Blogoir

Former Bosnia Presidency member Ejup Ganic has been released on bail, albeit subject to some strict conditions. Serbia has to continue mustering evidence for the process to move forward.

In the end current BH Bosniac Presidency member Haris Silajdzic did not visit him in jail, but instead remonstrated with David Miliband about the whole business.

The British Government are sticking to the line that this is a purely legal matter with no (no) political connotations in any way whatsoever either for the present or in terms of any view of what happened in the past. See HM Ambassador in Sarajevo, Michael Tatham, on his blog (in Bosnian!).

That position, of course, is exactly what critics of the whole affair are attacking:

Please. Be serious. How can the fact that you have arrested a former senior Bosniac on war crimes charges emanating from a Serbia which refuses to hand over Mladic be 'solely' a legal matter?

Fair enough. But that's today's Europe. Better to tackle complex questions by stuffing all concerned with the Porridge of Procedure than through ethnic cleansing and the rest?

So on it all trundles. As things now stand, it is hard to imagine that the Serbia side will not assemble enough material to persuade a judge that prima facie the issue deserves a substantive hearing (unless, that is, the Bosniac side knock down the extradition application on jurisdictional or other procedural grounds).

Is a British court in due course to pore over the origins of the Bosnian conflict and the Dobrovoljacka St shootings back in 1992 and try to reach a conclusion?

"It seems to me, Jeeves, that the ceremony may be one fraught with considerable interest."

“Yes, sir.”

“What, in your opinion, will the harvest be?”

“One finds it difficult to hazard a conjecture, sir.”

“You mean imagination boggles?”

“Yes, sir.”

I inspected my imagination. He was right. It boggled.

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.

Under the Lisbon Treaty the European Union has a new External Action Service, led by Baroness Ashton.

And as expected, it is struggling to trundle out of the hangar and get on the runway.

The main issue in the arguments over setting up the EAS is not all about how the EU might best throw its weight around in the world.

No! Much more important matters principles are at stake. Namely:

• who gets which top jobs?
• who decides?

In one early and much criticised power-play, probably the most important overseas job in the EAS went to ... a close colleague of Commission President Barroso, who was bundled through by Barroso before the EAS was properly set up. Many Europhiles see this as at best unseemly:

The fear is that the appointment of a Portuguese official, formerly Barroso’s chef de cabinet smacks of patronage and inappropriate influence. 

Not an inspired move, if the aim is to make the EU effective?

Since then there has been the long anticipated three-way struggle between member states (keen to get EAS defined and run in such a way as to pose no threat to national foreign ministries), the European Parliament (ever scheming to extend its power) and the Commission (having hundreds of people previously serving at Commission 'representations' overseas who need placing).

Behind all that are key European policy competences. Who leads and sets the overall agenda? The Commission, the Parliament, or Member States?

Zzzz.

Meanwhile Cathy Ashton too is being attacked openly from various quarters (including France) for being 'just not up to the job'. Although some of the examples cited are a bit strange:

... some experienced EU officials say she would have done better to have waited two months in order to learn the ropes from Mr Solana and his team.

“She hasn’t had the tools she needs. When Haiti hit, she did not even have a television in her office,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s foreign minister.

Huh?

Good. The last thing she needs is tedious 24/7 media propaganda flickering away distractingly in the corner.

Nor should she have rushed to Haiti to 'see for herself' the earthquake devastation there. Trips like that are basically do-something resource-intensive self-indulgence by the leaders concerned.

Maybe patiently plodding along is the inglorious but overall best available approach.

In short, all going just as I predicted.

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:

Dnevni Avaz in Sarajevo reports that the UK court has ordered that Ejup Ganic stay in prison for a further week, apparently to give Serbia more time to present evidence against him for the Dobrovoljacka St massacre in 1992.

A protest demonstration is to be held outside the British and Serbian Embassies in Sarajevo.

Here in the UK the absurd and preposterous media silencefulness about this story is truly terrific.

As far as I can see:

Nothing more on the Telegraph website since 2 March.

Nothing more on the Guardian website since 1 March (Note: I mentioned this to the Guardian's Diplomatic Editor last night).

Nothing more on the Times website since 3 March.

