Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Point Of Attack 20

Panelist comments and i might throw in a point or two as well, and then following that well open up the floor to your questions, and have a good, robust discussion, im sure. Before turning the mic over to downare john, let me introduce our two guest panelists. As you can see from the biographical merles you have in hand, both have had quite distinguished careers. Michael is a professor another law at ohio northern university, former navy pilot, harvard law graduate, graduate of the naves top gun program. Michael has written extensively in the areas of the laws of war some the laws of war as applied to the current war on terrorism. Harvey chair the abas Ad Advisory Committee on National Security and a former professor at the national war canaling war college, and he was a Legal Counsel to the fbis Deputy Director and has had his hand in drafting this is my tenth never here and its ten inch anniversary and this book is a product of that ten years. I started working on it when i came here after the iraq war, and this is my effort to try to make sense of the iraq war, and the Afghanistan War and allow the other conflicts we have been going through as a country. Its also great to have gary as the moderator. A perfect person. One of the few people who shares an intense interest in the framers and National Security and intelligence, and i would be remiss if i didnt say that i had stolen one of garys great ideas from his dissertation on my last book on Thomas Jeffersons views on executive power. Gary has the opinion that jefferson had a robust approach to the presidency in practice but not in theory, and i had tried to disseminate that idea through my own work and you were the first one to realize that and to explore it. Also a great pleasure to be here with mike lewis. Mike was on the front lines. Mar have i was at the National War College on the rear lines, i guess, and its great to i want to make one recognition of my mentor for many years, judge Lawrence Silverman is here. He is angry for writing the book and claim is stole the idea from him. With many other things i admit, i dill did steal it from him but he didnt publish fast enough. I got there first. I think they arent do it today under the u. N. Charter itself. To have been plenty of wars since the u. N. Charter, never authorized by the u. N. And were not in selfdefense. And the u. N. , i think, has been powerless to stop and it the invasion of ukraine is a good example. Part of it is the rule and part of it is the institution, that if you require the full agreement of the permanent members of the Security Council to authorize measures against any kind of aggression, and china and russia sit on the Security Council, theyre going to veto any effort to respond to an invasion of crimea, or looking down the future, any military engagements that might arise in the South China Sea or in asia. Which essentially renders not just the rule being denied practice but means institutionally the u. N. Charter the americanled effort to create a system to manage conflict after world war~ii just doesnt work and has failed. Its not going to work for the future. That done mean that great power war is an actually, a certain kind of war is actually under supply because of this ban on International Law on any use of force other than selfdefense. Actually prevents we were al bern allies and the United States from intervening to shore up the International System. So rwanda, kosovo. Iraq, all places the ukraine. The South China Sea. All areas where the system actually prevents, discourages nations from using force where we might want to because the gains to the world will be much higher than any costs of conflict under International Law they would be illegal and the International System ought to encourage the powers to use force to control those kinds of threats to International System. It doesnt need to worry about war between the great powers where International Law does nat have much affect, and the peace has been kept for other reasons. One last way to understand this thesis, this is very similar to the way law and economic scholars think about contract law or tort law. There may be a rule. You which i think would be consistent with this approach but which may well be seen as troublesome and potentially illegal under the u. N. Charter. The first thing i would say is the United States should terminate the s. T. A. R. T. Treaty. The s. T. A. R. T. Treaty is the one that spoke for the u. S. And russia to 1550 nuclear weapons, places other limits on the delivery vehicles but its an effort to treat the United States and russia as the same when it comes to Nuclear Arsenals even though russia is not really projecting power around the world anymore and the u. S. Has a lot of responsibilities for peace and stability. Doesnt make any sense for United States to treat russia as an equal it seems to me we could terminate the treaty and the Nuclear Arsenal can flow to whereever it needs to be for our security obligations rather than any kind of commitment. Obviously the second thing and this is the position president obama taken laysha about how these trying to hit single Foreign Policy and not devils and certainly not homers and it seems to me in ukraine right now we are looking at called third strikes because only military aid were given to meals ready to be. Even under president carter when the soviets invaded afghanistan we did more than give the afghan rebels food. Seems to me another thing we could do. This would be very difficult under the charter but under the set of