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- The great flaw in the libertarians demand-must-prevail argument is that, unlike illicit narcotics, ivory is finite in supply and limited in location.
| "How shockingly destructive and historically shameful it would be," Secretary Kerry said last year, "if we did nothing while a great species was criminally slaughtered into extinction."
As an extension of the UN, CITES would have, one would think, some sway in New York. Yet in Bangkok, when somebody had the half-decent idea of taking the problem of poaching by terrorists before the UN Security Council, that didn't get far either. They won't even use what little influence they have. As for the organization's credibility, that moved fast when the bidding started. To turns things around now will take bigger forces. It will take real power, decisions that count, laws with force, and an audience that listens. So ask yourself this, especially if you're a proud environmentalist and voted last November for the candidate who said he is too: If America, 24 years ago, could take the lead under a Republican president, why can't we do it again now under a Democratic president? It's hard for anyone, much less for a president, to think fresh about a problem so perennial and unpleasant, to clear the mind of the tawdry particulars and find a straight path to what is ultimately a fairly simple objective. But to give it a try, start with Japan. Often in the ivory debate, when it comes to solutions, it is said that we just have to "put pressure on China," as if this were an uncomplicated proposition. Yet how are American diplomats to prevail on China, a creditor of the United States and at times a rival, to cooperate in this effort when our closest ally in the region is, basically, one of the bad actors? Like Thailand and other friends, Japan has become a gateway for the trafficking in wildlife of every variety, living and dead, "from turtles to tigers" as Scientific American puts it. Demand for "traditional East Asian remedies" is clearing Africa of animal life, all to feed nothing but the delusions of people who are certain that bear claws will ease their arthritis, expect lion viscera to solve their impotence, or -- in the delicate phrasing of our state department -- believe "unsubstantiated claims of the rhino horn as a cure for cancer." Secretary Clinton detailed trafficking issues in a speech last year, and in just about every case -- the whole pillaging of Africa, to say nothing of Japan's slaughter of dolphins and willful, deceitful hunting of whales even as we and other nations seek to protect those creatures -- Japanese authorities figure prominently in the problem. America itself was once the world's largest market for ivory, and we still have a busy retail market for it that goes casually policed. Yet for nearly a quarter century, we have at least sought to make amends by pursuing the honorable and unselfish objective of curtailing ivory and sparing the African elephant from extinction. Ultimately, there's nothing in it for us. It's just one of things we do for its own sake, and happily most our friends in the world feel the same. We can't count on Japan to help us? Why, time after time in these matters, are they lining up with China instead of with America? You could counter that Japan is a vital ally in a dangerous region -- North Korea over here, China over there, and a general situation we're all aware of -- and so we have much bigger things to worry about in our dealings with them than their complicity in the undoing of the world's wildlife. But why doesn't that same point work in reverse -- that the government of Japan has much bigger business with us, and therefore should not constantly work to cross purposes in matters that we, at least, think important enough to put a lot on the line for? All the more because China is a strategic concern, and America the nation that to this day underwrites the security of the Island of Japan, it would not seem to be asking too much that Japanese leaders help us in a benign and, by the standards of high diplomacy, fairly innocuous matter like keeping ivory off the market and holding the line at CITES. It is surely a rule of diplomacy that before you approach a great power with which you have a difference, you've got to know your friends are with you. And at the next opportunity, Secretary Kerry would be within his rights to say that he and the president who sent him expect that of Japan going forward. They need to trust us on this one, as do Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and every other friendly or dependent government in the Asia-Pacific region, and more "promising steps" such as Secretary Clinton noted last November aren't going to cut it. Her team, she said, had "met with African and Asian leaders to discuss the immediate actions needed to thwart poachers," and "next week, President Obama and I will personally bring this message to our partners in ASEAN and the East Asia