Slave markets in Libya; U.S. crimes; and known unknowns

A recent CNN report, People for sale: Where lives are auctioned for $400, documents how the flow of migrants from Africa escaping destitution and violence has turned some Libyan towns into slave markets. Human smugglers, their business thwarted by a crackdown on boats heading across the Mediterranean, have taken to selling their cargo to Libyan bidders. You can see video captured by hidden cameras at the link.

The U.S. right-wing has leaped to affix blame for this atrocity. Obviously, since the story involves Libya, Hillary Clinton must be the villain. This tells me these people have neither imagination nor decency. Simon Balto eviscerates this right-wing crackpot conspiracy theory. In that argument Balto casually throws off an observation that he doesn't seem to think even requires any argument:

... regime change in Libya appears to have made a bad situation worse, which is in line with the U.S. history of foreign regime change more generally. This was true under Obama/Clinton. It was also true under Bush/Cheney and pretty much every presidential administration since the beginning of the Cold War.

I agree. We should know that by now. It's pretty much irrefutable. But is it yet conventional wisdom?

I've been reading Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro's ambitious The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. The book makes an historical case that, during the last century, nation states laid the groundwork in international law and effectual custom to end the era of "might makes right." This argument is both fascinating and debatable; I'll discuss the book more thoroughly soon. But I was struck by how closely Balto's observations echoes something in this volume:

We should be clear about what our data show and do not show. They show that conquest, once the rule, has become the exception. But they reveal nothing about whether strong states use or threaten force to dominate weaker ones without actually conquering them. Indeed, we can point to cases when states have used their militaries to exert significant pressure on—and, occasionally, domination over—other states. ...

... in several cases, states have forced a change in regime, or prevented one. Most famously, the CIA orchestrated a coup to remove Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstall the Shah of Iran in 1953, the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Much more recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. ... influence often wanes as soon as the threat disappears. ...

This book simply throws off an assertion very like what Balto assumes, this time within the arena of legal scholarship. The notion that hegemonic conquests do not "work" cannot become conventional wisdom too soon if we're to have a more peaceful international order. Mucking about by force in other peoples' countries builds nothing worthwhile and leaves only suffering behind.

The Internationalists is about how an idea whose time had come gradually spawned supporting and sustaining structures around what might seem a weak formality. Sometimes, when world circumstances change, we "know" novel things long before we "know" them. The truth that strong powers cannot effectually impose viable governments by conquest may be one of those things we know that we don't even know that we know.

If you followed that, I apologize for sounding like a certain war criminal (remember "known unknowns"?) but I think there is something to this idea.

And let's give props to CNN for exposing the contemporary slave markets. Will anything change for migrants as a result? It is hard to see how. Photo is via International Organization for Migration (IOM).