rules that would be fine to give military aid to ukraine and like president carter did in afghanistan supplied new rebels that there might be in the ukrainian region under russian control. The third thing we can do is to restore the antiballistic Missile Systems in Eastern Europe that the Obama Administration pulled paul vallas of diplomatic offering of a reset in relations. That has clearly failed. If russia wants to go around invading its neighbors United States can send a strong signal of support for its allies without any boots on the ground without any military proffer with russia by putting the systems out. The abm system and help the russian soviets go bankrupt and Health Injury to the fall of the soviet union why not give it another try . And then the last thing i would say is we should than our cooperation with russia on syr syria. I dont see why the u. S. Should be a partner with russia in an action which is having the effect of propping up the Syrian Regime and actually switching the momentum of the civil war towards the assad regime. And lastly i think this is very difficult to see this happening quickly but it could happen in the longer term is institutionally created an alternative to the u. N. And the Security Council where we dont give permanent fee goes to authoritarian governments like russia and china. Something in the book i call a concert of democracies where you still need an institution of process to legitimize the use of force then create one. It doesnt have to be focused around the u. N. And the charter. It can be focused around those countries that are democracies and have open markets and have the same value system as the United States. So with that thank you very much and i look forward to comments. Thank you all for coming out and aei for having me here. I think professor u is absolutely right that the u. N. Security council is broken that the permanent veto is going to prove it. The use of force in places where the use of force would improve Human Welfare. He had mentioned that the number of great power wars and the people that died in great power wars has diminished to near zero since the institution of the United Nations but at the same time the number of internal struggles, civil wars, low intensity conflicts around the world has gone way up as have the number of people dying in those conflicts all over the world. And the idea of saying you can improve Human Welfare by intervening in these conflicts and preventing these conflicts from having the kind of humanitarian disasters that they become in many cases is a legitimate use of force but its a use of force that is absolutely forbidden by the u. N. Charter now unless we can get russia china and the United States to agree at the same time that this is a place where we want to use force. The only other exception would be article li selfdefense and in most cases that does not apply. Another point professor yoo makes in his book is that there is at least an undercurrent of nations that have three state practice indicated a willingness to go beyond where the u. N. Charter says they are supposed to go. In terms of using force to prevent either humanitarian crises or other kind of disasters so kind of disasters so whether it be tanzania intervening in uganda or vietnam and cambodia or india and bangladesh all of which were unilateral interventions or a collective intervention like nato in kosovo where you had a group get together and decide we need to stop the humanitarian crisis in kosovo. Those have all been criticized at some level or another but they have also all been praised as some level or another for the kinds of good they have done. The central theme are one of the central themes to the book though is to say how do we figure out when a war is going to be a net benefit to Human Welfare . If it has an economic sense to it and it says you have to downgrade here are the benefits that are going to a group from using force here. Here are the lives that will be saved and here are the lives that will be improved as a result of doing whatever happens whether it be libya, syria, iran etc. And while that is a laudable idea in practice its going to be very difficult and i think we can look at perhaps the best way to look at things is to look at the example which would be rawanda. Everybody looks at that and says how could 800,000, 2 Million People have been killed with missions of smallarms mid20th century while all of europe and the rest of the world stood by and watched. It seems like it cries out for intervention but looking at the one intervention that has happened in the last few years, libya is a good example of the indeterminacy of the good that is done and i guess what i mean by that is whenever you intervene and intervention is a nice word that what you are doing is killing. You are going to go and kill people, whether it be the libyan command control and Communications People or the air defense people or some of the Libyan Special Ground Forces that we attacked, you are going to kill those people and sometimes you kill the wrong people. You are going to kill civilians and have Collateral Damage. The french and the british were criticized for the amount of Collateral Damage and strikes in libya that killed civilians when they were going after command and control in tripoli. And so you will steal the say that these are people that died that should not have. Now you tell me who you saved. I dont know how we can know exactly how many people were saved by libya. I dont know what the estimates are that the best you can do is come up with a historical counterfactual thing if we had not done