 So, our next speaker is my colleague, Samuel Moyn, who's a professor of law and history at Harvard University. Sam has written several extraordinary books in the last decade on the history of human rights that I highly recommend you buy and read, especially the book called The Last Utopia. Today, he's going to speak to us on a topic that one does not hear enough of in Washington, how warfare became both more humane and harder to end. Sam Moyn. Alright, well thanks to the organizers and thank you all for lingering. So, in his 2015 farewell column in the Washington Post, where he covered national security for 40 years, Walter Pincus recalled a cutting remark that a CIA contact made just a year into the war on terror. We've turned 16 clever al-Qaeda terrorists into a worldwide movement, seemingly more dangerous to Americans than the communist Soviet Union with the thousands of nuclear missiles. And then we set out to fight phantoms of our own imaginations, bringing about fearsome enemies we never had, entering a spiral of endless fighting from which there is no end in sight except our own choice to reset. Now, I start very bluntly in this way because I think we have to acknowledge that whenever we talk about legal interpretation, we are really doing politics by other means. Our understanding of whether and how law does and should constrain the war on terror is not going to be separable from our opinions about whether this war is a good idea in the first place, whether it's ethically just and not simply legally proper. Even as we hand our endless war now over to someone who gives no sign to us that she's going to be inclined to take any different of view about how she prosecutes it except escalation. But let's bracket those big questions and suppose a real threat to American soil or Americans abroad. And let's grant for the sake of argument that the threat's serious, although as the last panelist just mentioned, it doesn't account for many deaths compared to guns and fast food. With due allowance, which we should make for indigenous radicalization, although it's very unclear whether our foreign activities are deterring that radicalization or exacerbating it. But let's assume the foreign threat. And what I want to focus on is how we've dealt ourselves a bad legal hand and why we should want our next president to fold it rather than double down. So what I'm going to argue is that our military engagements over the past 15 years have been humanized in the limitations we've learned to place on our targets and methods even as these engagements threaten to become unlimited in time and space. Now I'm going to use the words clean and humane and hygienic to describe our war. If you like, there are scare quotes around those adjectives for the rest of the talk. All I mean is that we've made a novel form of fighting that is effectively, although not perfectly, brought in line with the humanitarian standards of fighting that go back several decades. So we live in a world of humane war, more humane war, but also endless war. And I want to make sense of that and how law connects to it. Because legal interpretation along with many other factors has played a central role in enabling this result, humanity and endlessness. It's not a story about more or less constraint. It's about both at the same time along different axes. Roughly an exchange has been made. Wars have become more unbound in their initiation and their continuation, less constraint on condition of being more humane, more restraint when it comes to their prosecution. We've humanized but not pacified. Now it's not the current president's doing alone. But war that like ours is more like policing, a permanent institution except it's for the globe and under much less significant legal constraint is a bequest that no one's done more than the current president to give to the next one. Clean and endless war I want to make clear is not without some good points or virtues but it's vices or ones that I think a number of actors for their own reasons have overlooked. And the ultimate question which I get to at the very end is whether there's hope to change the equation and the result we've reached. So I want to proceed in three steps. First I just want to sketch very briefly how humane and endless war came about and in particular how it served a variety of constituencies in what you might see as a convergence of interests. Second I'll turn to law and legal interpretation and specifically international law where the dynamic of constraint and unbinding is most graphic. And then finally I'll ask if there's a dark side to the bargain that we've made. What we might have lost or put at risk even though as I say we can't expect Hillary Clinton to do anything other than make what I think is a bad deal worse. So I start with humane and endless war. It's not this war on terror of ours not just the longest war in American history as professor Goldsmith said right at the start of today. I think it's been the most humane major conflict any states ever conducted in the history of warfare. Now this is for some an outrageous claim and it might not be correct. All that matters for my purposes is that war in our time and especially counter insurgent war has undergone a big transformation over the past half century especially and is now fought with a level of humanity a lack of brutality that prior generations would have rejected as unnecessary or once they got a conscience about it would have considered impossible to achieve. Now I'm not trying to downplay the inhumanity of our wars but I think we should classify that inhumanity that remains in one of three categories for the most part. First superseded mistake that actually when we look at it confirms how far we're going towards humane war. Second unintended collateral that goes along with any military intervention no matter how humane it is. And third the inevitable residue of the attempt to humanize war in our time. So let me explain these three kinds of inhumanity that remain just so it's clear what I'm talking