Nothing more on the Independent website since 1 March.

Good grief.

A former European leader has been arrested and detained on a Balkan war crimes extradition rap, involving an attack on a UN convoy. The London court blunders its own procedures and brings the wrong prisoner to court. The issue stirs controversy and adds to Bosnia's already sharp political divisions.

Is all this and much more not in some way maybe ... newsworthy?

UK/World News today: Should Carla Bruni have Worn a Bra?

Duh. Of course not.

I have just given a short interview to Radio Free Europe in Sarajevo about the Ganic problem.

The interviewer asked a question about the abuse of UK courts for political purposes. I pointed out that there are two completely different issues here, which may (understandably) be merging into one in the public mind:

• extradition requests filed by other states, which may or may not involve foreign leaders (Ganic situation): these are played out under the relevant detailed Extradition legislation
• private prosecutions (eg for war crimes) of visiting foreign leaders attempted by UK-based 'activists' as politically motivated lawfare. See the recent Israel episode. That was what Gordon Brown has written about today. 

I also pointed out that HM Government took war crimes issues very seriously - see eg the first action in Bosnia by NATO to round up ICTY indictees in 1997, which had been fatuously denounced in Sarajevo as a pro-Serb ploy even though the SAS killed a leading Bosnia Serb indictee in the process.

So (I said) it was not surprising that a British court confronted with some evidence that the Bosnian leader concerned had played a direct part in the killing of up to 40 people in a UN convoy might take the case very seriously. If it went to substantive hearings a rare battle would ensue, with top lawyers arguing the extradition case on its merits. I added that it remained to be seen whether the Bosnian application for Mr Ganic's extradition would help or hinder his case - were they really going to present him as a war-crimes suspect..? 

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.

This morning's Dnevni Avaz newspaper in Sarajevo has plenty on the Ejup Ganic story. Here.

For those of you unfortunate enough not to read Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, some of the interesting points in the article as yet unreported in the UK media - British scoop, right here:

• Mr Ganic's son Emir is reported as saying that Mrs Thatcher, a 'very close friend' of Mr Ganic, has sent her lawyers to help him - they represented him yesterday in court in London
• Action is in hand to raise £200,000 bail money
• Ganic is being held not under some sort of Interpol or other arrest warrant but under the 2002 UK/Serbia extradition agreement
• Which opens a 'key question': is Ganic a Serbian citizen and so subject to this agreement, or not?
• Son Emir says that his father was born in Serbia and had a Yugoslav passport when Yugoslavia broke up, but he never applied for a Serbian one, so he does not have Serbian citizenship
• British Ambassador in Sarajevo Michael Tatham has said that this situation represents no form of political or diplomatic statement by the British government about past events 
• Bosniac BH Presidency member Silajdzic is insisting that events in Sarajevo in 1992 are solely the responsibility of Bosnia and that BH and Serbia have signed an agreement to that effect - experts from his office are en route to London to help Ganic
• Serb BH Presidency member Radmanovic is saying that the arrest of Ganic shows that international legal processes are working as they should

The whole issue may turn on the issue of how Serbian citizenship is defined.

Yugoslav citizens had Yugoslav passports, and many continued using them long after Yugoslavia itself collapsed (they finally expire at the end of this year). They were also 'citizens' of their native republic.

Serbia for legal purposes was agreed to be the 'continuation' of Yugoslavia. So if a former Yugoslav citizen did not make the positive step to renounce his Yugoslav/Serbian citizenship, did it continue on paper even though that citizen had acquired a new citizenship of another former republic? Can citizenship in that part of the world lapse through desuetude?

Interesting formal point, since of course many Bosnian Serbs and Croats also have citizenship (and passports) of Serbia and Croatia respectively - a galling fact for Bosniac Bosnians who find themselves subject to different visa regimes when they travel. See also the convoluted issue of Serbian passports and people living in Kosovo.

Did Mr Ganic somehow positively do enough to keep his citizenship options open?

A Serbia claim that any former Yugoslav citizen who did not take formal steps to renounce Yugoslav/Serbia citizenship remains a Serbian citizen would lead to the bizarre result that anyone from former Yugoslavia could be subject to an extradition request emanating from Belgrade - not an outcome likely to appeal to international courts. 

