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.

I missed this interesting sidelight to the Nobel prizes, but my wife pointed it out to me.
Vernon Smith is putting his share of the prizemoney back into research

As if to prove his point [that people are innately co-operative], Mr Smith, in a crass display of economic irrationality, has announced he would not keep his share of the $US1.07 million prize money.
Irrational, but perhaps not totally unselfish: the money is to go into research, which as Mr Smith mischievously remarked, is a way of giving it back to himself.

The NYT report on Bali includes the information that:

The Laskar Jihad, the most prominent face of militant Islam in Indonesia, said it had disbanded and would withdraw its militia forces from the Moluccas islands where they have fought in a vicious conflict with indigenous Christians.

Further detail is given later in the article:

The leader of Indonesia’s high profile militant group Laskar Jihad said his organization had disbanded.
Jafar Umar Thalib denied the move was linked to the Bali bombings. He said the group made the decision to close and bring home its fighters from the Moluccas islands on October 7, days before the Bali explosions.

Nevertheless, Laskar Jihad is struggling. Thalib is currently on trial for inciting violence, and there are reports his group, which analysts say is sponsored by segments of the armed forces, is now running short of cash.

If correct, this report is good news on a number of fronts. Laskar Jihad was the other obvious suspect after Jemaah Islamiyah. Even if this group wasn’t responsible for Bali it has committed hundreds, if not thousands, of murders in Ambon and elsewhere. And, given all the criticism of the Indonesian government, much of it justified, the fact that they’ve apparently been able to beat a group with notoriously powerful military sponsors (or perhaps to scare those sponsors into pulling out) is an encouraging sign.

It’s been hard to think about much other than the horror of the bombings for the last few days. But, as citizens of other countries under similar attack have learned, we can’t let the terrorists dominate our lives, even if there are inevitable changes. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to live our normal lives while maintaining a heightened state of alert, whatever that turns out to mean in practice.
Some good news today is that the Indonesian police have detained two suspects in Bali and that Howard has named Jemaah Islamiyah as the perpetrators. Hopefully the Bali arrests will lead to convictions and there will be enough evidence to tie Jemaah Islamiyah to the bombings or Al Qaeda or both.