about. Clearly at the beginning of the war on terror there were divergences from the trend to humanize warfare that America committed. John you if there's a script that that was leading us towards humane war didn't get it and yet it seems to be more significant in the cold light of history that pushback arose so early within the prior administration and one could even worry that we played into a kind of diversion by focusing so much on quickly contained although thoroughly outrageous crimes of war like torture while something much darker has continued including under the current president. Torture is a superseded mistake and it ended but humane war continues with no end in sight. Second I said there's collateral unintended violence that goes along with war by definition. So there's been lots of disorder and civil war no matter where we've intervened and most obviously in Iraq with large death tolls following but it's important to recall some important facts. Many civilians have died in the global war on terror but not because they've been directly targeted actually few have died for that reason and this is actually the reason why our ancestors put strict constraints on what lawyers called use odd belem the right of a state to go to war in the first place. We've worked much more on the other side a use in bellow a constraining how it is we fight but forgetting that whenever a war is allowed to begin there will be lots of collateral deaths from disorder that will often follow and that's true above all I think very clearly of our light footprint so-called often more accurately no footprint form of war in our time and then third that last category I mentioned the inevitable residue of violence we've killed people because the laws of war allow us to not target civilians but kill them in the course of targeting our enemies a fully legal thing to do and so there's going to be even in the most humane form of warfare a lot of violence no regulation of the way that war is fought will ever eliminate bad apples and it won't eliminate honest mistakes and it will allow a lot a lot of collateral violence so clean and endless war in my conception is is just clean enough it's been clean enough for us it's not that it's nonviolent far from it it's a deal that was struck to reach a clean enough form of war how did it come about I think that's the interesting question because it's so unprecedented and my answer is going to be interest convergence along with technological change it served the powerful and it served our current spokespeople for the weak namely human rights movements so let me explain states have faced unprecedented new challenges the United States most of all in its war making and it learned that it would serve its interest in pursuing war to make it more humane so as to continue it indefinitely a nonhumane warfare in Vietnam and then again immediately after 9 11 cause serious threats to war's legitimacy clean war does not more interestingly the military is willing to fight clean war and it can you may remember the journalist Jane mayor of the New Yorker who wrote many articles about torture in the years after 9 11 she also wrote a very revealing one about the command on of West Point who flew to Hollywood to beg the producers of 24 to stop glamorizing torture no better example I know about of a military acting to try to keep civilians and civil society in bounds when for many generations the challenge was civilians keeping the military under control but now it turns out that souped up militaries do not need to fight dirty wars if they're if they have the right equipment so that leaves the interesting case of the human rights movement now anti-war movements in this country were once far more prominent than human rights movements but no more and anti-war movements were prominent in part because states and military still fought dirty now they don't and human rights movements have taken a different tack actually sometimes as in the case of the late Michael Ratner of the of a of a very well known NGO they have roots in in anti-war activism but strangely their legacy today is to help the state and the military humanized their wars in the convergence that was addressed earlier sometimes human rights activists have argued for war as in the case of humanitarian intervention but more often they've used information naming and shaming to target not the legality of going to war but the crimes of fighting it if you like the not war as a crime but crimes of war and they did this for a number of reasons they wanted to pose as a political you heard Hina Shamsi respond angrily earlier to Ben with us to the effect that she's not on the left she's not partisan and this fits with a very deep genetic code in human rights movements that they claim neutrality they speak from above politics and fair enough but that means you can't speak against wars it makes it more difficult and I think more importantly after 9 11 human rights movements knew that they could not fight the early response to the 9 11 attacks and the rise of the national security and surveillance state so they chose a lesser ambition it would be enough to keep war clean even if they couldn't keep a patriotic response with some hysteria in the mix from happening and so strangely humanitarians joined their old adversaries states and military in bringing about this bargain okay so now I turn to my second theme international law what happened to it I think what happened was the loss of what had been international laws highest priority control of force in the international system and that's because I think in part many actors believed it was going to be okay to fight wars precisely because it was now possible for them to fight them cleanly this is a new view our ancestors thought if you care about war crimes you stop war because war involves war crimes you can if you like stop war crimes but it doesn't mean you stop war so I'll read you a quotation from the most famous law professor of the middle of the 20th century named Herbert Wexler I think he was