Blogoir

Is one argument against using unmanned predators to attack enemy targets that they are just too accurate?

How about this other one: if eg the USA does not have to go through battle processes by putting troops in danger on the ground as in medievel times, that is either unfair or makes it too 'easy' for the USA to wage war?

Suggesting, however sophisticated the language, that superior intellects understand that “we” need to have more American GIs killed, or at risk, in order to reach the efficient equilibrium of incentives and disincentives to violence is not a winning argument.

I also think, however, that the folks inclined to make this kind of argument cannot restrain themselves from making it, because it lies at the heart of what they truly think, while also confirming both their morally superior position of “neutrality” and their intellectual superiority, too, and all the rest is merely a minor add-on.  If I sound offended by it, I am.

Me too.

A fine article at Devil's Kitchen reminding us how New Zealand slashed socialism in a series of bold, strong moves (emphasis added):

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well.

The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration.

Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else.

We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school.

We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day...

It will happen here too.

One day. When we decide to drive back government to sensible levels.

Bring it on.

A reader argues that I am underestimating the impact of Fox News in the USA:

Thus the numbers of people 'reached' in America are not the paltry 2.8 million you purport, but rather 80% of the total viewership for the day, 18,166,000, (again ridiculous, 20% of 18 million people did not tune into FOX news yesterday and spend the entire day watching it)...

So obviously many more people were one time show watchers tuning into an original program they wished to view, rather than spending their entire day watching a news channel on a non-news day.

I did not 'purport' anything. The figures I quoted were clearly describing 'prime time' viewership alone. That said, the ratings over a longer period of course stack up for Fox as for everyone else.

The media term for this is the cume. See how Arbitron defines it:

Major ratings products include cume (the cumulative number of unique listeners over a period), average quarter hour (AQH - the average number of people listening every 15 minutes), time spent listening, (TSL), and market breakdowns by demographic.

It is important to understand that the CUME only counts a listener once, whereas the AQH can count the same person multiple times, this is how to determine the TSL. For example, if you looked into a room and saw Fred and Jane, then 15 minutes later saw Fred with Sara. The Cume would be 3 (Fred, Jane, Sara) and the AQH would be 2. (an average of two people in the room in a given 15 minute period)

Which is why in fact CNN claim that their cume is greater than Fox's.

The point of my posting was to look at the sense behind the claim of a senior Democrat that four times as many viewers watch Fox as watch CNN. If the total numbers for both are relatively small, why if at all does that matter?

This piece supports my position, noting that back in 1969 the main evening US news channels would reach 40 million people (at a time when the US population was a lot smaller):

There's a growing perception that opinion news outlets like Fox and MSNBC drive the news agenda. Do they?

No. The state of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, whether swine flu is going to turn more deadly--these things drive the news. That perception may be there, but cable news is still a niche medium.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has around 3.5 million people watching each night, or about 1% of American adults. That would get you canceled on broadcast television. The three nightly newscasts have about 20 million viewers, not 3.5 million.

What Fox clearly does is reinforce the sympathies and energies of a smallish number of conservative Americans. So what? It's a free country! Most other cable and network channels push in a more 'liberal' direction, far outnumbering Fox.

Where US conservatives do have an edge is with Talk Radio, with Rush Limbaugh reaching some 13.5 million listeners a week. But again, that is only two million per day on average.

The basic fact is that with the huge expansion of TV channels and Internet-based entertainment and information of the past couple of decades, fairly few Americans now watch TV for news and current affairs. Newspaper circulations are falling too.

Hence the vicious circle of those programmes (and newspapers) cutting reporters and so getting more and more shallow or even solely 'opinion-based' (ie making a loud and often silly noise) to try to keep up their ratings.

That trend is evident here in the UK too. See for example how the BBC lost my vote back in 1993 with its scandalously poor assessment of the attempted coup against President Yeltsin, which I watched at the Embassy in Moscow with gunfire echoing round the city in the background:

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC's dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

In short, if the Democrats want to blame something for their woes, maybe the right target is not Fox News but rather their own policies?

Here is what looks like the original British Arrest Warrant for Ejup Ganic (click on the Arrest Warrant.jpg link)

It contains a seeming serious error (emphasis added), saying that Ganic is accused in a category 2 territory, namely Serbia of the commission of an offence the conduct of which occurred in that territory ...

Is this a mistake of some sort based on the information Serbia has put forward?

Or have bemused Brits in the Westminster Magistrates Court failed to grasp some of the basic points of the collapse of Yugoslavia - annoying but possibly justifiable?

Or is Serbia deliberately claiming (to get its jurisdictional credentials established) that at that point the independence of Bosnia had not been generally recognised by the international community (Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the UN only on 22 May 1992 - my birthday), and so Sarajevo was still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and thus within a single legal space, of which Serbia is now the sole remaining heir (insofar as there is one)?

Or is there some Serbia implicit link to the Karadzicistic idea that Sarajevo by that stage already had been divided into two parts, ie 'Serb Sarajevo' and the rest?

If either of the latter two, blimey.

If (more likely?) it is some sort of footling mistake, I would not suspect that the nature of the mistake would make the whole arrest to be so improper as to derail the extradition request, if (if) the issue of where the alleged crimes took place is not in itself a substantive issue (eg for jurisdictional reasons)

Meanwhile here I am on Radio Free Europe talking about the case, as translated into Bosnian/Serbian.

