A conspicuous silence on Iraq
FEW ASPECTS of the evolving crisis in Iraq are beyond controversy, but on one point there is now little dispute: The conflict there has produced a humanitarian disaster. The United Nations estimates that at least 30,000 Iraqis died in 2006, and more than 100,000 have died since the invasion. The bloodshed, and the question of what might staunch it, has now become a critical part of the debate on Iraq policy.
Yet one group of voices has been mute: the West's leading human rights organizations. These organizations have no public position on whether US troops should stay or go and on whether the "surge" of troops can help restrain the escalating bloodshed.
Ask human rights organizations why they haven't taken a position, and they'll say it's not part of their charge. "The question of whether we should pull out or not is really just a basic question about aggression or warfare that is beyond our mandate," says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
In theory, the distance that these organizations keep from such fraught political questions allows them to report impartially on the behavior of all parties to a conflict. But this is a slippery rationale, and these groups do not necessarily follow it in other conflicts. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, for instance, have supported expanding the African Union's overwhelmed peacekeeping force in Darfur. Last month, Human Rights Watch demanded that the United Nations dispatch an armed protection force to Chad with the mandate to "use force to protect civilians."
Supporting an expanded peacekeeping force in Darfur or Chad is not, as the human rights community knows well, somehow above politics. Factions in those conflicts will try to use the intervention force to advance their political aims just as surely as Iraqi groups do.
If the limits of their mandate cannot fully account for the silence of the human rights community on Iraq, what does? Part of the explanation is genuine puzzlement: human rights professionals are as confused as everyone else about how to stop the spiraling sectarian violence. When speaking privately, experts offer widely different predictions about what would happen if US troops were to withdraw quickly and whether the surge of US forces can work. Some argue that an American withdrawal might force the major Iraqi factions to reach a power-sharing deal. Others say withdrawal would unleash a far worse bloodbath.
The groups' uncertainty meshes with a deep distrust of the Bush administration -- distrust it has done much to earn; consider Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
What's more, most human rights activists opposed the war from the beginning, and they are now loath to endorse it in any way. Human-rights groups did groundbreaking work exposing Saddam Hussein's atrocities. But however much they despised his regime, most activists believed that American and British politicians abused humanitarian rationales for political aims. Human Rights Watch even released a brief in January 2004 explaining why the war did not meet its strict criteria for humanitarian intervention.
However valid those concerns were then, the situation now is different. Many of the war's early rationales have fallen away, and the US-led force is now struggling to impose basic security and restrain sectarian violence. The occupation also has a legal mandate: Although the UN Security Council did not endorse the invasion, it did authorize the occupation and gave the US-led force the responsibility to help provide security and bolster the elected government.
So the Iraq war now is arguably the functional equivalent of a humanitarian intervention. Human Rights Watch's Roth concedes that the killing in Iraq has now reached crisis proportions. But he also believes that other methods -- including the threat of international war crimes trials for militia leaders on all sides -- must be tried before attempting to stop the violence with expanded American military force.
But there is an air of unreality to some of these proposals. No morally pure cavalry stands ready to pull Iraq back from the brink. However worthwhile international prosecutions might be, they are unlikely to snap the cycle of violence, just as they have failed to do so in Darfur.
As the United States careens toward a new Iraq policy, human rights experts must bring their insight to bear. The debate on whether to stay or go should not happen without the input of those Westerners who are most concerned with the fate of the Iraqi people.
David Bosco, a contributing writer at Foreign Policy magazine, is a visiting scholar at American University's School of International Service. 