kind of the leading law professor of the time who says once the evil of war has been precipitated nothing remains but the fragile effort to limit the cruelty by which it's conducted of these two challenges who will deny that the worst thing is the unjustified initiation of the war so you see clearly there he cares about war because the greater war includes the lesser war crimes we changed that view we've focused on war crimes but not war itself and the human rights community has I think fit in in this troubling result maybe for some understandable reasons but I hope they can't last and the human rights community since obviously the continuation of war has served states and militaries has nonetheless stood by in a relative silence as constraints on going to war in the first place have been eroded so this this is I think one of the most remarkable phenomena of the era since roughly 1989 there seems to be some kind of hydraulic relationship between crystallizing constraints on fighting dirty and whittling away on constraints on fighting in the first place and we have to see not just states and militaries but our humanitarian movements as part of how that result happens now I'll add just in passing that it's been central to the human rights movement as well of course to open the road to the use of force by certain states and if you want an example of this you have no better one than a professor Harold co who's made very clear that uppermost for anyone who cares about human rights is giving the United States more capacity more legal grounds on which to go to war okay so let me tell a brief story about what's happened to international law in particular as this strange shift has occurred this crystallization of constraints on how we fight coupled with erosion of constraints on whether we can go to war now most of us especially in this town would rather talk about domestic law a red meat topics like article two or the war power resolution and we could say a lot about those because they've been eroded to those are the domestic constraints on going to war but I'd rather look at international law because it's there that we see the most graphic version of the picture I'm trying to lay out so briefly especially under the current administration international law constraints on going to war have been eroded in a series of major respects so we should start just to go back with a lot of controversies that took place at the very beginning of the era of war on terror concerning whether you're allowed to declare a legal war in self-defense against a non-state actor you remember Mary de rosa mentioned that controversy in her talk and obviously that's a decision that the bush administration made but that the current president and for that matter the next one aren't going to change there's also this a very important issue of the concept of associated forces with domestic law allowing the war on terror to pursue affiliates of al Qaeda but there's no corresponding category in international law which would allow the extension of a legal war against one entity to another that's also been ignored now consider a second area just briefly the constraint that requires you to act in self-defense against a threat suppose supposing you can act against a non-state actor only when the threat is imminent very graphically for example when when we went after al Shabaab from to in North Africa from 2012 on we've seen a fairly significant in undermining of the constraint of that that we strike only against the most imminent threats but what I want to talk about at at slightly greater length I think the most revealing example of the undermining of the constraint on going to war on initiating and continuing war is a constraint that has been most in play and in our bombing of Syria in the past couple of years so I'm referring to the rise of a doctrine under the current administration's calls called the unwilling and or unable doctrine and if you don't know it's it's a doctrine that says if a state abroad can't control actors on its territory terrorists cited in this case in Syria if it's unwilling and or unable to control terrorists it gives right a rise to a right of intervention that's not illegal according to this theory under the UN Charter and we've seen people argue for this doctrine which is the doctrine that allowed the United States to begin bombing Syria a couple of years ago one law professor for example has amassed a lot of alleged precedents that show that states can intervene against non-state actors when the state that's hosting them is unwilling or unable to to keep them from posing threats I have lots of problems with the precedents that have been cited one is the US intervention against Cambodia in the midst of the Vietnam war which is not I think a very savory precedent to call upon to justify later conduct but more interesting is the way in which supporters of this doctrine massage the precedents for this doctrine to hold it has to be the case that there's a general and consistent will practice practice of states to allow this interpretation of article 51 of the UN Charter and in fact there's not most states are on record as rejecting this interpretation of the UN Charter precisely because they want to keep states from going abroad militarily and yet we've done it anyway most interesting I think is that the United States relies very publicly on this doctrine and after it entered Syria got some of its long-standing allies if not to change their minds then to rely on it too in joining so you may know that states like Australia France and the United Kingdom were not willing to go after Syria under this doctrine it might be that they didn't denounce it but they didn't join that part of the coalition and it seems as if their skittishness about this doctrine must have been one of the reasons and yet what we've seen is that in part because of the Paris attacks all three of those states are now in Syria and they've declared that this doctrine of the unwilling and unable doctrine is good law to them it justifies