Summit." Doubtless they did. But the message doesn't seem to have taken, because in Bangkok a few months later there was not the least sign of unity. In what passes for drama at CITES, Thailand's Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, declared that she would consider reforming Thai law to regulate the ivory trade, in terms to be defined on some unspecified future date. In the most emphatic, precise language -- no more "urging" and "calling on" them -- all of these governments need to hear that this cause really matters to our country, and regardless of Asian traditions surrounding ivory, the American government will be counting on their support on every front to end the ivory trade. "How shockingly destructive and historically shameful it would be," Secretary Kerry said last year, "if we did nothing while a great species was criminally slaughtered into extinction." Tell them that and more, until they understand that the use of ivory, like foot-binding and other ignoble traditions mercifully abandoned, has to end. They are great and advanced nations; now, in the treatment of animals, they need to start acting like civilized nations, and so, in other respects, do we. Let the elephants be a "keystone" here, too, the focal point of a larger effort. Cast a wide, strong net for ivory dealers throughout Asia, and all kinds of other miscreants will be dragged in as well, including traffickers in weapons and narcotics. Relentless policing of smugglers; grave penalties for offenses; fast-lane prosecution of any official abetting the trade; a shutdown of domestic retail markets found with ivory, down to the smallest curio shop; widely aired ad campaigns in their countries, like that of Yao Ming in China, to show the real cost of ivory; and votes at CITES and at the UN consistent with all of this: These verifiable, immediate steps by our friends across the Asia-Pacific region should be taken as the signs of cooperation, no vague assurances or "draft action plans" accepted in their place. * * * I once had the experience of being in Adelaide, Australia, watching our American delegation to the International Whaling Commission -- basically, the CITES for whales -- contending for days with Japanese delegates, unsuccessfully, to get any slight concession on the hunting of whales. In theory our delegation represents the views and wishes of the president of the United States, who appoints its chief delegate, but at far-off conferences, against the harangues of tireless, troublesome adversaries, those views and wishes lose a good deal of their force. A few years later, as it turned out, I found myself in the West Wing of the White House when the subject of whaling by Japan and Norway happened to come up, and a figure of some influence around there remarked, "There is no reason why anyone in the year 2003 needs to be killing whales," going on to explain why that was so. Such clarity, the best instincts of those at the top, could save our diplomats a lot of trouble on the whaling issue, and it's the same with the fate of the elephants. As a speechwriter, I also traveled with President George W. Bush to Japan, South Korea, and China, as well as to Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, and Nigeria. And I noticed something that's probably similar in the Obama years as well. The policy aides all cared about wildlife issues, and ivory in particular, but they acted, even during these travels, on the assumption that none it was really vital enough to rate direct presidential attention. It all got sorted out at lower levels, leaving foreign counterparts to draw logical conclusions about its importance to us, and, by neglect, perhaps hastening the unraveling of conditions in Africa. It's just possible that these things keep unraveling exactly because they are not handled at the top. And who is better suited to take on the crisis? It's hard to believe that an American president with a solid environmentalist constituency, a foreign-policy emphasis on Asia and Africa, some boyhood years spent in Southeast Asia (at Jakarta's St. Francis of Assisi School), and doubtless an abhorrence for cruelty of any kind, would not have convictions and practical ideas of his own about how to avoid such vast suffering among the people and creatures in the land of his father's birth. In Dreams from My Father, the president recalled how his Kenyan sister, when he first went to that country in the late 1980s, "grimaced and shook her head" when he expressed a desire to see the wildlife parks. She viewed them as a vestige of colonial days, an indulgence for white tourists who came to the continent to photograph the animals without noticing much else: "These wazunga care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children." Obama told her "she was letting other people's attitudes prevent her from seeing her own country," and the book has some lovely passages recalling his first glimpses of wild Africa -- "what Creation looked like." All of this, to