indictment against Bashir.
We sponsored the peace process. Tried to work
the Darfur rebels, I was there in Nairobi
when we were trying to make them more presentable
in these negotiations which was a difficult
task, kind of a motley crew. The result was
a humanitarian achievement. A lot of lives
were saved because of massive levels of aid.
But very little progress on the security side
and really these events went forward with
impunity. It points to the ultimate problem
here, which I think is at least in my limited
experience you have to take seriously. And
that it's that a sovereign state dedicated
to destroying a portion of its people, with
the support of China and Russia and the Security
Council and the cover of Arab solidarity in
the Arab League, is a very difficult thing
to deal with. Bashir, by the time I met him
in 2005, when Bob Zoellick and I were in Khartoum
he felt almost no pressure because he was
shielded by a variety of these factors. And
we could not and nothing would have happened
in this circumstance, it did happen without
the ability to generate a credible threat
of force. And we could not do that for some
of the reasons we've talked about but also
for diplomatic reasons like the context of
the North-South agreement which was taking
place at just the same time to bring a conclusion
to a bloody civil war. And also, and I'll
point out that it's newsy, that the military,
the Department of Defense, was one of the
largest they were not a neutral actor in this,
they were one of the most vigorous opponents
of any action that related to humanitarian
issues in Darfur - and as you are seeing in
Syria with the testimony of the information
that we see today. To the point where, I had
the experience and I won't go into details,
but to the point of near insubordination when
the military would refuse to plan for the
possibility of events where the President
wanted planning. Because they didn't want
the plan to ever be called upon. And so there's
a variety of problems in this about coming
up with a credible threat of force, the plan
B that we talked about in Darfur and could
never produce. And it's hard sometimes when
you have dedicated offenders in this to get
much progress without that credibility.
Susan Glasser: I am sure we're all thinking of Secretary
Albright's famous line when it comes to the
military in whether they should be called
upon in crisis like this to step up and take
action. But I wanted to highlight and ask
the others to respond to your point about
the U.N. Security Council, which has sort
of come up in many ways. It's I don't know
if that's a tool in the toolkit or a negative
tool in the toolkit or just another weapon
that trumps the toolkit, but clearly many
conversations not just about Darfur but about
Syria come back to the veto in the U.N. Security
Council. Do you use that as basically trumping
many of the tools that we have developed?
Nicholas Burns: Well it's the fundamental problem that the
Obama administration has in Syria is that
it doesn't have the capacity to use the power
of the Security Council which can be considerable
in this case because Russia and China in the
most cynical way are blocking even a coherent
discussion of how to respond to the humanitarian
crisis. Not just whether or not the Security
Council should intervene politically or militarily,
they don't want to give any credence, any
role to the Security Council in Syria because
they are protecting Assad. And so because
of that the administration faces the same
challenge that the Clinton administration
faced, as Secretary Albright said, in '98-'99
when it became clear that the Russian federation
was going to veto any military intervention
in Kosovo despite the fact that Milosevic
was just about to annihilate a million Muslims
there. The United States was forced, and this
is really to the great credit of President
Clinton and Secretary Albright, was forced
to take up leadership of its own. We used
the NATO Alliance, it worked very well, a
very successful example, as was Bosnia, of
American-led military interventions to save
people in a very difficult situation; so in
this case the United States has to create
a coalition of willing in Syria of its own,
but as I said before, Susan, I think we have
many countries ready for that. And one way
to think about this, David Miliband, who has
just left British politics - he was British
Foreign Secretary and the last Labor government
is now going to take up the Presidency of
the International Rescue Committee in New
York - he gave a really insightful speech
ten days ago at the annual Ditchley Lecture
outside of Oxford, where he essentially said
we have to understand that we're at a time
when ten years ago there was a lot of criticism
of the US and U.K. for intervening too frequently
and too aggressively in the world. Now we're
at a point where there's criticism that those
two countries and others are not intervening
sufficiently. We don't have a big enough sense
of our own role and he said something at the
end of the speech which really resonated with
me. He said, "I prefer the course of activism
to prevent problems rather than passivity
in reacting to them." And that's the essential
choice that we face in Syria. This problem
is so severe in its geopolitical implications
and humanitarian as well, it will be with
us. The question is do we engage and lead
now, and hopefully have a chance of the Assad
regime sooner? Or do we wait for that country
to tear itself apart, the humanitarian crisis
will be greater and then we perhaps have a
bigger problem because as Mike has said Lebanon,
Turkey, Jordan, are engulfed by it and it's
Israel's northern border as well. So to me,
that's the calculus that the President has
got to- the administration has to face.