their presence abroad now what do we make of this little episode for some it adds to the number of states that support it and therefore to the crystallization of a new a new kind of law in the international system I think it teaches something else it teaches us that powerful states like the United States get to make the rules they break them first and they make new ones in doing so and that's bad behavior that other states then follow and that's exactly what's happened weak states still oppose this doctrine because they don't want their sovereign territory subject to intervention strong states are tending to side with the United States and so this all I think fits in a pattern we've seen these rules about how we fight the cleanliness of our fighting crystallized and amazingly the Obama administration in spite of lots of criticism has sometimes insisted upon the importance of these rules there's a very well-known case called I'll be honey versus Obama in which the DC circuit judges in this town said that the international law of how you fight doesn't constrain the president the president's lawyers responded that it does and yet the very same president has acted in serial ways to undermine the rules about whether he can go to war in the first place that's troubling now it might not be troubling I'm now in my third a set of worries about what what's wrong with this picture or the dark side it there might not be one if it were just a matter of protecting Syria and the Syrian state from intervention and again I'm not raising these concerns because it's at all predictable that the next president is going to change the equation we've seen a chill caught report in the United Kingdom investigating how it happened that that country joined the Iraqi intervention that is unimaginable in this country and as we heard from the first speaker our next president is likely to be more aggressive and militaristic in pushing the envelope with all of these doctrines then then and yet there is this dark side it's been mentioned but it I think it should be mentioned again first they're just moral qualms about life and death decisions about taking people's lives especially when even if it's in a good cause the likely scenario is disaster after the fact the reason why our ancestors in when they made the UN charter when they held the Nuremberg trials wanted to constrain force is all this bad stuff that can happen as a result of war even if it doesn't rise to the level of war crimes and and it's that lesson I think we've forgotten and even if you're not troubled by what's happening to people in the rest of the world or what might happen under the next president or her populist challenger into in 2020 you ought to be concerned about other actors around the world a rising China now has the right to fight its counter insurgencies is a global hegemon in the future the way America has fought its global counter insurgency and there will be little ground for us to oppose the results on our record all we will be able to do is beg the Chinese to fight clean okay so let me give a brief conclusion I want to be clear that humane war is better than the reverse it has its virtues what we can't say is that 19th century dreamers who thought that humanizing war would end it are seeing their dreams fulfilled today first of all the rules they made to humanize war leave room for so much violence legal violence second we've now learned but this is just a lesson in our own time that humanizing war can make it more consensual and endless and so if you believe in humanizing war you're you can't believe anymore that it contributes to the pacification of the world just the contrary is there a bright side to this dark side I'm not sure I would like to say there is it's hard to believe that Americans are going to stand up in the absence of a draft even if they watch the endless news cycle and conclude themselves that the the war is self-defeating bringing about further enemies rather than pacifying the world possibly there are signs that the human rights movement is positioning itself to avoid what it's been lately an enabler of endless war inadvertently as I mentioned some of its affiliates especially if they plan to serve in government may want to put most emphasis on preserving the right of humanitarian intervention as a carve-out from the old regime of using force in the world under the UN Charter but I think many others in the human rights movement now want to free themselves from the collusion a tactical one that they entered with states and militaries because for them endless war is not a result they planned or wanted now they can't become shouldn't become an anti-war movement but that doesn't mean that they need to play the same role they played in the rise of clean and endless war so I'll end with a quotation from one of our leading generals until recently general John Allen you know he's a friend of Hillary because if you watch the Democratic convention you saw him on there at the end of his time fighting ISIS he said we need to get to the left of the symptoms of terrorism and solve the underlying circumstances if we don't we're going to be condemned to fight war forever forever now this is I think a marginal comment it's more rhetoric than anything else and the question is how to take it more seriously there are so many forces arrayed against changing the equation we've reached whether it's an apathetic public the need to justify defense or surveillance budgets or the need to placate the base with aggressive action so there's there's I'm sorry to say precious little reason to hope that the next president will do other than the current one she's going to test the limits of law and intensify our strategy of humane war over the short term but maybe in the long term it can reverse and you may ask and I'll close this way when the long term comes when the short term ends and the long term arises and the truth is I don't know but I give an answer it's an answer that I of which I got a reminder last week and you can interpret it