If you don't speak that, forget using the Google Translate button to get it into English - you'll still have no idea what I said! It seems to think I discussing pilgrims.

At the risk of boring everyone, here is an excellent interview with Jovan Divjak about the Dobrovoljacka St killings and the politics of it all now.

It's in Bosnian/Serbian (not as Google says Croatian), but if you use the Google Translate button you'll get more than enough of it in somewhat strangled English to get the essence of what he is saying.

Key points:

• Divjak insists that there was no formally organised attack, but rather attacks from a number of different units with unfortunately no central command possible - a certain chaos
• But (Note: as an honest soldier) he accepts that whereas the Bosniacs were defending themselves, there were 'proceedings' not in accordance with the Geneva Convention.
• "Of course you ask yourself, who did the shooting?. It's known who did it" (Note: the Google translation gets this key point 100% wrong!)
• Ganic at the time was indeed substituting Izetbegovic as the most senior Bosniac commander. But who precisely ordered what should be determined by the Prosecutor's Office, not the media.
• As and when the whole affair comes to trial, Divjak's own statements will be judged to show how far and in what respects he himself bore responsibility  
• Tensions between Bosnia and now Serbi are as high now as they were when the war ended, with Serbia in particular unable to face up to the way Karadzic was supported from Belgrade. Facts clearly established at the Hague Tribunal are being ignored for propaganda purposes.
• But the Bosniacs too are unwilling to accept massacres committed by their side.
• Politicians on all sides have an interest in keeping up tension as the only way to advance their own plans; see for example former Serbian PM Kostunica on TV blaming the Muslims for everything which happened

Gripping stuff, for those of us able and willing to follow all these Balkan tensions in any detail...

The wider point is this.

With the possible exception of Slovenia, a tricky case in itself for reasons going back deep into WW2, no former Yugoslav republic has found a way to strike a way between defensive exclusivist 'national'/nationalist/ethnic politics and a different inclusive pluralism.

Put to one side the fascinating sociological fact that this is the dismal result of decades of intense central communist propaganda in favour of Brotherhood and Unity - something those insisting on 'ever-closer union' within the EU might want to think about.

The simple fact is that all the different communities across former Yugoslavia can not imagine ethnic disarmament - moving to a situation where issues are looked at on their merits, rather than in terms of which community 'somehow' will gain an edge.

In fact this problem has a lot of disarmament game theory in it:

Of course we are ready to disarm - we are good Europeans! But given our long history of being brutalised, it is only fair that the other sides have to put down some weapons first to show their sincerity

Haha. A typical banal Balkan trick. They are saying that we should put some weapons down to make it easier for them to attack us again. They must be planning new attacks. Let's get a few more weapons, just in case

See?! We told you so. We make a fair offer aimed at achieving disarmament - and they start getting new weapons! How can we trust them?

There appears to be no way out of this centuries-long psychological and immoral, suspicicious morass. One name for it is the Sakic-Milosevic Syndrome.

Is the problem especially acute in Serbia? Arguably yes.

The good news there is that as much the largest former Yugoslav republic Serbia necessarily has a different, 'larger' sort of democracy and democratic potential, which has to incorporate different ethnic communities and does so pretty well for day-to-day purposes.

However, at the level of state policy there is an unhappy tension between lumpen 'nationalist' ambition and modern pluralism. A fine article by Srdja Popovic describes how that confusion affects the main force for change in Serbia, the Democratic Party (emphasis added):

... when I saw their program, I realized that it incorporated two contradictory parts. The first part advocated widely defined democratic values, freedoms, civil rights, market economy, and the other part was nationalism in its darkest form. I would sign the first part in an instant, and the second part I wouldn’t even dream of signing.

And now, looking back, I see how even then they were impressed by the success of the Right and of Milosevic’s supposedly leftist party which pursued right-wing policies. So they realized that they would remain isolated and alone if they too didn’t give their contribution to nationalism. 

The party was constantly being divided by this built-in contradiction, and the result is Tadic’s slogan – both Kosovo and Europe. He is responding to the contradictory demands which they themselves made at the very beginning.

This explains the historical reconciliation narrative, because they now want to reconcile the two irreconcilable parts of their program. They want to do it on a personal level, on a governmental level, on the state level.

... But it can’t get us anywhere, it is self-paralyzing, because it is confined by the two conflicting forces which it contains. It is a void, and this void is wasting the precious little reformatory energy this society has.

All that spills over into Bosnia too, whose self-absorbed leaders (admittedly operating in a bizarre constitutional framework imposed by Dick Holbrooke) have blown their opportunity to build a successful modern economy.

Which is why I am sitting here today writing about a dirty little massacre 18 years ago, one squalid episode in a far wider series of horrors which few if any leaders in the region really want to accept as a whole.

Robin Harris, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, lambasts at NRO the way judicial processes are being used and (he says) abused in the UK for foreign or other political purposes:

The British authorities allowed themselves to become dupes of judicial manipulation, and it will be hard to claw back towards common sense. Serbia is a signatory to the European Convention on Extradition. This should mean — but does not — that its courts conduct their business fairly. No one, knowing the circumstances, could imagine that Ganic would receive a fair trial in Belgrade. Yet Britain has limited its own options, by legislation passed in 2003 that reduces the scope for ministers to intervene to stop such cases.

