More Harold Koh

What I tried to do was to say, "There are basically four principles we really care about. First is telling the truth in human rights; second, promoting accountability for past violations, while promoting reconciliation; third, with regard to ongoing abuses and present violations, engaging violating countries to try to get them to stop, and with regard to the future, preventing future abuses. And [fourth], the long-term solution is promoting democracy." In the end, torture, genocide -- these are not diseases, they're symptoms, symptoms of bad government. So we try to promote healthy government.

Now, interestingly, my brother, the commissioner of public health, said to me, "I used to treat smoking patients, and then I decided if I wanted to make people not get cancer, I would encourage them not to smoke." He said, "If you promote a healthy body, you don't have to deal with the symptoms of disease." I realized in the same way, if you promote democratic government, you don't have to deal with the symptoms of unhealthy government.

So those were our focal points: Truth-telling, accountability, engagement, and promotion of democracy. And we had a very exciting period. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, that was the largest expansion of freedom in the twentieth century; the second largest came during the time when I was in government. Nigeria and Indonesia, and various parts of the former Soviet Union, all switched to a democratic form of government. There was an amazing fact, which we uncovered, which was that in 1971 there were only 25 democracies in the world, and in 2000 there were more than 120.

In fact, when Colin Powell's people asked me to brief him on what the challenges were for the democracy in human rights policy, they said, "We'd like you to start with a presentation of about fifteen seconds." I thought about it and I said to my staff, "Get me two maps: one is a map of the world in 1970, with all the democracies in blue, and all the non-democracies in red; then get me another one for 2000, same thing." Then, when he said, "Are you ready for your briefing?" I said, "Secretary Powell, I want you to look at these two maps. What you'll notice is there are a lot more democracies now than there were thirty years ago. The countries that are in red, the non-democracies, are the ones that are giving us the most human rights problems. The countries that are in blue are the ones we can cooperate with the most to try to address those problems. And the major difference is that you now have many, many more countries with whom you can cooperate to deal with a much smaller number of countries. So your success in achieving this policy will be your capacity to mobilize the blue countries to address the red countries." I still think that's right. I think that's what we should have done with regard to 9/11.