Susan Glasser: So Heather, it seems like we're having one
of those very Washington conversations. It's
there's the seductive power to the idea of
a policy and a toolkit, that's a wonderful
phrase to an American ear. There's a toolkit
to deal with atrocity. There's a toolkit to
deal with genocide, but really we're talking
about politics, aren't we? So what's your
view of the politics here?
Heather Hurlburt: I have been known to ban the phrase "toolkit"
from the stuff that we put out at the National
Security Network because it is such an inside-the-beltway
construct. And I actually want to talk politics
on the global level first because the Security
Council, for better or for worse, carries
with it a degree of legitimation that nothing
else matches. But there are other routes to
getting legitimation. We talked about the
role that NATO and the E.U. were able to play
in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the big global political
challenge that I see in Syria is that we simply
don't have a body, a structure, somebody that
can give legitimacy to the kind of coalition
of the willing that Nick, you're talking about.
And I from a US national interest perspective,
but also from the perspective of the legitimacy
of R2P, frankly, that if you see a coalition
of the willing acting in Syria without some
ability to say we are representing the will
of the people of the region, particularly
when it is so clear that you have some regional
proxy conflicts going on. That that will fatally
undermine both an effort to end the conflict
and deliver another blow to the norm of R2P.
And I think what's particularly challenging
in the American context is that, you made
the argument and it's one that has great appeal
to many people, that one of the reasons the
US should get involved in Syria is due to
our geopolitical conflict with Iran. Now that
does not sit terribly well globally with our
assertion that we would be getting involved
in Syria for humanitarian reasons. Nor does
it sit well with the idea that we could be
a fair or neutral arbiter of what comes out
afterwards. And this is a challenge that we
face. It's a very, very real challenge in
Syria but it's something that we're always
going to face with R2P. And it's something
that has made it very difficult in the US
political context because we live in a period
for better, for worse where national security
is very politicized and that we have frankly
as I said we are all the Rwanda generation.
And the generation that has come up after
us, Susan everybody that writes for you, everybody
that works for me, everybody that works here
- does not see, is not seared by Rwanda the
way we were and doesn't necessarily believe
that there is such a thing as disinterested
humanitarian intervention, and we haven't
figured out either to talk to our own elites
or to talk globally how to square that circle
and say, "Yeah, we do have an interest with
respect to Iran and we have a humanitarian
interest and both of those things are on the
table." And I see that as a really fundamental
political problem for R2P globally.
Susan Glasser: I want to get to Nick but I also want to make
sure that we get at least a few questions
because I'm sure everyone has a lot of questions
for this great conversation to keep it going
and I'm sure you all have those. So start
thinking what your questions are and Ambassador
Burns I'll let you respond to Heather.
Nicholas Burns: Well I think we're in agreement that countries
and governments act for a multiplicity of
reasons, and it's the responsibility of the
president to think first and foremost about
what's good for our own country but he also
has an obligation to think internationally
and in this case I think you can use both
of those arguments in a compatible way. I
don't think it's a contradiction to assert
that we have narrow interests, geopolitical
interests, I should say as well as humanitarian
interests that should guide us here.
Michael Gerson: Can I just add real quick? I think norms like
Responsibility to Protect help create momentum
even internally within government systems
to raise the profile of these issues and the
decisions that are made. It's the reason I
am a big supporter of the atrocity prevention
panel. It takes away excuses, raises things
higher in the system earlier. I think that's
all to the good. I also think advocacy groups
play an important role in this to provide
some political constituency and sometimes
cover for these issues. Save Darfur and a
lot of other groups played an important role
in raising profiles and but I would only add
that ultimately it's a matter of national
will by the main actors in the international
system. Whether they block things or whether
they push things. And how you weigh the cost
of action and inaction and the real goal here,
the important goal, these types of interventions
are seldom popular in any circumstance. Libya
was not popular. And the question is whether
you have the type of leadership that can not
only determine what your responsibilities
are but give you early enough options that
are realistic to make a real difference in
these situations.
Susan Glasser: Those are important points. Okay questions?
Right here you sir? We have a microphone and
give us your name and an ID, and please make
it a question so we can move on. Thank you.
Lieutenant Buffalo: Hi, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Dave Buffalo. I'm
the Military Advisor in the International
Organizations Bureau of the State Department,
PhD student at George Mason and at one time
as a young lieutenant peacekeeper in Macedonia.
The question is going back to the toolkit,
I know you hate the term "toolkit". But going
back to the toolkit and what Syria has highlighted
for us or taught us. The atrocities prevention
emerging doctrine states that as soon as you
identify an atrocity the more tools you have.