Any present or former politician, high official, or soldier from any of the countries involved in the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia is now at risk of arrest on a politically fabricated charge if he or she comes to Britain. But one cannot stop there. Leading figures from many Western countries have also been involved in Yugoslavia’s wars, particularly in Kosovo in 1999. A Serbian court could issue warrants against these figures, too, and the British police will, as we have seen, unquestioningly act on them.

So Gordon Brown’s assurances are less than reassuring. It is not only private groups that manipulate international justice. So can states with ill-functioning judicial systems and little respect for veracity or equity.

The abuses inherent in universal jurisdiction will, therefore, continue to manifest themselves in acute form in Britain, unless radical reform is undertaken. In the meantime, Heathrow arrival gates could usefully be marked: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

Fine (more or less), except that it does not take us far.

Either we make extradition arrangements or we don't.

If we do, there are three general choices:

• let the courts decide, according to firm criteria which respect human rights and as far as possible common sense (ie as far as possible 'neutral' and unpolitical decisions)
• let Ministers decide, ditto (ie as far as possible reasonable decisions which weigh the UK public interest in an openly political way, and for which Ministers are publicly accountable)
• some sort of messy hybrid (what we now have)

Then there is a quite separate list of questions:

• Do we have 'easier' extradition arrangements for countries we regard as capable of running a fair trial (ie relatively few)?
• If we do, how much easier should they be? Is the aim to get foreign feuding out of our courts asap?
• How far if at all should we (courts or Ministers) look at the substance of the request and the background circumstances?
• Do we have no extradition arrangments with countries abusing human rights (ie most of them)?

The problem with having easier extradition arrangements for some ostensibly respectable countries (including EU and would-be EU partners) is that even they may allow political murky considerations to drive extradition requests. See this Ganic case. 

The problem with having no extradition arrangements with 'bad' countries is that any gangster or corrupt oligarch from that country can make a beeline to the UK and hide behind those laws and/or 'human rights.

No clearly good answer here, in either theory or practice. Reasonable people will disagree as to which extradition requests (and processes and principles) are well founded, and which are a scandal.

Robin Harris appears to advocate some sort of reserve trump card for Ministers to step in and stop any extradition or other such proceedings they dislike for foreign or other policy reasons.

That's one way of doing it. But it opens another risk, namely that decisions made by Ministers in such circumstances will be politically motivated and capricious and therefore open to legal challenge - hard to maintain any sort of consistent principle one way or the other.

In any case, there looks to be no way to stop the UK courts having full-blown legal battles over the politics of other countries. Since even if we have a 'let Ministers decide' rule, decisions will be challenged in the courts on any number of procedural and substantive grounds. See the Pinochet cases - nice earners for the lawyers involved, all at UK taxpayers' expense.

As for Ejup Ganic, it may all be over next week if the Serbian government fail to put together a convincing dossier which establishes enough of a case to answer to force the matter into a substantive extradition process.

If they do produce enough evidence to achieve that outcome, the whole saga could become really very complicated. If not dramatic.

What really happened in chaotic Sarajevo in and around Dobrovoljacka Street on 3 May 1992?

The range of views appears to be broadly as follows:

Core Serbia/'Serb' Claim:   perfidious massacre of JNA soldiers attempting to withdraw from Sarajevo under UN colours as per an agreement duly reached with the Bosniac leadership, with senior Bosniac leaders including Ejup Ganic personally responsible either directly or implicitly. Slam dunk war crime.

Bosniac Claim Version 1:   understandable formal military response to previous JNA brutality and kidnap of President Izetbegovic - JNA themselves broke the agreement under which they could withdraw. That said, not known who gave the orders to shoot. No war crime - chaos of war, which Serbia started

Bosniac Claim Version 2:   spontaneous, irregular but more or less understandable/justifiable attack by Bosniac irregulars responding to JNA aggression the previous day. No formal orders given. No war crime - just a mess

Bosniac Claim Version 3:  a fully legitimate attack on a fair military target: at worst the Bosniacs were in 'technical' breach of a ceasefire unfairly imposed on them as a condition for getting back their kidnapped leader. Even if orders were given, as it was a proper military attack the issue is of no significance. No issue here folks, so move along

* * * * * 

The Serbian claim lies behind the Serbia government's latest attempt to secure Ganic's extradition. But what level of hard evidence will they need to put forward (a) to make a convincing and finally winning case for extradition now, and (b) to secure a conviction if the issue ever gets to trial in Serbia?

The Death of Yugoslavia videos suggest different version of Bosniac Versions 1 and 2, as articulated by Ganic himself and others. For a good, detailed account of the "it was all a mess" approach, read this interview with Jovan Divjak, one of the few people in the whole Yugoslav collapse disaster to have kept a reputation for integrity:

Over at the latest Crawford Diplomatic Despatch:

It all boils down to a profound infantilisation of public life. Government has turned into feckless dim-witted parents who treat their children like spoiled brats. The children themselves duly morph into something neurotic, angry and sly.

To win the public’s loathsome brattish affections and get re-elected, the parents offer endless sweeties, only to be aghast when the brats start to think that this is how things must be – even when there is no more money for sweets, and their own teeth start to rot from all that sugar.

The door-bell rings. It’s the bailiff:

Nice islands you have over there. Pity you can’t afford them any more…

The Daily Telegraph weighs in on Ejup Ganic:

Bosnia has demanded his release and supporters claimed Britain had allowed itself to be used as pawn in the long-running battle between the two former Yugoslav nations.