as you like the answer is blowing in the wind thank you very much professor goldsmith okay Sam I just want to ask you more about the origins of the human rights they move away from the anti-war movement I think rattner is the most is an interesting example because as you alluded to he was the president I believe of the center for constitutional rights he was a 70s war processor a leftist radical anti-war person he spent the 80s litigating against all of the wars of the 80s and the 90s and so he was I think it's fair to say a leading anti-war activist of the type you say we're missing now and then I'm just fleshing out what you said and then his organization became after 9-11 the main organization that I think humanized war in the type of ways you're talking now he said he has said before he died he said that he you know I think even before 9-11 they had kind of given up on the anti-war movement they got in their heads pounded for 20 years they just got no air with it and I think that they had kind of the movement had kind of sputtered out even before 9-11 and then I think he also thinking you alluded to this that maybe the type of litigation that they went into habeas corpus detention interrogation and the like I think he actually believed at the beginning that would be the way to end war that if you made it humane enough I think they actually had a theory that it might careful that it might end and yet I think they woke up one day and they found that they had legitimated and I think he in particular had serious regrets so I just wondering if you agree with that story but then the question is what is the basis for your hope that there's going to be and that there's going to be a cleavage within this movement to go more in the anti-war direction you alluded to that but I don't really know what you're talking about there. Okay excellent so no I think you're right that Michael Ratner illustrates the trajectory I mean I think we can go back and think you know in more historical ways and I'm basically a historian it's quite striking to me that there was no human rights movement in the era of the Vietnam War there was an anti-war movement and the Vietnam War in itself didn't cause a human rights movement to come about there was consciousness of the law of war but in part because there was no John Yu in the Vietnam War who denied the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the conflict in a way people didn't fixate on that and yet the human rights movement I think emerged primarily amongst the Democrats in the aftermath of George McGovern's disastrous defeats so that I think we have to go back and just remember that there were paths open for the Democratic Party because this comes back to your question about the future at the time the paths were seen as unviable McGovern's defeats were so catastrophic that the Democratic Party decided and then we get Hillary Clinton very quickly actually that it needed to be part of the national security establishment that had existed since the inception of the Cold War and that's sort of the rest of history all right there now I think the last this current election cycle is interesting not least because the McGovernite a wing of the Democratic Party turns out not to be dead after all now that's not to say that it controls it it lost and we have a militarist I think you know many of us would fear who's going to become the president very much not in a McGovernite spirit I'm sensitive to the worry that the career of someone like Ratner actually illustrates that we have to accept the result he struggled for so long that there that his his actions are kind of object lessons in what happens if you resist the riptide of history towards this result but I'm not I'm not sure so first of all you know it's the the battle over the identity or the Democratic Party is not over but more important I see a lot of people in the human rights movement that I meet very nervous about where liberal international this like Ann Marie Slaughter Harold co-exctor have taken the foreign policy of the country and will take it again under Hillary Clinton and they want to avoid having human rights become in retrospect something that helped America keep it's you know it's it's freedom to intervene anywhere alive so long as it was done cleanly so I think there's there's there's consciousness that there were there were paradoxical effects to the way that Michael Ratner ended up living his life and and and people like you know sham see you're still still fighting and the question is you know is there a social movement basis that would would would would take a different direction in light of some of these lessons I agree that there's there's the reasons to hope or slender but then you know yes big it really was I think that's true I think that's true I think that's true so if you believe that the the upheavals of the 60s and and and the critique of the Vietnam War were primarily selfish acts to defend one's own body or that of one's husband or brother or son then you're going to be even more pessimistic but I wouldn't reduce I wasn't there but I wouldn't reduce it so but it's it's a it's a big it's a no it's a big it's a big factor what all I can say is that I think that you know we talked about consensus earlier and my the remark I have about the idea that we've reached a stable consensus is that it's certainly a consensus in this town and it can it's a consensus among certain kinds of elites but you know it doesn't reach that deep and that means it can be shaken and more than that even in the Beltway there's more and more consciousness that our strategies have been self-defeating there they're creating more enemies not fewer bringing more endless counter-terror not any end in sight now of course that serves certain constituencies IE the military industrial complex so called by the Republican president White Eisenhower but it but for for other kinds of strategists especially those who care about the effects of our choices around the world there there may be other insights