complete the picture, in the company of a tour guide named Francis. An answer to the anti-colonial point is that, whatever else is to be said of elephants and their claims of space, the very last influence they should be associated with are the imperial cultures of past times. Africa's people and elephants have shared nothing if not common tormentors -- the gangs and traffickers of today, the slave traders who once provided most of the ivory in Europe and America, and so on just about all the way back to the Roman era. A quarter-century after the president's journey, moreover, their population stands at a third or less of what it was then. It's a difference of about a million dead elephants, and even the poorest Africans seem to take a lenient view. As Julie Owona of Cameroon writes at Al Jazeera: "with the disappearance of elephants, the continent is losing a part of its soul." What America can do to help is, in any event, for Barack Obama to decide, and determined executive action would go a long way here. A hundred outstanding issues between the United States and China exist at any given moment, from territorial disputes to currency problems to regional dangers. Five or six issues, I suppose, are worked out by the principals when they speak, as they will this week when President Obama and China's new president, Xi Jinping, meet right here in Southern California. Whether the African elephants will survive, whether gangs and terrorists will rule the savannah, belongs among those five or six central issues. Exactly how such matters are handled at the commanding heights, I could only guess. But it needs saying at such a meeting, in so many words, that surely Yao Ming is the future of China and not Zhao Bai; the prospering young man who takes responsibility, and not the prideful old carver who just doesn't give a damn. We in America know a little something about vain luxuries and conspicuous consumption ourselves, and don't present ourselves as spotless. But the checkered history of Western nations, the harm left behind by our own wretched excess, including the very crimes that first drove the elephant into this nightmare world, is no license for others to repeat them, least of all when this crime can never be undone. For ages to come, one way or the other, people will come to Africa to see the beauty of its forests and plains. Without that sight like no other, without the silhouette of the herds in the distance, it will never be the same, it will feel empty and stilled by absence, like the familiar places of a friend we have lost -- "Here is where they used to be" -- and always visitors to Africa will think: "China." This cannot be how a great people, living out whatever destiny the Chinese see for themselves, wish to be known by the rest of humanity. The owner of a pricey ivory shop in Shanghai told the Times that a gift of his wares "says this relationship is as precious as ivory." An American president, in solidarity with African, European Union, and G-8 nations, could say to his Chinese counterpart, "This relationship is more precious than ivory," so let's deal with it quickly, accepting equal responsibility to a continent where both our nations can do a lot of good instead of a lot of harm. No nation, whatever its past offenses, current troubles, or aspirations, will want the vanishing of the elephant on its record. Here's a last chance, for all of us, to set things right, without need of problems and penalties that would cost far more than any country's stake in ivory. It would put some life into CITES, meanwhile, if our delegation were instructed to initiate, right now, an honest, "time-bound" debate about who's doing what to cause this mayhem and what forceful penalties are in order. And those penalties cannot issue from CITES alone. China some years ago finally got serious about banning the domestic trade in rhino horns -- a Chinese law enforced with quite severe punishments -- for one simple reason: the United States finally got serious about trade sanctions. A legal recourse known as the Pelly Amendment authorizes presidential action against nations that fail to comply with international conservation regimes. Were the Obama administration to invoke this authority in the case of ivory, instantly life would become much harder for ivory dealers, and the prospects much better for elephants. Why not also a presidential speech about Africa's ordeal, on the theme of an all-encompassing ban on ivory, a complete ban on sales in America to set the standard, the destruction of all stockpiles, the confident expectation of support among friends in Asia, and material aid for on-the-ground deterrence, with Yao Ming, leaders of the range states, and a hundred African champions of the elephant to share the stage? All those anti-poaching protests in Nairobi and elsewhere are meant to get our attention and China's, too. A White House event will gain them both in a hurry. For Westerners, President Obama observed in his book, Africa can be "an