The Telegraph quotes both an unnamed spokesman for Lady Thatcher and Robin Harris, her former speechwriter:

"She is deeply concerned. It is a mark of her regard for him that he is one of the relatively limited number of people she has met recently. She is worried about the precedents that these arrest warrants represent to visiting statesmen to London and absolutely urges a quick resolution."

Robin Harris, Lady Thatcher's former speech writer, said: "The idea that Serbia can now just actually indict and seek the extradition to Serbia of people who were, in fact, of course defending the local population against Serb-inspired aggression as long ago as 1992 on Bosnian rather than Serbian territory; and that actually such a request should be even given any kind of proper consideration at all by the British courts is to me quite astonishing,"

They also cite me(!) as saying that Ganic would joke "that his career was doomed because he had been born in Serbia". Which of course is not what I have said: how could I, when he was a leading member of the Bosnian Presidency and having an evidently undoomed career?

Idiots. Sigh.

The big policy question raised by Lady Thatcher is a good one. What are the limits of freedom?

On the one hand, we want to be open to foreigners (including political leaders) visiting here both as tourists and on business.

On the other, we do not want foreigners coming here to escape justice when they are wanted in their own countries for alleged crimes.

Plus we do not want unjust regimes to insist that foreigners on UK soil be sent back home to face trumped-up charges.

Plus we do not want to annoy generally friendly foreign states whose ideas of democracy are, hem, less sophisticated than ours by implying that they are incapable of running a fair trial.

Plus we do not want to be the world's default option for anyone wanting a job and free benefits and claiming to be an asylum seeker.

Nor do we want our legal system to be abused through politically motivated 'lawfare' by 'activists' issuing arrest warrants for foreign leaders they don't like.

Oh, and we also want to see all war crimes suspects brought to justice.

And we do not want to waste our time trying to fathom out in nano-level which countries are capable of running a fair trial or not, in general and in particular cases. Since almost none are (we suspect).

Which is why we want to make it fairly easy to extradite people to especially trustworthy international state partners in the EU and beyond, whose motives and ability to dispense justice are deemed (by us) to be (more or less) above suspicion. That means you, Serbia - and Bosnia and Herzegovina too!

Not to forget that we want to keep politics out of the courts.

Except that we do not want the courts taking decisions for tedious narrow legal reasons which could screw us in our international dealings.

Hence we have an odd hybrid system with detailed rules laid down for how extraditions are to be run by the courts but with ultimate authority lying with the Home Secretary (whose own criteria for stopping an extradition approved by the courts are tightly defined).

And did I mention the Human Rights Act?

Phew. Does anyone care to rank these policy considerations in priority order?

No. I thought not.

Mr Ganic's case ticks a number of these boxes simultaneously, which is why the line coming from Robin Harris is open to question.

Plus huffing and puffing that it is wrong to look at extraditing someone 'who was only defending his country' is a perverse reading of what happened, namely an attack on a convoy including UN vehicles which was trying to leave Sarajevo under a deal agreed by the Bosnian leadership including Mr Ganic himself. Watch the videos.

This one falls clearly within the war crime - case to answer category. A point not lost on Bakir Izetbegovic (son of former Bosnian President Izetbegovic who himself was in that convoy). Here he is quoted on B92 from Belgrade:

Neki zločin se tamo jeste desio, al' ga sasvim sigurno nije učinio Ganić, niti je odgovoran Ejup Ganić za njega. Jeste tamo bilo stradanja ljudi, ali će tužilac svoje reći...

Some sort of crime did happen there, but for sure Ganic did not commit it, nor is Ejup Ganic responsible for it. Yes people were massacred there, but the prosecutor will have his say...

Meanwhile as expected the question quickly appears of how far BH-level institutions might weigh in on Ganic's behalf if there is no consensus on the issue.

Republika Srpska leader Dodik has argued that it is 'unacceptable' for BH official money to be made available to help get Ganic out on bail, and has accused the BH Prosecutor's office of ignoring the Dobrovoljacka St massacre and other crimes against Serbs for political reasons.

Back in Sarajevo Bosniac and Bosnian Croat politicians are variously calling the whole business a scandal if not unfriendly act by Belgrade, and demanding that Belgrade focus on arresting General Mladic rather than prosecuting Ganic (Note: good point).

And Ganic's daughter is claiming that the British authorities are abusing her father's human rights by denying him contact with his family and the Bosnian Ambassador in London.

In short, a gripping foreign policy gužva.

The arrest of former Bosnian leader Ejup Ganic here in the UK in response to an extradition request from the Belgrade authorities is a striking development. See this short account on the Belgrade-based B92 website.

In fact the issue has been rumbling on for a couple of days, with Bosniac leader Silajdzic in Sarajevo unwisely denying that anything amiss was happening.

Here is a quick piece I have done for the Independent website. It gives what I hope is a fairly untendentious (and highly simplified for space reasons) account of the confusing events in Sarajevo's 'Volunteer Street' back in 1992, when a convoy of Yugoslav Army (JNA) troops withdrawing was attacked.

Amidst heavy fighting arising from Bosnia's declaration of independence and pro-Yugoslav forces' attacks on part of Sarajevo, Bosniac leader Alija Izetbegovic had been captured by the JNA. A plan emerged. JNA forces surrounded in Sarajevo by Bosniac forces could leave the city in exchange for Izetbegovic's release.

Agreement to this effect was reached with UN active engagement, to the point of UN vehicles leading the convoys intended to effect the swap.