available Warren Coates I am not a historian so I'm really you know coming out this from way out outside but it had never occurred to me before that championing human rights had much of anything to do with sort of the neocon vision of militarizing our foreign policy and you've merged them I don't see why they have to be merged I mean championing human rights does not necessarily ever have to have anything to do with military force agreed no that's that's important and I would never argue for for merging human rights to neoconservatism actually it's very interesting we go back to the 70s when the human rights movement gets started that there were left and right versions of it so from the beginning there were the scoop jackson Democrats who are going to cross over from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party just as they may do now again given the support of people like Robert Kagan for Hillary Clinton their view was that human rights could be a way of pursuing communism under a new label and later they they did a lot with the idea of democracy promotion and human rights were central to the idea of spreading democracy but there's there's no need to make an argument that that human rights are the same as neoconservatism in the guys in in which human rights have taken amongst American liberal internationalists there's a much more of a resemblance because human rights tend to be about seeing American power as a beneficent force for the spread of human rights including in and through military action and there's just not much daylight between that vision and neoconservative democracy promotion however I would insist that that's a rare view now in part because our humanitarian interventions have been so dreadful in their consequences and and human rights communities understand the need to avoid collusion with with great power agendas now they don't have a lot of answers about what it would look like to promote human rights around the world when when you don't have good tools to do so except for for grassroots penetration and alliance but I think I just wanted to make a case that there was a kind of convergence between human rights and these other forces and mainly for the very understandable reasons that anyone who cares about human rights wants war to the extent it continues to be humane and so that's what they worked on but they didn't work on war itself and so it's endless I'll be a humane yes in the back like anticipatory self-defense on April and willing test and so forth they're eroding article 24 of the Charter so I'm just wondering at what point in time do you think article 24 was working well before these doctrines came along with it working well because I think a lot of people would say it was just violated blatantly since it was first put forward and some of these doctrines are actually attempts to try to discipline when force can be used rather than just have the violations that would routinely occur before thanks I think that's a fantastic point and of course you know in my contrast of Vietnam and today I'm insisting that Vietnam was a much worse much more brutal war far more torture even though there was no movement against torture and so forth and so there's no reason to to get nostalgic or romanticize the past or anything like that however they're they're they're still the 1945 text of the treaty which before the Cold War began was imagined to provide a durable world order focused on peace not justice that was the original understanding of the United Nations Charter to constrain force to the extent possible precisely because of this view that to the extent you keep war from happening you keep war crimes from happening so that's why that you find this strange fact that when we look back at Nuremberg they're not talking about the Holocaust they're talking about Hitler's bringing war to Europe because if had not happened no Jews would have died etc so but I guess I'll say that there's 1945 and then there's 1989 when there was a thought that after all the the terrible sordid history of the Cold War there was going to be a reset and yet the reset was not in terms of peace but justice in the form of human rights and so what we've seen since 1989 is much less work on a peaceful world and much more work on a just world if you like and the sad thing is that that's that that idea of justice in the form of human rights has often meant either authorizing wars in the name of humanitarian intervention or once they've been authorized focusing on keeping them pretty and that that's a good thing but it's just limited and so your point is absolutely important if you're a fatalist and you accept that the fact of states engaging in war and the world is a fatal complete that we can't manage you have to face the fact that it has been managed to some very remarkable degree with the decline of interstate war in the past half century in spite of the Cold War and in spite of the war on terror and so the fear is is about erosion from a baseline and the fear is about inhibiting progress towards some you know some some better situation yes following your theme of the conversion of human rights groups from a anti-war focus to a making war humane focus I've worked for decades with center of constitutional rights and their common theme is constitutional rights sure it's true that Ratner was very involved as was said in some of the post 9-11 litigation but for me the human rights groups like amnesty human rights watch and analogous sense analogous sense for domestic the ACLU are focused on acts by government internally they were primarily focused on human rights denials by dictatorships and so forth and even with regard to the actions after 9-11 with regard to torture which is the original emphasis that related to the US violation of its commitment as a signature to the declaration on human rights so I didn't think of the human rights groups as basically anti-war groups I was familiar with the anti-war groups and I don't quite understand your theme which stresses sort of a conversion of