AUTHOR'S BIO
David Rieff
David Rieff is the author of At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. His most recent book, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir, is about his mother, the novelist and critic Susan Sontag.
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The Limits of Bonapartism
David Rieff Series: The World in Words 2009-04-06At a stroke, President Nicolas Sarkozy has returned France to NATO’s unified military command, overturning a four-decade-old pillar of French policy. This, however, is consistent Sarkozy's manic style of government – essentially an electoral campaign, not a government – which virtually guarantees that almost nothing else of real importance can be accomplished.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 12131
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Is Mexico Disintegrating?
David Rieff Series: The World in Words 2009-02-25
Mexico is in freefall, with drug cartels posing the gravest threat to its state institutions since at least the Cristero Uprising of the late 1920’s and possibly since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. While the Obama administration is aware of what obviously is happening, the threat simply does not command the attention that its gravity requires.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 16070
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The Kouchner Conversion
David Rieff Series: Human Rights 2007-08-01French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner made his name as a champion of "humanitarian intervention" by outside states to stop grave human rights violations by tyrannical governments. Kouchner has retreated radically from that position since Nicolas Sarkozy appointed him to the government, underscoring how vain a hope humanitarian intervention always was.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 18950
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The Last Interventionist
David Rieff Series: Human Rights 2007-06-18Tony Blair can be plausibly described as being chiefly responsible for formulating and successfully propagating the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention." But neither his successor, Gordon Brown, nor George W. Bush’s successor, whoever he or she turns out to be, will be able to mount another intervention similar to that in Kosovo, let alone Iraq.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 16364
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Down With Human Rights
David Rieff Series: Human Rights 2005-09-21The relationship between the United Nations and the human-rights movement has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, human-rights ideology – and it is an ideology, every bit as much as Communism was or neo-liberalism is today – is profoundly legalist, claiming legitimacy from treaties and other international and national instruments. These include, as “first among equals,” the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The modern human-rights movement was born out of the UN, and in many ways it has never entirely left home.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 35963
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War Against the Laws of War
David Rieff Series: Human Rights 2003-03-05The value of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the additional `Protocols' of 1977 is impossible to overestimate. In simple human terms, millions of people are alive today because these norms enabled the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Together, the conventions and protocols form what is misleadingly called international humanitarian law (IHL), but which in fact regulate war--seeking to limit its effects, regardless of the rights and wrongs involved, and to restrict its methods, even in battles undertaken in a just cause. ... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 15455
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What if not all goods are compatible?
David Rieff Series: Human Rights 2002-07-03It is an abiding conceit of our age that all good ideas go together. Truth and reconciliation, peace and justice, even justice and truth: these are only some of the worthy ambitions for human society that are routinely presented as totally reconcilable. But the stony reality is that it is by no means obvious that they are. ... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 12005