 

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. 

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? 

Update: Welcome Iain Dale readers

* * * * *

Former warrior-diplomat Al Haig has died, aged 85.

The obituaries are noting his unique contribution to the English language:

The Washington Post’s George F. Will called him as “an aerobic instructor for the English language, making it twist and stretch.” His instructions took the form of “Haigspeak,” which uniquely combined periphrasis, convolution, and bureaucratese, with a healthy salting of neologisms. “Caveat” was a verb in Haigspeak, and “epistemologicallywise” an adverb.

Basically, he inclined towards convoluted vocabulry of an extreme order.

To the point where (I was told) the following remarkable episode occurred.

Haig was US Secretary of State during the Falklands crisis. The then British Foreign Secretary and a team of senior officials had a meeting with him in Washington.

It went well enough. They departed in the car. Then they started to analyse what he had said. It became clear that one important sentence had been so opaque and tangled that its meaning was quite unclear.

Hence, an awkward question arose. How to go back to the US side to try to get the sentence explained?

It was rather embarrassing for the Foreign Secretary to telephone Haig to ask him to translate himself. But if the Brits asked his officials they might give an answer which was not what Haig meant, if indeed Haig's people themselves had understood what he had meant.

A lively discussion ensued.

Somehow it was sorted out.

And we retook the Falklands.

Hurrah.

Families are tricky. They stretch to outer limits our private sense of responsibility.

 

You are Diligent. You work hard and honestly, you treat everyone fairly, you are generous towards friends and family, but you dislike being exploited or ‘expected’ to help others who don’t do all they can to help themselves.

 

You have four siblings, Dopey, Grumpy, Lazy and Feckless:

 

• Dopey does his best, but is dim and usually misses opportunities to do better; he appreciates favours from other family members, and now and then reciprocates in a cack-handed way
• Grumpy works hard and has had more success in life, but begrudges others their success; she expects favours to be offered generously by other family members, but is ungrateful/dismissive when that happens and never offers favours in return
• Lazy never tries hard, preferring the idea of the good life to the reality of the hard work needed to achieve it – she values favours, but usually does not reciprocate. Not exactly selfish or mean-spirited – just somehow air-headed and not that bothered
• Feckless works hard but squanders the results on fun and parties – has no long-term plan and lives only for the moment

You may or may not be your siblings’ keeper. But if you have good fortune or they fall on hard times, how far might those siblings make a moral claim to part of your success?

 

Complex issues and emotions are involved:

 

• The limits of generosity of the would-be giver – should Diligent be so generous to the others as to put his/her own immediate family’s welfare at risk?
• A calculation by Diligent as to how far the favour will in fact be used well – better to give more support to someone who at least tries hard but usually fails, or to the sibling who is in more need but likely to fritter away any support given?
• Does reciprocity or at least genuine gratitude come into play? Should Diligent’s generosity be affected by how far the individual recipients of generosity might extend favours if roles were reversed? Is it somehow better or more just to share more generously with people who are grateful, than with people who ‘expect’ support and then sneer at its level?
• And underlying it all is a philosophy of how the world should work. Does Diligent believe that the best way for people to get through life is to take responsibility for their own fate, and that those who make miscalculations should themselves bear the cost of the consequences and not try to get others to bail them out?
• Or does some sort of abstract ‘solidarity’ automatically kick in, so that any sibling falling on hard times through the results of selfishness or idleness or greed or fecklessness or incompetence can call on Diligent to sacrifice some of the results of his/her hard work and thrift?
• If that ‘solidarity’ principle applies, how far might Diligent insist that the selfish/idle/greedy sibling be shown to have mended his/her ways as a condition for support? Is it not heartless to expect everyone to behave well as Diligent invariably does?
• If Diligent subsidises his siblings’ poor work, is he doing them benefit or harm in the long run? 

A lot going on here at the most human micro-level, even in the happiest families.

 

So welcome to the European Union, namely Article 122 of the THE TREATY ON THE FUNCTIONING OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (Consolidated Version - emphasis added):

 

1. Without prejudice to any other procedures provided for in the Treaties, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may decide, in a spirit of solidarity between Member States, upon the measures appropriate to the economic situation, in particular if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products, notably in the area of energy.