idea more than an actual place." So, live from the East Room, let the world hear from people who know the actual place and love it. Across Asia, as these signals began to register, a wave of interdictions, roundups, shutdowns, and newly inspired reforms would soon be underway, exactly as Steve Itela, director of Kenya's Youth for Conservation, envisions: "China could end the killing by immediately closing its domestic ivory markets and severely punishing citizens engaged in illegal ivory trade. But it chooses ivory trinkets for a luxury market over live elephants." A different set of options, all around, will yield a different set of choices. "White gold," the moment that fundamental political and economic interests are felt even slightly on the other side of the scale, will seem a lot less precious to all concerned. * * * Mrs. Clinton noted that "the United States is the second-largest destination market for illegally trafficked wildlife in the world. And that is something we are going to address." We are also a prime destination for the "trophies" of slaughtered elephants, and why not address that, too? With so many of them dying as it is in Africa, do we really need Bob Parsons, the Trump boys, and that whole crowd going over there to kill even more? The great flaw in the libertarian's demand-must-prevail argument is that, unlike illicit narcotics, ivory is finite in supply and limited in location. Authority for the 1989 presidential order banning ivory imports derives from the African Elephant and Conservation Act of the previous year. Imports from blood sport were exempted at the behest of the big-game hunting industry, a subculture of sadism that would appall the average citizen. Amend that law and also the Endangered Species Act, to bar any elephant product, and thousands of elephants will be saved, just like that. The heart of America will be with President Obama all the way. As for House and Senate Republicans, eager to "rebrand" themselves, it doesn't get much easier than a chance to show compassion for their own party symbol. The European Union likewise treats elephant trophies as "personal effects" carted in from abroad, even as customs authorities are suddenly finding smugglers sneaking the other way, with tusks taken at zoos and, not long ago, hacked off the skeleton of a beast from the menagerie of Louis XIV in France's Museum of Natural History. You know you've got an ivory crisis when you're catching poachers in the streets of Paris, and the EU should act accordingly. All of our countries would be doing rhinos, lions, polar bears, and many other threatened or endangered animals a big favor with a ban on every last "trophy" import, while also calling public attention to the final martyrdom of the elephant. Instead of sending more killers over there, let's send more protectors. And let's direct aid to the scattered platoons of rangers, militia, and private charities already giving their all. They are people like Daphne Sheldrick, who was interviewed at her shelter in Kenya not long ago by Chelsea Clinton for NBC News. With her daughter Angela and a team of men, Daphne is among those who rescue the calves who got away. What a strange sight the cameras caught: a little herd of five or six, led down a trail by an African man, all just baby elephants. And the woman has been doing this for 50 years, her only thanks the sight of severely traumatized fellow creatures growing to maturity, living in peace, and learning to trust. At first, she says, "they think we're the enemy." It takes a little while, after that first impression that mankind has made on them, but they figure it out. The orphans see all of the other things that we can do, all of the other powers that we have. Each time, it's just one baby elephant saved, a little thing done with great love. But there is more beauty to the picture than in all the carving factories of Asia. I hope Chelsea shared some of this with her father. Maybe the Clinton Global Initiative can get involved, so that all the victims of poaching will have an advocate in the most persuasive man in America. Then there's an item out of Gabon, reported in the UK's Daily Mail, that someone in Hollywood needs to take a look at. It's about a fellow in that country, "a mild-mannered British zoology professor" named Lee White, who left his post at Stirling University in Manchester to save the elephants and now leads an army of 250 rangers -- placed at his disposal by President Ali Bongo -- to secure the nation's 13 parks. The military has offered an additional force of 3,000 soldiers, and one day every herd in the rainforests of Gabon can relax at least a little under the protection of the legion of Professor White. "I know I am in a strange position," he told the paper. "But this is no longer a biological issue -- it is a security issue. Either people like me can keep studying these animals until they disappear or we have to join the fight to protect them." Jungles, ruthless gangs, brave African fighters, this