To get a sense of what all this was about, there is no better source than the magnificent Death of Yugoslavia TV series.

Here is part of it describing the negotiations over Izetbegovic's release, with Ejup Ganic himself figuring prominently in interviews afterwards and in live footage taken at the time:

This then describes what happened: 

Legal and foreign policy questions swirling away in the coming hours and days will include:

• is the Serbia extradition application properly made in itself?
• do the circumstances back in 1992 as alleged by the Serb side in principle meet the legal requirements for extradition now?
• can enough persuasive factual evidence be adduced by Belgrade to show that there is a case to answer?
• what about other agreements between Belgrade and Sarajevo on how war crimes allegations arising from the BH conflict are to be handled - should a UK court take cognisance of them?
• do wider political factors need to be taken into account, and properly might be by the English courts? What impact might Ganic's extradition to Belgrade have on already unhappy Bosnian internal processes and prospects for EU membership? (Answer: negative) 
• even if the political impact might well be negative, should the UK government properly stay out of this one and let the legal chips lie where they fall?
• and many many more

On the substance, the vivid Death of Yugoslavia footage shows clearly where the Bosniac leadership seek to escape any responsibility for the Volunteer Street shootings. Their argument is (variously) that parts of the deal had not been finally nailed down and/or that they had no operational control over the actions of Bosniac militia forces who acted (they claim) spontaneously.

As in all such situations, it is next to impossible to prove how far any attack was explicitly ordered by the leadership, as opposed to encouraged by a sly wink at the right time.

Did Ganic and/or some of the other Bosniac leaders/commanders plan all along to double-cross the Serbs, suspecting that that is what the Serbs would do to them if things were reversed? What if anything did the UN people on the spot know or suspect?

Bear in mind too the wider politics now.

President Tadic in Belgrade is pressing Serbia's Parliament to pass a resolution condemning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. And, as luck has it, Radovan Karadzic's trial at the Hague Tribunal moves into the media spotlight again.

Tadic needs to show Serbia's public opinion that he is taking a position of principle - just as Serbs allegedly responsible for war crimes in Bosnia need to face justice, so do those suspected of crimes against Serbs.

Meanwhile in Sarajevo Bosniac President Silajdzic is loudly insisting that any extradition of Ganic will amount to Bosnia's legitimate self-defence being put on trial, yet another example (he says) of the 'relativisation of responsibility' for the Bosnian conflict at the main victims' expense.

Phew.

Will we see another protracted example of other countries' affairs being pored over exhaustively in the London courts?

Note: declaration of interest. I knew Ganic and his family quite well when I was in Sarajevo and he was a top leader of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (the so-called 'Muslim-Croat Entity'). He was a genial wily negotiating partner, albeit often ruefully joking that his prospects were limited in Sarajevo as he was seen by other Bosniacs as a bit too Serb/Yugoslav (he was born in the Sandzak area of Serbia).

I was far away in London in mid-1992, knee-deep in the papers generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. So insofar as I know anything about the Volunteer St shootings it is not from first-hand experience. 

A lively effort is being mounted to raise money to secure the release of one Nick Hogan, who has been imprisoned here in the UK for not paying a £3000 fine and a further £7000 in costs for failing to stop people smoking in his pub.

Try Old Holborn, who has set up a PayPal button. Nearly £4000 has been raised in little over 24 hours.

Galling as it is to have to pay money into the coffers of the state to get Nick Hogan free when he arguably should not be in prison, it will be an impressive sign of libertarian people power if he is quickly released when the money to pay his fine is raised.

What I strongly object to is the definition of a privately owned pub as a 'public place' under the relevant legislation. Just because the public have 'access' to a pub does not mean that it should be treated as a public place. The public are welcome to walk in and see what they like and dislike before deciding (or not) to stay.

If a landlord wants to allow people to smoke or take their clothes off or otherwise amuse themselves on property he owns, anyone not liking it may leave. Market forces can decide how far pubs and other establishments make provision for eg smokers and/or non-smokers alike.

This tendency by the state to usurp private property rights for 'public' purposes is utterly obnoxious, whether it applies to pubs or sport. See this piece on Football Socialism.  

Exhibit One:  Robert Baer, former CIA officer, looks at the the evolving world of organised assassination.

Exhibit Two:  Professor Kenneth Anderson praises President Obama's efficient use of Predator strikes in and around Pakistan:

... of all the ways it has undertaken to strike directly against terrorists, this administration owns the Predator drone strategy. It argued for it, expanded it, and used it, in the words of the president’s State of the Union address, to “take the fight to al Qaeda.”

* * * * *

Once upon a time wars were sort of personal. A King or Emperor would be peeved at the temerity of another King or Emperor or Duke in challenging his authority or grabbing some land. A mass of hapless conscripts would be rustled up and led off to battle.

That went on for a long time. Civilians were there to be looted by foraging armies as they passed through the countryside. 

Then it all got big and impersonal, as Machine Age wars emerged - vast armies slugging it out, with startling levels of casualties, all because of rivalry between states or ideologies. Civilians supporting the war effort became targets themselves as the notion of 'total war' took hold.

Now war is shrinking again, almost to nano levels. Technology is allowing individual opponents to be targeted and hit with something close to unerring accuracy. 

This poses important policy and legal questions.

Once a state declares war, new rules kick in. See Wikipedia on the Laws of War for a gallop round the main points. Kenneth Anderson has a learned blog on the subject. 

