We had a big duststorm in Canberra last night and when we woke up everything was covered in red dust. It makes you think about what’s happening out in the bush. Of course, I know that drought is part of the natural cycle, that a lot of the problems are caused by overallocation of water, that Farmhand is just a front for the privatisation of Telstra, and so on. But when you see people not only washing their cars but hosing down their drives to get rid of that nasty dust, you begin to think that criticism of farmers can only go so far.
To be fair to my fellow Canberrans, only a minority engaged in conspicuous water waste. Driving to work, the 4WDs all looked as if they’d been off-road for once, and the average motorist looked like a rally car driver.

Update: As is so often the case on this blog, the comments add more value than the original post. Be sure to click on the comment link, and read a lengthy and thoughtful comment from Gary Sauer-Thompson

In this post last week, I pointed out that the following claim by Mark Steyn

“Just as a matter of interest, how many countries does George W. Bush have to have on board before America ceases to be acting ‘unilaterally’? So far, there’s Australia, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Qatar, Turkey”

was false, at least as regards Australia. I meant to check on the other countries listed but have been focused on the Bali bombing and its consequences. Today I did a Google search on “x support Iraq invasion”, substituting each of the listed countries in turn. Here’s what I found:
Qatar opposes U.S. invasion of Iraq
Denver Post.com – Turks oppose U.S. invasion of Iraq
Spain Urges Easing of Sanctions Against Iraq
Italy confident of Bush consultation before any Iraq action. 24/8/2002. ABC News Online
NetworkOfMinds.com: Regional: Czech Republic and Slovakia news: 08/29/2002
“Czech Cabinet opposes military invasion of Iraq”

The Spain reference is pre-S11, and the Italy story refers to Berlusconi as an “instinctive Bush ally”, which is obviously also true of Howard and Blair, neither of whom have declared themselves “on board” for an invasion without UN authorisation. But it’s clear that Steyn has misrepresented both countries.

In summary, Steyn is wrong on every count. He is either one of the most incompetent journalists ever to be published by a major newspaper or a shameless liar. Any assertion he makes should be assumed false in the absence of independent confirmation.

Update: See two posts up for more direct refutation of Steyn’s claims. Also, be sure to check the comment thread for an erudite and entertaining discussion between Jason Soon and Jack Strocchi regarding Baathist ideology. It’s great to be able to publish this stuff, but given the flakiness of commenting systems, I endorse Jason’s suggestion that Jack should publish his own blog.

The news that Dynegy is to abandon its energy trading business must cast grave doubt on the future of the entire US electricity market, which replaced vertically integrated regulated monopolies in the 1990s. The earlier collapse of Enron was seen by some optimists as the product of firm-specific fraud, but it’s now clear that the whole energy trading market was based on underestimation of the risks involved. And without energy trading those risks are shifted either back to generators or forward to retailers and consumers. I say a bit more about this here.

Update: Another nail in the coffin
Further update: And another

As I did earlier this week, Tim Blair draws on the successful European fight against leftist terrorists like the Red Brigades in the 1970s and 1980s as a model for the fight against Al-Qaeda. As he notes, similar groups like the Weathermen (later the more PC Weather Underground) and the Japanese Red Army operated in the US and Japan, but on a much smaller scale. There were also right-wing groups who while less prominent were more like Al-Qaeda, going in for indiscriminate attacks like the Bologna railway bombing of 1980 which killed 85 people and injured 200. In nearly all the main cases of terrorism, the perpetrators were eventually caught and brought to trial (A closer look at the European evidence has led me to revise my earlier assessment, that we are unlikely to identify individual perpetrators in most cases).
Blair is right to point to Europe as a model, but I don’t think he’s fully absorbed the implications, and certainly his subeditor hasn’t. Blair says ‘Killing and jailing terrorists wipes out terror’ and his piece is headlined ‘Killing terrorists wipes out terror’.
As a corrective to the kind of nonsense being spouted by people like Bob Ellis this is all well and good. There is no point in being nice to terrorists – they must be hunted down remorselessly and brought to justice.
But the European model has a lot more implications, and Blair doesn’t mention these. Unlike many countries that tried and failed to fight terrorism, such as Argentina and Uruguay, the Europeans stuck to legal strategies. Many more terrorists were tried and jailed than were killed. Suspicions have been raised about the prison suicides of Baader and Meinhof, but there’s no good supporting evidence, and these were isolated instances.
There were, at the time, plenty of calls for a less scrupulous response, and suggestions that what was needed was a ‘man on horseback’. Countries in Latin America and elsewhere that heeded those calls paid a high price. The Europeans, with their annoying legalism succeeded where advocates of ‘direct action’ failed.
Blair is also missing the point when he says:

The only major European terrorist group from that era to survive in any significant way is the IRA, which tells us something: attacking terrorists doesn’t breed terror. Negotiating with them does.

Negotiations with the IRA only began in a serious way when attempts to crush it had clearly failed. For two decades, the British government steadfastly refused negotiation and condoned a wide range of extreme measures, including torture* and internment without trial, aimed at suppressing the IRA by force. The failure to beat the IRA had a number of causes, to which I will return in a later post, but excessive willingness to negotiate was not one.
(* Routine use of sensory deprivation, and illegal but widely-known insances of physical torture as well as a number of assassinations)
I’d like to end on a positive note. The tone of right-wing US commentary on the way to fight terrorism has been anti-European, often venomously so. Particular scorn has been poured on European legalism and hostility to vigilante action. It’s good to see someone like Tim Blair recognising that the European model is the one to follow.