gallant man -- get it all in the script, and find the next Peter O'Toole to play the part. It can be as hard to track the protectors, engaged in on-the-ground operations, as it is to get a fix on the enemy. At this very moment, plans are in motion to get the fiends from Sudan who butchered the 89 elephants in Chad. Ministers from eight central nations met in Cameroon after the massacre and declared that they would gather a thousand-man expeditionary force and send it east. The mission is part of a new Extreme Emergency Anti-Poaching Plan, PEXULAB, which sounds promising -- more "air support, field vehicles, satellite phones, the establishment of a joint military command" -- until you see the funds available for the effort, all of $2.5 million to cover Central Africa. From the Central African Republic, meanwhile, an America academic named Louisa Lombard noted some gunfire there in a Times op-ed: "In remote parklands, far from public scrutiny, park rangers and militias led by foreign mercenaries, safari guides and French soldiers on a cooperation mission for the government have been fighting a dirty war on behalf of the elephants." We can only hope that's going well, and it's not hard to guess one of their objectives. Somewhere in the same vicinity is the Lord's Resistance Army of Joseph Kony, who, as of April, carries a bounty of up to $5 million under America's War Crimes Rewards Program. Which suggests a general approach for the arrest of all poachers: Put a price on their heads and see how they like it. Some places, however, remain almost entirely undefended, such as the vast Niassa reserve where northern Mozambique meets Tanzania at the Rovuma River. There, reports the Voice of America, "all the poachers have to do is cross over in canoes to get to the elephants, which they attack with high-caliber weapons." Mozambique has enlisted help from the Wildlife Conservation Society, but poachers still kill four or five elephants a day, with special attention lately to the matriarchs so that the others are left leaderless. "Rangers try to stop the poachers, though it is a lopsided battle. There are only 40 rangers to patrol the park ... and the rangers are armed with rifles that date back to World War II." Some are caught, but even then, explains VOA, the fines are light and to this day "Mozambique's penal code dates back to Portuguese colonial times, and does not recognize poaching as a crime." The whole effort across the continent, as you try piece it together, can seem a blur of rag-tag ranger patrols, improvised fighting units, multinational efforts, NGO initiatives, and UN appendages. And however admirable each might be, one has the feeling that even in combination they look more formidable on paper than they do on the ground. Somewhere in the effort too is our own U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages a fund set aside for elephants that, in 2011, was given $1.7 million to spread around for law-enforcement and aerial surveillance efforts. It feels awkward to call any federal program "underfunded," with a national debt in excess of $16 trillion, but that would be a candidate. And the extra $100,000 pledged last year by the state department, for "a global system of regional wildlife enforcement networks," doesn't have the ring of a game-changer either. Spend nothing at all or spend all that is needed, drawing on guidance from our U.S. Africa Command to equip national and local anti-poaching forces and turn events toward victory. So many of the military and intelligence capabilities our country has developed or refined in recent years to deal with terrorists are the same that would track and stop poachers, who in trans-Saharan Africa are terrorists, bringing misery and death to people as well as to wildlife. American forces have the technological architecture and operational knowledge to put these killers to rout. Sharing that technology and manpower, within a coordinated strategy that only America can lead, would give African states a decisive upper hand. Second only to presidential action, and any military assistance that the United States can offer, if anything can help here it is fast action by American philanthropies, providing the means of protection while keeping bureaucracy at a minimum. An example is the Google Foundation, which last year awarded $5 million to the World Wildlife Fund for drones to track both the herds and the killers. An outstanding idea: And if that or some other foundation will donate more, drones -- and with them the capacity to pass information rapidly to law enforcement on the ground -- could in short order cover the most vulnerable regions. Conservative foundations, too, instead of just keeping "fellows" flush at CATO and elsewhere, could get outside their think-tank comfort zone to accomplish something real, enduring, and altruistic in Africa. As Jonah Goldberg put it last January, "the poachers need to be crushed." Though he is "not sure it makes a lot of sense for the