them from anti-war to human to making war humane so the main argument was that was about the focus of groups like the the Center for constitutional rights I think it's okay fair enough civil libertarian and human rights groups but you can put amnesty international human rights watch the leading you know human rights NGOs in the world one with a global presence and the other you know a New York base but also today global human rights outfit and I guess I would I would beg to differ that these groups were not really even primarily focused on the rights of Americans except once the Snowden revelations okay sorry oh okay correct no okay well then we agree and the question then is why why do we have that project so strong in the present day without any anti-war group to match it so if you look back in US history or even broader western history actually peace movements were much more popular than anything resembling human rights or civil liberties movements and so the worry is that we've the groups we have left which are honorably pursuing their focus are not pursuing the big picture and that might be a fine thing but the big picture still matters which is that we've we've seen them focus so substantially on how we're fighting the war including in our treatment of foreigners that we've lost much public discussion of and we don't have NGOs focused on the erosion of the state's legal legally claimed rights to intervene to start and continue war if you don't like my explanation which may be faulty and especially in its emphasis on human rights groups I'm willing to concede some some some difficulties but I would just suggest that we need to explain where we have collectively ended up which is relatively clean war with with some criticisms left to make that shows no sign of ever abating that's the result we've made for ourselves and that has to be explained and yes oh it's got soft okay thank you very much you're all wondering who's this guy you haven't seen all day cutting off our last speaker I'm Doug Sylvester I'm the dean of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law and you know for those of you who've been here since this morning or have joined us at other sessions I hope you'll agree that our speakers have been profound provocative and tremendously insightful but I'm a dean so my comments will be obsequious self-promotional and most importantly incredibly brief obsequious because I really just want to come up and say thank you to our partners in particular the new America Foundation and Marie Slaughter and the entire team and I've got names I got to make sure to thank Ellen Alpaw and John Williams for their tremendous work you know it's such a great opportunity for us to collaborate and bring events like this together and so it's wonderful to have them involved with us on the McCain Institute of Arizona State University has been wonderful with Liz Fontaine and her team couldn't put this together without them as well so thanks to all of them obviously my colleagues at the university it's been great to see a number of the ASU law faculty here so a bunch of them have asked questions I hope you get a chance to see them and in particular to my team Andrew Janes David Campbell and Emily Fox for all you did to put this event together as well so thanks to all of you so that is the overall thanks and then also I'm sorry to Jack Goldsmith I want to make sure that this is for Martha the Goldwater visiting chair at Arizona State University this year so thank you Jack for helping us put this together and taking on an even larger event in the spring I really hope that gets tweeted out at somebody and then this self-promotional not really about me but about the program I don't know if people know but Arizona State University has been in DC for more than a decade the law school is entering into its ninth year of a program that's been run largely by professor or Kittry who's been here for a number of years running a program for our students to become engaged in federal agencies international agencies giving them great jobs and now we're incredibly proud to have the rule of law and governance program with Ambassador Clint Williamson and Julia from Holts for those who don't know we're going to have over 20 students here this spring spending an entire semester learning about rule of law and governments coming of events like this but it's not just the I think tremendous opportunities that our students get by coming here to DC it's also having events like this and educating our students back in Tempe I know this is being simulcast back in Phoenix we're in Phoenix now I know we just moved into a fabulous new building hopefully all come and see it but they're watching as we speak and so we are really a university in different places at the same time teaching on really important topics I mean these kinds of events are not just ideas this has been a really thoughtful again very provocative bipartisan in depth and complex it occurs to me none of those adjectives will be used to describe tonight's debate but it's a wonderful kind of opportunity for us to sit back and think about these kinds of ideas but what's most important to me as an educator is most important to me as really just a citizen is that we are taking these ideas and we're embedding them into our students our students are learning about these ideas every day there are other pathways to think about our future it's not just what we're going to watch on TV tonight it's the kinds of ideas and thoughtfulness that we've had here today that just really launches the next generation of leaders the next generation of Americans and lawyers that we really think can make a difference and so last but not least I have to thank the Goldwater family for making this event possible and for really just our entire philanthropic community for really helping us throw off these kinds of events we hope to do a lot more of them I hope to see you at all of them coming forward thank you to everyone for what you did today and I hope you had a great day talk to you