The collapse of the Dutch Government and the implosion of the xenophobic Pim Fortuyn List is welcome news, though cautious evaluation of future prospects is needed.
Update I dashed this off very quickly, and didn’t take the time to point out that I was referring to the Pim Fortuyn List political party, and not to the late Pim Fortuyn himself, as “xenophobic”. Quite a few people in the comments thread picked me up on this. Fortuyn was a complex character, certainly not a right-winger in the mould of Le Pen or Haider, but in my view, politically irresponsible. (I shouldn’t have to spell out that this does not in any way mitigate the guilt of his assassin, but I will spell it out anyway). The PFL was a very mixed bag, including some people like Fortuyn himself and some very nasty types indeed, but its overall political position was, as far as I can see, the standard anti-immigration agenda pushed by Hanson, Haider et al.
I’m glad the PFL is (apparently) gone. The crucial question now is whether the official conservative parties will repent of the deal they made, and repudiate the racist right (as, for example, Bush and Chirac have done) or make a play to pick up the votes that are now floating, as happened in Australia. Whatever the short-term benefits of the latter strategy, I am convinced it will prove disastrous in the long run for the countries and parties that pursue it.

Ken Parish has now debugged his site, removing some nasty code that was serving up popunder ads without his knowledge. The problems were exacerbated by an apparently unrelated Blogger failure. Bloggers who want to maintain alertness should read his account here.

Paul Krugman and I think alike a lot. In this piece on Bali (one of relatively few useful Op-Ed pieces on the bombings in the US press) he looks at the proposed war on Iraq in the light of a metaphor commonly used to describe economists.

Meanwhile, plans to invade Iraq proceed. The administration has offered many different explanations, some of them mutually contradictory, for its determination to occupy Baghdad. I think it’s like the man who looks for his keys on the sidewalk, even though he dropped them in a nearby alley, because he can see better under the streetlight. These guys want to fight a conventional war; since Al Qaeda won’t oblige, they’ll attack someone else who will. And watching from the alley, the terrorists are pleased.

I prefer another metaphor. “To a man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. For the last decade, Americans have been told that their armed forces are more powerful than the rest of the world put together, that they are the only superpower and so on. Although S11 shook this faith in some ways, the aftermath reinforced it in others. Bin Laden imagined himself safe in his caves in Afghanistan, backed by the Taliban fighters who had beaten the Red Army and the Northern Alliance. Within a few months, the Taliban had been destroyed and bin Laden himself was either a fugitive hidden in a cellar somewhere or (more likely I think) a corpse buried under tons of earth. In the whole process, the American casualties could be numbered on the fingers of two hands.
What is more natural, then, than to want to repeat this success? But the fragments of Al Qaeda have learned the lesson of Afghanistan. They are hiding in cities around the world and behind the skirts of people like Abu Bakar Bashir, who defy the authorities to produce the evidence of their guilt. Carrier battle groups and predator drones are of no use against this kind of enemy. So attention is focused on Saddam Hussein who is at least a plausible nail to be hit with the hammer of US military superiority.
It’s taken me a while to reach this analysis. I’ve never been satisfied with the idea that the US push for war on Saddam is ‘about’ oil, or imperialism or Bush family vendettas but I haven’t been sure what it is about. Now I think I understand it. I still think the advocates of war with Iraq are wrong, but this is the kind of error everyone is prone to, and one which I hope may be amenable to reasonable argument.

Anti-spammer wins court case

Microsoft Pulls Ad After Web Flap

This is an amusing story and a good example of the weblog community at work. The geeks at Slashdot caught Microsoft faking a riposte to Apple’s “Switch” ads.

BTW, when I last wrote on this topic, I received from the Bitchin’ Monaro Guide some very amusing parodies of the Apple ads, unfortunately not suitable for publication on this (so far) G-rated site. I imagine those interested could get the parodies if they asked.

Just before the Bali bombings, I posted a piece on US use of ‘military contractors’ (mercenaries in plain language) and threw in what seemed like an academic aside on the implications for the International Criminal Court. Responding in the comments thread and then on his blog, Bargarz raised the suggestion that terrorists such as Hamas could commit their crimes with impunity as far as the ICC is concerned.
This question is suddenly one of real relevance to Australia. If the Indonesian legal system fails to bring the Bali bombers to justice, as seems all too likely, could accused suspects be tried before the ICC?
Based on this article by Geoffrey Hills I conclude that the answer is, provisionally, “Yes”. Like Bargarz, Hills is a critic of the ICC, but his complaint is that the jurisdiction of the court is too broad, covering ‘crimes against humanity’ as well as traditional war crimes. This is the opposite of the criticism made by Bargarz. It seems clear that the Bali bombing fits the ICC criteria regarding the nature of the crimes covered by the Court’s jurisdication.
The other question is whether crimes committed in Indonesia, by Indonesians or others, are covered. According to this link supplied by Bargarz, Indonesia has not signed or ratified the treaty. I am not clear as to whether this would protect the perpetrators. The US which has signed, but not ratified, and has sought to revoke its signature, clearly does not think that this is sufficient to protect its nationals from prosecution, since it is trying to negotiate bilateral treaties with as many other countries as possible to exempt is nationals.
I’d be interested to from Ken Parish, Kim Weatherall and any other legal bloggers on this issue. In particular, I’d like to know whether, if Indonesia ratifies some time in the future, the jurisdiction of the ICC covers crimes like the Bali bombing, committed after the Treaty came into effect but before Indonesia became a party. I’d also like to know whether there is any way suspects could be tried in Australian courts.