U.S. government to get officially involved militarily, I would love to see some foundation hire some ex-special forces to lend a hand." Why not? A voluntary effort, perhaps in concert with well-targeted U.S. military support, to show that here, too, the good can be more resourceful than the wicked. "Policy to Come," as speech drafts put it when enthusiasm runs ahead of practical details. Enough to point out that the details and obstacles here, whatever they are, haven't prevented foreign mercenaries from getting involved already, apparently, along with French soldiers and our own special forces assigned to get terrorists poaching in Central Africa. And somehow a British zoology professor is leading soldiers of the Gabonese Republic up and down the Ogooué River in defense of the elephants. How might a unified effort by highly trained American ex-servicemen and women, along with British and European counterparts, affect the security environment? The mere presence, in proximity to every herd, of expert warfighters with equipment and technology equal to the task, would have an enormous deterrent effect. If the aim is a sudden and sober recalculation of risk by ivory poachers, then let word get around the range states that reinforcements have arrived, and from now on it's not just a few valiant men with old rifles that they'll have to contend with. Of all people, it was a Chinese delegate to CITES who, on the way out the door in Bangkok, advised that everyone "focus less on the demand side of the equation and instead consider the anti-poaching capacity of countries which were losing their elephants." He had a point, at least for the short term, in a year when another thirty or forty thousand elephants will die for their ivory. The great flaw in the libertarian's demand-must-prevail argument is that, unlike illicit narcotics, ivory is finite in supply and limited in location. And if those ranges, broad and scattered as they are, can be forcefully defended, then demand will be killed off instead of the elephants. Demand for ivory might be a craze but it is not an implacable addiction. And commerce in the material depends on unique skills that pass away with the carvers, so that even a decade of earnest protection buys vital time. In that crucial period, for a fairly small price, private foundations, and all the more those with an environmental agenda, could accomplish more than CITES has in its four decades, saving people and elephants alike from a threat that brings ruin to all. The non-military aid could go to WildAid, Humane Society International, and other such advocacy groups, or straight to those like Save the Elephant, a faithful and long-suffering organization that posts on its website such humble but essential objectives as: "Goal 1. Get a supercub aircraft in the air over Tsavo National Park in Kenya, scene of a recent poaching surge, to assist the Kenya Wildlife Service in protecting the areas. ... The aircraft and pilot are ready to go. We need to build them a hangar and put fuel in the aircraft to keep it airborne every day this year." Someone get these people the hangar and fuel. Get the anti-poaching forces all of the equipment, weapons, aircraft, and communications and surveillance capacity they need, in every place they need them. Provide chief ranger Joseph Okouyi in Gabon and his men the planes and boats and camps that they need, and Professor White whatever he asks, and the Sheldricks and others like them funds to nourish the orphans and keep them safe. And in every way, on every front, let them know that the United States of America is on their side. We should give to these kindhearted people all that we can, and our prayers, too, because this forlorn, sentimental cause of theirs is the cause of humanity, in the story of life that is bigger than humanity, and right now the fight is not going our way. This is ground we cannot afford to surrender, the final refuge of animals who mourn their own, and deserve more than to be let go and mourned by us. We would miss the elephants, forever, with only regrets and recollections to fill the space, these grand, peaceable fellow creatures whose final, bloody departure from the earth would warrant a rebuke of Old Testament proportions: "What is this that thou hast done?" Let the spirit of it all be Francis -- the pope and, better still, the saint, who "walked the earth like the pardon of God." But let tactics, strategy, and diplomacy, across Asia and Africa, be inspired by men a little more familiar with what it takes sometimes to protect the beauty of the created world. Poachers, explained chief ranger Paul Onyango to Jeffrey Gettleman, as they surveyed the bodies of twenty slain elephants at a park in Congo, should not expect negotiations, or warnings, or even much in the way of due process: "Out here, it's not michezo." As the Times translates, it's a Swahili way of conveying to enemies that this is serious and we don't play games. 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