You have financial tools, diplomatic tools,
non-lethal military tools whether it's mil-to-mil
exchanges etcetera. When you have a country
where we have no diplomatic relations and
no trade and no mil-to-mil exchanges, and
no investment, no aid, have we- does this
show the conditionality of the tools at our
behest? I'm trying to look at Syria and think
that perhaps Russia has all the tools at their
disposal should they want to prevent atrocities.
But we had none. We come back to the whole
state of our choices are do nothing or send
in the Marines. I would like any of you to
comment on the conditionality of the toolkit.
Susan Glasser: Thanks for a great question.
Heather Hurlburt: Actually the Obama administration deserves
credit for having tried and not frankly gotten
a lot of attention for trying to use the tools
that it had. Having an ambassador who was
very brave and really tried to use all of
his personal tools that he had to try to go
out during the nonviolent and the early violence
phase for exploring options of sanctions for
using public pressure, using what pressure
they could muster at the U.N., trying to use
regional pressure. So the administration did
sort of look at what we know what works early
in a conflict and did try to use what it could
and so I think the idea that there were no
tools is maybe not quite right but what it
does show you as you said is that you don't
necessarily hold the right tools and again
this is why the toolbox metaphor is problematic.
If you compare Syria with Kenya where neither
side was really interested in taking their
society over the edge, and so the tools that
we had were much more effective because the
parties didn't want to do to their country
what Assad is willing to do to Syria. And
again when you're dealing with that kind of
raw power there's no tool that deals with
that.
Michael Gerson: I would say sometimes, not to sound like an
advocate of realpolitik, but in a case like
Syria you have one side of the conflict, a
desperate regime, Iran and Hezbollah that
are all in. They are completely committed.
They are willing to do anything to win. And
then you have something different on the other
side, and that makes not just Assad's strategic
calculations different but I think even more
in a difficult way, the leaders around him
that might at an earlier point decided he
was a liability in this conflict. That's sometimes
the way things happen is that you can isolate
a leader himself. We often talk about we would
prefer to do negotiations in a circumstance
like this. But when I talk with some of my
older colleagues about this, what their concern
about Syria is you simply can't have two sided
negotiations when one side believes that they
are winning. And that is I think one of the
challenges that we've had in this process
is that no amount of diplomatic initiative
is going to make much of a difference when
one side believes that they have an advantage.
And that's something I think the United States
allowed to get away from us earlier in this
process.
Nicholas Burns: I would just say great question. We have the
tools. It's just a question of strategy and
will. Does it make sense for us to intervene
and do we have the will to do it? And there
are two options that were raised in the New
York Times, Washington Post articles this
morning on this open letter that General Dempsey
sent to the Congress. One would be arming
the rebels. We certainly have the tools and
we have the financial wherewithal to do that
should the President decide to take that further.
The bigger question is should the United States
consider the imposition of a no-flight zone?
A lot of military people would say, well that's
probably the easiest way to degrade Assad's
ability to wage this war against the rebels
and against his own people and to kill so
many civilians and to drive them out of their
homes. So if you impose that no flight zone,
as we did in Iraq between the two wars, between
'91 and 2003, that might be the single most
important thing you can do. But it was interesting
in all the press coverage this morning. What
was highlighted with that option was do we
have the money? And I must say that when I
was working both for the Bush 41 and 43 administrations
as well as the Clinton administration, we
always had the funds, more or less, to do
what the United States had to do to lead,
and now for the first time we have to ask
that question as General Dempsey did. I think
the figure the Pentagon put out publically
was a billion dollars a month to impose and
maintain a no-flight zone. That's a forbidding
figure given our perilous financial straits
in Washington. So suddenly that enters this
calculus.
Susan Glasser: Ma'am?
Barbara Dellow: Hi thank you, my name is Barbara Dellow. I
wondered can the humanitarian efforts be evenhanded
in judging atrocity by allies, by selves,
as well as by regimes and persons we oppose?
You know I'm thinking of Syria, in particular,
where there is plenty of cruelty to go around.
Can the humanitarian efforts be separated
from the political positions?
Michael Gerson: It's a very good question. You face it even
in some of the clearest examples like Rwanda
where there are ongoing investigations of
various Rwandan officials in that case. So
it is often very, very complex and you often
get when there is mass atrocities the prospect
of a cycle of atrocities in these cases where
very few people have clean hands at the end.