this is what would have happened and you are going to have to convince skeptics and other nations that are opposed to the action that this in fact would have been the case. I guarantee you that had we intervened in rwanda, if you were going to turn around and try to convince the world that you had saved 800,000 lives by being in rawanda theres no way anyone would have believed you. It would have been a neocolonialist acts by the french the belgians the americans to go back in and reestablish control over a lost colony and no one would have believed that you saved 800,000 lives by doing so. And the counterfactual nature of this means that while i agree that there is intervention that intervention should be undertaken on a number of occasions, that if you do so you have to be very cleareyed about the fact that no one is going to thank you for doing it. Nobody is going to look back and say it was a great thing you did. Nobody is telling us that for libya. Nobody is telling us. And so as long as you dont expect people to thank you and dont expect people to fully support everything you do because corporal geopolitical reasons i guarantee russia, china and others will criticize any of those actions you take and you have to be prepared to accept that and do the best you can can to back up the claim that hears the counterfactual that we avoided. Excellent. Thank you so much. I have been here before and its always great to have a form might this that dedicated to the John Stuart Mill principle of having open debate about interesting and hard subjects. These are my remarks and are not affiliated with the groups im associated or involved with. This is quite fascinating for me because i am johns tenth anniversary he has revealed himself to be a canadian, international idealist interventionists. Which is fascinating and the book which i find intriguing in an earlier word would have found extremely compelling is the current ambassador for united the United States Samantha Powers. If you read the book you could make a strong argument that john has become samantha. That happens all the time. So why is that . It is because first of all its a classic john yoo piece of work. He rereads all the classics, the romans, the greeks of gustines and its almost an openended relations but he he reads it completely differently than anyone else. He comes with a different conclusion about what is embedded in the doctrine and that doctrine allows him to make an argument of why you can have a principle of prevention tied to morality and the morality is tied to much more of it classic conception of costbenefit analysis so he marries economic theory to International Policy based upon the principle global goods. So its a very creative argument putting together literature you dont normally see together. Its classic yoo so its a good or bad . Like Everything Else it depends so as my colleague to the left is at the point of the spirit john ridge x. The constant at bellum as being ripped apart from its tradition and therefore our traditional way we teach it right now as you go through the steps of just cause, is there competent authority, is their intention is their probability of success and what is the last resort to use force and finally the proportionality. He really honed in on that. He doesnt talk about the classic doctrine about how we make proportionality combatants and noncombatants and the other part which i am sir john has become like poser is that theyre something we call postbellum so the grapevine of postbellum is go crofts line switches the issues where john was intervene and are very hard, nasty internal issues. I will get to this notion of civil wars ethnic conflicts and borrow the its hard for americans to stand on the side particularly for many of us who have experiences with world war ii. The irony of scowcroft is intervening in these cases doesnt solve them. It gives you, you win the right to try to sell them. The assumption is that people youre intervening with will embrace the ideas and values that we carry us americans and the values that we understand the world should be. That is somewhat unclear actually and not only that but the assumption of johns book is tuesday at the high level of what the values are in our interest is how far do you go . One of the great cleavages in the world system is how you treat women . You have gone through quite a struggle inside the United States for equality and equal rights but if you do a certain ethnic groups such as Orthodox Jewish i b. C. Women which is not particularly in accord with the way we understand our relationship with equal rights so how far do you want to take what we see is the american way. As you know many are resisting the american way. Where do you stand on abortion and where do you stand on the whole range of issues . Do we want those . What is the logic of it so when you start at that level of distraction and you drive down into the specifics thats where the devil is in the details and why you explain that we have not been very good at nationbuilding. We are good at nationbuilding when we occupy and whether we like it or not the american way is its Unconditional Surrender which is the story but we story but we used to do in world war i and world war ii and we occupied germany and occupied japan. The irony about america as we say we worst are negotiations and thats also what that means for the evolution of where we are in afghanistan and where we are with iraq today. So i found the book extremely fascinating as always really putting forward a whole range of arguments that go forward but the logic is where does one understand whe