Basically, once war is declared (and assuming that that itself is done lawfully - see the Chilcot Inquiry) violence on a significant scale is justified (including collateral damage) as long as the force used is reasonably aimed at the rights targets with as much proportionality as might be mustered, plus reasonable efforts made not to harm civilian targets, and so on.

The invention of new hi-tech weapons is changing all that. Why blow up large numbers of combatants when it is relatively easy to zap specific enemy leaders and/or their senior henchpersons?

Why indeed? Hundreds of Serb squaddies were killed when NATO bombed Serbia in 1998. Yet Milosevic was not targeted. Something seems not quite right there.

In short, Predator killings are the most humane form of war ever invented.

But once war moves into that sort of phase it starts to look much more personal, and lose the 'impersonal' implacable quality of larger-scale choreographed hostilities.

In fact it starts to look more like assassination. Or even common murder, but done in a 'cowardly' way by remote control from far away, a ghoulish video-game experience for an amused operator. 

If a state thinks that only a tiny number of enemy leaders are the real problem, is it not better or even right for civilian police to be used to arrest them? Who gives any leader the right to order such 'extra-judicial killings'? Isn't that sort of thing a tiny step away from murdering an opponent in a Dubai hotel?

Of course, a busy predictably progressive campaign to delegitimise this sort of warfare is well under way. Kenneth Anderson's excellent article above describes in great detail how it works, and how it is gaining traction at the UN and elsewhere. He bemoans the Obama Administration's failure to step forward and strongly justify the policy:

What the United States says regarding the lawfulness of its targeted killing practices matters. It matters both that it says it, and then of course it matters what it says.

The fact of its practices is not enough, because they are subject to many different legal interpretations: The United States has to assert those practices as lawful, and declare its understanding of the content of that law.

This is for two important reasons: first to preserve the U.S. government’s views and rights under the law; and second, to make clear what it regards as binding law not just for itself, but for others as well...

... upholding the American view requires more than simply dangling the inference that if the United States does it, it means the United States must intend it as law. Traditional international law requires more than that, for good reason.

The U.S. government should provide an affirmative, aggressive, and uncompromising defense of the legal sense and sensibility of targeted killing. The U.S. government’s interlocutors and critics are not wrong to demand one, even those whose own conclusions have long since been set in stone.

This is the nub of it - what self-defence means in the modern world:

A broader legal category than “armed conflict” (a subset of it), self-defense might consist of tiny strikes using, for example, covert CIA actors against terrorists, yet not rising to the full level of sustained fighting that crosses the legal threshold into “armed conflict.”

It might be invoked in places and ways outside of traditional theaters of armed conflict such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq. The president’s legal advisers should be elaborating the legal arguments for self-defense, and not solely armed conflict, as the proper international law “frame” of the president’s statements.

As previously noted, this is a classic Amazon Space issue:

The best (if not only) way to deal with individual terrorist formations lurking in foreign lands - if the governments of the states concerned are unable or unwilling to do it - is not to invade the place and create all sorts of new tensions and contradictions.

Instead it is to proclaim them to be enemies and then hit them before they hit us. 

Thus a new international law precept starts to emerge.

Every country in our networked world benefits from the network. So every country has a responsibility to do what it can to defend the global network from attacks by criminal extremists trying to wreak wider havoc.

If a country can't or won't suppress extremists on its territory, it necessarily forfeits its sovereignty to the extent necessary to allow others to defend the network by taking such action as they see fit, with minimum intrusiveness and respectable proportionality.

The great advantage of this approach is that it keeps the issue of war where it belongs - at the level of states and state sovereignty. States are given a positive incentive to deal firmly with extremists on their soil, since failure to do so will lead to their sovereignty being temporarily qualified as others step in to do so.

If by contrast a state is clearly unable or unwilling to take action against our enemies lurking in its territory and known to be plotting violence against us, that is in effect an unfriendly act against us by the state concerned. It is then our right and duty to respond at the state level with all possible proportionality and care to deal with the problem.

In other words, with a well-aimed Predator.

Via The Browser a rather lame article by Jay Rosen arguing that journalists in the USA have become so non-judgmental that they are striving for an impossible professional 'innocence' and are just missing the point.

By way of evidence he cites a long analysis of the Tea Party tendency in the USA by famed NYT reporter David Barstow, who saw much evidence that Tea Party people feared 'impending tyranny':

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways.

I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

Jay Rosen says that it is not enough that a reporter show analytical detachment, and so 'merely' report on what such people believe:

Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable?

If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can...

We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved.

Well, so be it.

What I dislike is the Rosen logic leap which takes us from where we are today to a banal lumpen Cuba-style tyranny - rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state - as if there was nothing in the middle which people should be worried about. Since he defines tyranny in such a banal way, Tea Party people ipso facto must be delusional!

Let's look at examples of the tyranny of modern life in the UK, which is all the more nasty for being insidious. Not the abrupt clumsy squashing of the public by a Monty Python Foot of Tyranny, but rather intellectual and cultural oppression by myriad pinpricks and official insults.

Thus the Tyranny of Filth. Drive between Swindon and Oxford, or round the intersections of the M40 and M25 and the M25 with M1. The roadsides for mile after mile are filthy with litter. What policy processes are happening to exact more and more taxes from people when the standard of public services is so obviously slumping? How can we be lectured incessantly by central and local authorities on 'the environment' while outside the windows of their offices the rubbish is piling up?