You see it in Congo, where the U.N. is conducting
investigations of past atrocities and past
interventions and how it complicates current
negotiations. All that said, that can't be
allowed to be an obstacle for the prevention
of civilian casualties. The primary goal here
as others have argued - justice is a very
important goal and sometimes it's a difficult
one where both sides need to be called to
account - but the overwhelming predominant
commitment of Responsibility to Protect is
the protection of civilians. And that should
be the testing measure of US policy when it
comes to these situations, so I think the
justice is sometimes very hard to sort out
but I think the protection of civilians has
to be the guiding principle in policy.
Susan Glasser: We have a question here and then one there.
Mindy Reiser: Thank you, my name is Mindy Reiser. I'm Vice
President of an NGO called Global Peace Services.
I want to refer to what former Foreign Minister
Axworthy said about the architecture involved
in peace building and also Responsibility
to Protect and the credibility of the Security
Council as we just heard. What can we do to
make the department of peacekeeping operations
at the U.N. function better? What can we do
to mobilize forces that can get on the ground
faster? That is a real big bottleneck. And
there have been efforts by a number of parties
to develop a standing army. We know the political
objections. We know the caricature of the
blue helmets but this is really something
that could make a serious difference. What
do you think?
Susan Glasser: Thank you very much.
Nicholas Burns: Well I'll refer again to the speech by my
friend David Miliband, which I'd urge you
to check out on the Ditchley website. He says,
that for a long time now the great powers
including his own country and our country,
have not really participated in U.N. peacekeeping
with our own troops as you know. And it's
been a particular weakness so I certainly
think we need to reinforce from a budgetary
perspective the capacity of the United Nations
to field effective peacekeeping forces. There
is sometimes tragically very little justice
and very little fairness in how this all works
out. The bloodiest place on earth is not Syria,
it's Congo. And there is practically no attention
by the American media to that problem and
most Americans aren't aware of the dimensions
of the conflict, but the United Nations is
there with a deeply flawed peacekeeping mission.
So reinforcing the capacity of the U.N. to
act in difficult places where we don't want
to send our troops is a vitally important
thing. I guess I'd also say we can't always
depend on the United Nations because if the
Russians and Chinese exercise in their cynical
fashion their veto, then it is going to be
up to the United States and like-minded countries
to provide the action in a place like Syria
or as we did in Kosovo. So you really have
to have the capacity of the central political
institution the U.N. to act, but we also need
to be free to act when authoritarian great
powers prevent justice from occurring.
Michael Gerson: I will agree. I mean some of the challenge
here is the capability of the U.N. I don't
know if you saw the report that just came
out yesterday the U.N. peacekeeping force
in Darfur, that they have about 25 percent
of their armored vehicles operational right
now in the peacekeeping force there. This
is a serious kind of challenge capabilities
challenge on the part of the U.N. Some of
it is capabilities of regional organizations,
the A.U. and others that I think would be
very helpful. When I visited A.U. troops in
Darfur in 2005 they didn't have secure communications.
They didn't have helicopters, they didn't
have armored transport. I think they are better
off now but increasing the capabilities of
these institutions, I think, is very much
part of trying to do this because often an
A.U. intervention is just a much superior
option in a lot of different ways. So I think
you're focused on the right thing is how you
get other actors in the system that have military
capabilities. I'm kind of hopeful that at
least in Congo they are experimenting with
a much more aggressive civilian protection
mandate. So it's not just, I mean I've been
to Congo several times and the U.N. just sits
around often in these cases. And I think there's
a recognition that there's not an option.
And they are experimenting with an expanded
mandate there so it would be a good thing
if some of those more aggressive regimens
worked out. It would be a good option.
Susan Glasser: I'm told we have time for one last question.
Yes, I promised to you, sir.
Paul Light: Hi. My name is Paul Light. I'm an undergraduate
student from Southern Alberta in Canada. I
just had a question in regards to defining
American interest in Syria. As a cost of inaction
it seems like there's been an increasing presence
of extremists flocking to the region on the
side of the rebels and an increasing amount
of infighting of the rebel factions. How is
it in the American interest to support even
indirectly these sorts of groups? I understand
the geopolitical concerns regarding Iran and
Hezbollah. There seems to be a Sunni hegemonic
counterbalance between the Qataris and the
Turks and the Saudis and they make no distinction
between moderates and rebels. So how is it
in the American interest to support this side?
And if it is to degrade the advantage of the
Assad regime, does that not beg the question
of how you balance strategic interest and
moral obligation because that was in my mind
would serve to perpetuate the fighting and
increase the humanitarian cause. Thank you.
Susan Glasser: I'm sure we can answer that in 30 seconds
or so. Would anyone care to try?