 

2. Where a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may grant, under certain conditions, Union financial assistance to the Member State concerned. The President of the Council shall inform the European Parliament of the decision taken.

 

Should Diligent Germany now help Feckless/Lazy/Grumpy/Dopey Greece and the other PIIGS?

 

The rule when the Eurozone was set up were clear. No bail-outs for countries not accepting financial discipline!

 

The threat of this awful implacable inflexible harshness was thought to be a necessary and sufficient condition to compel countries which had no serious tradition of running a currency successfully to realise that they were being promoted to the major league, and had to lift their game.

 

Ha ha. That boring northern European stuff is not for us gay southern European types. Who dares deny us our carefree way of life? We always knew that we wouldn’t accept all that drab discipline and paperwork and transparency – and taxes! And you stuffy Germans knew that too, even if you say now that you trusted us to behave like you.

 

So what’s the problem now? If there’s a crisis now, it’s your fault, not ours. You knew for years exactly what was going on, but looked the other way.

 

Wha-a-a-a-t? You’re saying now that we have misbehaved and that you won’t bail us out? That we have to tidy our room, work harder, tighten our belts and be poorer? That we are to get less lavish dinners than everyone else here? For years to come?

 

Are you patronising and selfish oh-so-clever people crazy as well? Where’s the solidarity in that?

 

Don’t you realise that what you are dealing with here?

 

When you brought us into your neat, tidy house, the whole point was that we would set the limits of general tidiness, not you! Which means that if you now insist that we tidy our room, we’ll wreck the whole place - just to spite you - dragging everything down to our level.

 

So what would you rather have? A complete mess, or a quiet life?

 

Borrow some money from some other suckers such as your own taxpayers’ kids if you have to. It will be years before they realise that you can’t repay it.

 

And puh-lease. Don’t start whinging that the Irish are behaving well, so we should do the same. If they want to make a scrawny fool of themselves by going on a long-term diet, that’s their problem.

 

It’s just not our style, here in the sunny south. It’s our culture, see? And Europe is all about celebrating diverse cultures.

 

Now excuse me. It’s long lunch time - I'll send you the bill later. Then I’ll need a siesta.

 

* * * * *

All of which goes to show that the Eurozone crisis is exposing the very heart of European Solidarity (or not). Since it goes to really very simple issues of trust and responsibility.

 

And perhaps there just are limits to trust and responsibility. Perhaps it makes no sense to set up supranational institutions which ultimately are unable to cope with these simple values, as the political legitimacy of those institutions is grounded not in trust and responsibility backed by law and elections, but in vainglorious elite ambition and hoping for the best. In the end, it just can't - and more importantly won't - work that way. 

 

See also in the USA. The Tea Party tendency is protesting that government is Just Too Big:

 

... more and more people are waking up to the fact that this just doesn’t work. We don’t have the money to keep throwing more and more of it into dysfunctional public schools, overpriced state colleges and government at all levels. In the competitive world we all live in now, our society has no choice but to learn how to do these things much more cheaply. Otherwise the blue sector will drag the whole country down with it.

 

This is part of what drives the Tea Parties: there’s a sense out there that the time for careful, limited reform is past. We need a crowbar, not a scalpel, to fix the blue beast.

 

It’s all the same point, expressed differently on either side of the Atlantic.

 

In the banking sector and in the public sector alike, limits of risk-management and common-sense responsibility have got lost in a sea of complexity. And accountability has spiralled out of control.

 

Back to manageable family values?

More from me (if you can face it) over at Business and Politics.

On Iran - who is weak and strong in the Negotiations between Iran/USA/Russia/China:

It all boils down to a simple proposition: you don’t win more in any negotiation than your objective strength deserves.

In a struggle between a lion and a hyena, different sorts of strength (physical power, agility, guile, deviousness) all come into play.

And on a more metaphysical level, what does it mean to say that resources are 'finite'?

Is "Toyota’s stuck throttle ... a metaphor for our greedy, addictive, all-consuming, cancerous so-called civilization"?

Er. No.