Or the Tyranny of Indoctrination. Listening to Radio Five Live in the car the other day (Friday), I heard the BBC presenter talking to a woman in Scotland about current snow problems. He asked her whether she thought it was down to Global Warming. "No, I don't believe in all that - it's just the changing weather" was (in effect) her reply. "You can say that. I can't" he replied in a curiously arch tone of voice. Huh?

Or the Tyranny of Complexity. My accountant tells me that many of his clients have had £100 notices for late tax filings, when he knows for sure that the returns were delivered on time (now the Revenue refuse to issue receipts to confirm delivery). He has tried to penetrate the tax system to find out what is going on. Eventually he finds a human tax-person: "We have hundreds of unopened envelopes here - there's a backlog."

Try the Tyranny of Official Querulousness. A five-year old girl was left in a car which had crashed into a river for 97 minutes because the police refused to try to rescure her as they had not had the right training.

The Tyranny of Educational Underachievement. Manipulating the results of school exams for non-academic reasons.

The Tyranny of Abuse of Public Funds to Reward One's Friends. See these especially awful examples from DFID.

Or the Tyranny of EU Deceipt, as exemplified by promising a referendum on the new EU Treaty then bundling it through Parliament instead.

And so many, many more.

It's not that any one of these is tyrannical in itself. Life is not perfect. Governments will over-reach themselves.

Rather that the cumulative effect of all these nasty developments is to create a new sort of PoMo post-democratic tyranny, one in which the citizens stop owning the state. Freedom and responsibility as currently understood - and as operationally meaningful ideas - decline. Instead everything sinks into an ooze of dirty ambiguity and mediocre uncertainty.

So if the Tea Party people are 'fearful' of that sort of thing accelerating in the USA as it has done here, as their Federal Government borrows recklessly against the future, are they really so wrong? 

Seen at Drudge:

Is nature out of control?

Er. Yes.

Wouldn't anything else be ... unnatural?

John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline writes a powerful weekly email on economic and investment themes to which one million people have subscribed.

As have I.

Because it is free.

His latest one is superb, disentangling different expert pessimistic and not-so-pessimistic analyses about the problems of the Eurozone, Greece and Spain in particular.

What I liked about this essay was the way he looked hard and fairly at rival views of unquestionable professional integrity, trying to find common ground and exploring the deeper reasons why they diverge.

He writes with tight precision:

... the valuation of the euro is not in and of itself a reason for the euro to disappear. At one time it was $.82. Then over $1.60. All currencies fluctuate, some more than others. What destroys them is political malfeasance.

What would put the euro at risk of a bad political decision?  A Greek bailout without serious conditions would be the one thing that could be a very bad start to a downward spiral. If Greece is bailed out, then why not Portugal or Spain or Ireland? What about the emergency room crisis that is Austrian banks?

The line has to be drawn, and it has to be a hard line.

On Spain he quotes another top analyst, Ray Dalio:

... Spain's external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% of GDP more than it has external assets.

As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I.

We don't know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.

Heavy stuff. Don't subscribe unless you aren't feeling weak.

Meanwhile Soeren Kern at Pajamas Media explores how the leftist Spanish ruling class are blaming Anglo-Saxon economics for their rotten situation. And, that old stand-by when you have run out of intelligent things to say, conspiracies:

“Spain is the victim of an international conspiracy to destroy the country’s economic status, and then, the euro,” he said. “Nothing that is happening, including the apocalyptical editorials in foreign media, is just chance.”

Well, that is true. Hard to imagine articles in newspapers and magazines about Spanish recklessness being created by ad hoc atoms of ink randomly settling on the page.

But it misses the main point. Namely this staggering graph in the WSJ showing why for some 40 years the USA's federal government too has been on (and remains on) a reckless binge:

The small cheer in all this horror is that the US Democrats, main drivers of government profligacy, are running scared. The Tea Party tendency is focusing hard on this issue, to fine effect.

It is only a small cheer. Since the scale of the problem is now so daunting that it is hard to see good options for dealing with it. Stephen Spreuill looks at what the Republicans might include by way of policy ideas to start the decades-long trudge back to sanity.

What goes up, goes up and up and up before there is a crash or a total breakdown, when it comes down. The Eurozone is inherently less rational a phenomenon than the dollar, and so it will face its existential crisis sooner.

For those who have not seen it, here is how the USA's 'Tea Party' political gamechanging grassroots protests against Big Government started a year ago:

Remember the Siege of Gondor in Lord of The Rings, when the defenders fall back from one defensive ring to the next as the wild armies of orcs crash through?

Brian Micklethwait painstakingly looks at how the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) came to add Immediate and Catastrophic to the acronym to give us ICAGW.

But now they are falling back in some disorder, yet ruthlessly trying to work out which position might be most tenable against the wild-eyed skeptic orcish hordes:

The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them lose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied.

This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all.

The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians.

And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri...

Actually, the debate concerns not only that, but whether, if CO2 does indeed cause warming, that warming is caused to any great extent by humans, and above all whether, anthropogenic or not, this warming will at some future date turn catastrophic.

To put it acronymically, the CAGW camp will still be fighting over all of those remaining initials. It's not just a matter of whether CO2 is causing the W. This is the terrain of the next big battle.

At what point do the skeptics get to behead warmists and catapult the heads back over the ramparts to terrify those still inside the crumbling castle?