Nicholas Burns: Maybe we can all take a swing at this, it's
the last question. First, since you're Canadian
we really do have to congratulate Canada being
one of the early supporters. In fact originators,
conceptualizers of R2P and Mr. Axworthy was
in the lead on that so we really owe Canada
a lot for what it did to promote this concept
and to get it accepted at the 2005 reform
summit. Second, I agree with you and one of
the most complicated issues that the President
and Secretary Kerry are facing is this disorganized
and feuding rebel misalliance, because there
are some actors there we clearly do not want
to support, radical Islamic groups that if
we arm them they turn those weapons on American
or Canadian civilians or innocents elsewhere.
And so the trick here the challenge is to
be very careful only to support those groups
that you think share, in a basic general way
our own values and our own strategic interests.
Is that impossible? I don't think it is. David
is no longer here but David Ignatius has written
consistently that there are such moderate
rebel forces. We just have to make a decision
as to whether we're all in or whether we're
going or be marginal players. The difference
here might be and it gets back to some of
the earlier questions, why do we intervene
or even contemplate intervening in Syria but
not in other places? Because of this mixture
of motives there's a humanitarian motive to
intervene in Syria but there's also a strategic
imperative. Syria is in the Levant and it
borders Israel and Jordan and Turkey and those
countries are all critical to us. It makes
Syria important. And it gets back to the central
choice. There are real risks of going in here
not with troops in the ground but even aiding
the rebels. And there are real risks of being
passive and so the United States and Canada
and other countries just need to balance those
relative risks and make a basic decision.
I think you know where I come down based on
this panel.
Heather Hurlburt: I want to make two points and one is to go
back to something Secretary Albright said
in the first panel, which I think hasn't been
repeated often enough, which is the fact that
you fail some places is not a justification
for not trying other places. And we have really
spent almost no time on this panel talking
about some of the very real successes not
just Kenya but also Cote d'Ivoire which is
an enormous success which I think is totally
due to the existence of R2P. The Cote d'Ivoire
would not have happened both if R2P hadn't
existed and frankly if the Libya intervention
hadn't happened. So just to make the point
that the Syria case deserves consideration
on its own strategic and humanitarian merits
as a humanitarian catastrophe that all of
us who have had a hand in not stopping should
be scarred by. But that it doesn't erase the
things that R2P has done to save hundreds
of thousands of lives and keep societies together
in other places. The point I would add or
the slightly different gloss I would put on
what Nick said is that we have really a dual-barreled
strategic failure and it's one that our political
system at this point makes almost inevitable.
Neither in terms of US national nor in purely
humanitarian terms do we have the ability
to have the conversation about how this ends.
What is the humanitarian outcome where somebody
is on the ground preventing, Mike as you said,
revenge killings that equal in scope what's
already happened? Purely humanitarian, how
do we do that? I don't know. The U.N. doesn't
know, the Obama administration doesn't know.
What is the end game for the US of what the
region looks like that you don't have either
ongoing Sunni -- Shi'a civil war or the establishment
of a kind of access that is inimical to US
strategic interests, energy interests, interests
in democracy promotion? And until you can
answer those questions, I actually don't think
you can design an intervention that will "work"
because you don't know what "work" means.
And frankly we still don't know that either
from a humanitarian perspective or a strategic
perspective.
Michael Gerson: I don't have too much to add. But I would
say that the conundrum that the question raises
actually points to the necessity of American
leadership. The reality is that Turkey and
Qatar were supporting some very bad actors
in the Syrian civil war and one of the tributes,
I think, to Secretary Kerry's focus on this
is that he's taken a much broader role in
trying to direct our allies to get the arms
to the right people. It's often a role that
American plays. If we don't take that type
of leadership role, other actors in the system
are not always responsible. The vacuum is
not good for either US interests or regional
challenges. So that specific issue that you
raise it shows why American needs to be involved,
why it's important that it is involved, and
maybe why it should have been involved sooner.
I would only conclude by saying I was once
told by a State Department official when I
raised issues related to Darfur, "You can't
solve all the problems of the world." And
that's true. It's frustrating and true. But
it does seem uniquely American to try. And
I think some of the worst moments of our history
have come when we didn't try. And so our predisposition
should be the priority of Responsibility to
Protect which is to vindicate the ideals of
human dignity that are at the foundation of
the American experiment and the basis of our
own ideology.
Susan Glasser: Powerful note to end on. Thank you all very
much and thank you to everyone in the audience.
Mike Abramowitz: I just wanted to thank our panelists and I
wanted to particularly thank our co-chairs
Secretary Albright, Ambassador Williamson.
We are done. Thank you for coming.