One of the very hardest things for a newly elected leader is to move into a new frame of mind - and give organisational expression to it.

Above all, how best to deploy the people who have slaved away to achieve victory and now expect a role in Power?

The problem is that running a government is completely different from running an election campaign. Will the people did such a fine job in the latter in fact be any good at the former?

And in ways which are impossible to explain to outsiders or even to insiders, it all starts and ends right at the very top. The tone of voice, the air of authority, the confidence and courtesy and wisdom of the people immediately around the Leader all combine to send positive signals through the government system as a whole.

Which also works the other way. Ill-temper, discourtesy, disorganisation, indecisiveness and so on at the very top spread downwards and outwards very fast.

My own classic example of this was when John Major visited Moscow as PM. He made a good personal impression when talking to people. But there was just no Authority. He did well at a press conference, but as he came back-stage afterwards his question to his team was a sort of uneasy "How was I?".

Not: "They nailed me on that one - kick the sorry asses of the people who wrote that brief, and let's get it right next time!"

In short there was a baffling lack of self-confidence right at the top, which led to the sense of doomed 'greyness' of the people around him - they could not be more bright and positive than the PM was. And that permeated the government as a whole.

Whereas with Tony Blair there was the opposite phenomenon, which also has been disastrous - a breezy instinct for charming spin, 'winging it' from the sofa without doing the work, getting away with just what is needed and no more, avoiding confrontation, politics by bubble.

And let's not mention Gordon Brown's calamitous team.

All of which leads us to various hard-edged looks in the USA at where President Obama has been going wrong. They do not make pretty reading.

He looks to have given too much power to a tiny core of trusted people whose ambition and vanity has got far out of control. Much to the detriment of good advice and steady policy-making:

... needed advice from a broader range of advisers "is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang's tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office, but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured."

Memo to Next Leader:

Start thinking now about how you are going to bring into your close, most trusted circles people you never may have met, but who will be vital to delivering the right results - and how you are going to nudge some of your current most trusted people away from the policy roles they so fervently expect.

Otherwise you'll just make a hash of a huge opportunity - as Obama is doing.

Ralph Peters praises the ruthlessness of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner who has authorised the expansion of 'drone' attacks on key terrorist suspects overseas:

The Pakistani Taliban is losing CEOs faster than Detroit ...

This is another 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.

These extremists challenge the West's very will to defend itself. Fine.

Whiz.

Bang. 

The decay of the Climate Change movement has reached the point where those of us politely pointing to some of its deep contradictions are no longer the 'denialists'. Rather the denialists are those who insist that the wheezing pantechnicon must roll onwards even as its wheels start to fall off.

It all got just too dodgy:

Likewise, in the years since Syed Hasnain “speculated” about glacial melt, the BBC, the CBC, CNN and thousands of newspapers around the world have hired specialist Environmental Correspondents on lavish salaries. Yet not one of them gave any serious examination to the claims of the IPCC report, or the “science” on which they rested...

... By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain.

In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier.

As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it.

The problem remains simple. To generate the 'global concern' needed to achieve 'global action'', political leaderships in a number of key countries (UK to the fore) frothed up the issue beyond all reasonable political and scientific limits.

This, by the way, is another reason for the problems now facing the FCO in London. It fleetingly had as Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who made up for her inexperience in international relations by trying to turn the place into a campaigning organisation for Climate Change, skewing resources and achieving a step-change in dumbing down proper foreign policy work.

Sooner or later this project was bound to collide with reality, in one shape or form:

For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want.  It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. 

But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it.

Note! All of which is not to say that there is no long-term problem with the impact human economic development has on the environment.

Insofar as that is demonstrated and accepted, the best chance to do something about is to be totally transparent about the science, create incentives for investment in lower energy products and processes, and be a lot less insistent on unfeasibly large 'global' collectivist schemes involving state-to-state financial transfers which will end up creating waste and corruption.

Update: a neat analysis from Tim Worstall who (as usual) cuts through a lot of blather:

We’ve also read our Bastiat you see: look for what is hidden, not just what is in plain sight.

Our argument, the rational one, is not that we should do nothing: it’s that what is being done is the wrong thing.