I have had an enquiry from someone who follows closely UK immigration issues asking about the policy issues surrounding the opening of the UK labour market to Poles in 2004 when Poland joined the EU:

Did the UK government encourage mass Polish immigration into the UK?

No.

Well, not really.

What happened was this.

Parts of the Blair government were very nervous about a tidal wave of Poles and other Eastern Europeans washing over the UK once we opened our Labour markets unconditionally.

Or rather they were nervous about the Conservatives making a big row about it after Jack Straw announced the policy in 2003. The more so since most other EU countries in a show of noisy EU anti-solidarity made clear that they would not open their labour markets unconditionally.

Which meant that whatever tendency there was for millions of Poles and Czechs and Slovaks and the rest to storm out from their respective homelands to look for jobs would be funnelled mainly in our direction, making the tidal wave even more fast, big and scary.

So intense consultations took place round Whitehall - should the UK row back on this commitment?

PM Blair took a breezy decision. Let it rip.

Previous experience with Portugal and Spain suggested that there would be a surge of interest (and people) but in due course it would all calm down without too many problems. But he threw a small bone to anti-immigration fears by setting up a 'registration scheme' for new arrivals with a view to at least having some sort of numbers to use in subsequent debates on the issue. Other administrative devices were used to try to stop people coming over to UK and promptly claiming benefits.

Thus it transpired that I as Ambassador had to go along to the then Polish Interior Minister Jozef Oleksy to break the official news of our keenly awaited decision. Oleksy previously had been Polish Prime Minister, but had an unerring knack of attracting controversy and scandals - a droll and unconventional figure by most former communist standards.

I pompously told Oleksy that I had the honour to inform the Polish Government that HMG had taken an important decision concerning the UK labour market after Poland's EU accession in May 2004, namely:

• The labour market would be opened unconditionally with immediate effect on 1 May 2004.
• Any Poles who wished to travel to the UK to live or work could do so with out a visa.
• Moreover, an effective amnesty would be given to all Poles who had been living in the UK and working illegally.
• All Poles seeking to work in the UK would be expected to register under a new scheme, but registration was not a condition for getting a job.

Oleksy looked at me in amazement and said in Polish: "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?" What's the catch?

"No haczyk," I replied. "It's as simple as that."

Oleksy simply did not believe me. He was sure that just as most EU capitals were announcing different severe restrictions on Polish workers after Poland's EU accession, the UK had to do the same. There had to be a catch with those tricky Brits!

He kept pressing:  "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?"

I assured him that there really was no haczyk.

We meant it. Unconditional opening with immediate effect after Poland's accession. The Brits were simply generous, open-hearted people. The Poles might like to remember who their real European friends were after this.

That's how the Polish Flood started.

By mid-2006 there were claims that there were more Poles in the UK than in Warsaw. Some indeed were feckless.

But by 2009 as the UK economy drooped many were heading back home. 

In the great sweep of things, Tony Blair got this one just right.

Ten years from now, let alone twenty or fifty or one hundred, the whole episode will have been forgotten. Those Poles who have stayed in the UK will be doing well, often paying taxes and generally acting as a force for good sense and intelligent conservative values. If any country wants immigrants, get Poles.

Although in a famous telegram to London I did warn Whitehall that this was coming the UK's way - whether we liked it or not. (I'll write this up separately).

Unfortunately there were risks for Poles coming to our country, as the families of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka so tragically found out.

For most others the experience seems to have been positive and helpful, with lots of Polish compliments to the UK on its easy-going ways and lack of bureaucracy(!).

And let's not forget that a while ago we were exporting our unemployed people to Poland in large numbers to look for work.

These things come and go.

A good round-up from Michael Ledeen on the moves by the nervous Iran regime to curb protests:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current phase of the Iranian revolution is that many of those arrested knew it was coming, had the opportunity to hide, but chose to go to jail.  They viewed their arrest as a badge of honor, and (not to make light of the horrors of Iranian jails) perhaps even a good career move.  They expect the regime to fall, and they are building up credits for the next government.

He links to two energetic sites, worth a look if you are interested in the passion of pro-reform Iranians: Planet Iran and homlafayette.

An interesting sub-plot is the way the Iranian regime is closing down mobile phone, Gmail and other services which might help people mobilise fast and well.

Who knows, it may work. But it also suggests that when an elite are that scared of the mass of the youthful public, something bad is going to happen to them sooner or later.

See also this loser.

I am starting to produce material for the fast-growing Business and Politics site. (Fear not. This site continues unabated, soon with a face-lift.)

Such as this piece today on whether it is 'suicidal' to expect continuing economic growth, or suicidal not to:

What is economic growth, in fact?

It’s nothing other than decisions by people to do things together, usually expressed in legal contracts which give expression to new ideas by putting resources behind them. Profoundly democratic and cooperative behaviour. Which also is why the most dangerous, unstable and poor places in the world tend to be those places where there is no respectable legal order.

So less growth = fewer contracts = fewer ideas brought to fruition = less freedom = less humanity... 

... I was at a conference in New York on the Internet and Politics a while back. One speaker put it in stark terms: the change brought by the Internet is that over a billion people now own the means of production of ideas.

An astounding insight. And every time one of them does a deal with someone else to give effect to an idea, global GDP clocks up a notch. Just as it does when Roger Steare or I write a blog piece about it.

Is that really so bad? Would it not be suicidal to try to stop that happening?

To put it another way, economic growth should not “be seen as essential to well-being”. It is well-being.

With added Abbey Road: