We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The transnational progressives have a new power grab underway – their attempt to seize control of the trial of Saddam Hussein and move it to the ICC or some other “international court.” I think it would be a very serious mistake to indulge the tranzis on this issue, as it would serve to validate and legitimize the most noxious pillar of their ideology.
The transnational progressive movement has a consistent theme: that governments should be answerable primarily to some overarching international authority, rather than to their own citizens. The pernicious (and unstated) part of this theme is that last phrase – the tranzis never state, and may not even recognize, that as governments become more accountable to outside authorities, they become less accountable to their own citizens.
The EU project is certainly an attempt to implement this ideal, as was last year’s attempt by the UN to control US foreign policy and military apparatus in the Iraqi, campaign. Readers will, I’m sure, be able to multiply examples, as the tranzis are nothing if not consistent in their top-down approach to accountability and control.
For the tranzis, the problem of rogue or abusive governments is not that such governments are too powerful and/or insufficiently accountable to their own citizen/subjects. After all, the source of legitimacy for this lot is not the consent of the governed; rather legitimacy can apparently only be conferred from above. Thus, the creation, from whole cloth, of international institutions such as the UN or International Criminal Court, so that there is a higher, transnational, authority to judge and confer legitimacy on the doings of national governments.
Of course, being made answerable to the “international community” (read: other governments) comes at the cost of being accountable to your own citizenry. This is the reason that the whole tranzi project is fundamentally corrupt, and corrupting. In my book, consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy. Period. Discussion over. Turn out the lights as you leave. The tranzi project is corrosive of the consent of the governed, because it substitutes the consent of other governments for the consent of the governed.
The whole meme/dynamic is on full display in Iraq right now. The tranzis and their project are the long-term enemies of liberty, my friends, as much as or more so than your penny-ante domestic politician.
Many thanks to Tacitus for his rather more brutal assessment of the tranzi attempt to shove the Iraqis out of the way and seize control Saddam’s fate, which got the juices flowing this morning.
GREETINGS!
LET ME START BY INTRODUCING MYSELF PROPERLY. MY NAME IS ALI KAMAL BISHARA AND I AM A SENIOR OFFICIAL IN THE IRAQI FINANCE MINISTRY. I WAS ALSO CHIEF ADVISER TO FORMER PRESIDENT OF IRAQ, SADDAM HUSSEIN WHO IS NOW IN THE AMERICAN CAPTIVITY.
WE ARE CONTACT YOU FOR TO ESTABLISH VERY URGENTLY A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP BUT ONLY WITH A FOREIGN PERSON OF MOST HIGH RELIABLENESS AND REPUTATION FOR WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO A FOREIGN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.
LET ME EXPLAIN: BEFORE HIS DETENTION THE PRESIDENT HUSSEIN DEPOSITED THE SUM OF $28,500,000 IN A SECRET BANK ACCOUNT IN A SAFE COUNTRY. THIS MONEY WAS OIL REVENUE WHICH I HAVE PERSONALLY CHECKED AND FOUND AS AN ACCURATE FIGURE.
NOW THE FORMER PRESIDENT HUSSEIN CAN NO LONGER ACCESS THIS MONEY WHICH IS MUCH NEEDED BY MY COUNTRY FOR DISBURSEMENT TO CHILDREN AND HOSPITALS. IF THIS MONEY IS NOT CLAIMED IT WILL BE TAKEN BY AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.
SO HUMBLY WE BEG AN HONEST AND DILIGENT PERSON TO WHO THE UNDISCLOSED BANK WILL TRANSFER THIS MONEY AS TRUSTEE. IN RETURN FOR THIS SERVICE YOU WILL KEEP 30% OF THE SUM AND REMIT TO US THE 70% REMAINING. IN ORDER THAT WE MAY COMPLETE THIS MOST SECRET TRANSACTION YOU MUST SEND TO US YOUR DETAILS BUT MOSTLY YOUR BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER AND ADDRESS SO THAT WE CAN ARRANGE THE SUBSTANTIAL MONEY TRANSFER TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.
YOU MUST REPLY QUICKLY WITH FULL DETAILS FOR US TO BE CONVICTED THAT YOU ARE GENUINE AND SINCERE.
YOURS MOST HUMBLY IN GOOD BUSINESS FAITH.
ALI KAMAL BISHARA.
Interesting argument by noted libertarian and Rand scholar Chris Sciabarra about the capture of Saddam. He argues that because Saddam clearly was determined to survive rather than die in a blaze of glory, this proves he was amenable to force, and therefore deterrable. In short, that we could have deterred Saddam from his monstrous ambitions and did not need to invade Iraq to foil him.
Hmmmm, as they say when confronted with arguments like this. I truly do not know. Is it really the case that a man who defied a hatful of UN resolutions, invaded Iran and Kuwait, consorted with known terrorists, and who threatened to destroy Israel was the sort of guy who could be deterred in the manner of the Soviets during the Cold War? (And by the way, recall how close to disaster we got in the Cuban missile crisis).
I honestly do not know with certainty and I very much suspect that Chris Sciabarra does not know this for sure, either. Deterrence as a foreign policy option has been the mainstay of the isolationist libertarian case since 9/11, as seen here over at Jim Henley’s blog. But the Middle East always struck me as being the place where mutually assured destruction could go horribly, horribly wrong.
And of course if deterrence did work, that still leaves the small issue of whether we could, and should have let Saddam stay in power had we been able to prove clear links between him and terror groups possibly implicated in 9/11.
John Keegan has an excellent column in the Telegraph today on the legal problem of what to do with a deposed sovereign. One suspects that Mr. Keegan wrote this column months ago, in the sure knowledge that sooner or later it would become topical when Saddam was winkled out of his hole. The column provides a nice historical overview of “sovereign immunity.”
How to dispose of a fallen dictator is a problem of immense complexity for victor states. Dictators have been sovereigns, as Saddam was, de facto if not de jure. Sovereign states shrink from disposing peremptorily of sovereign rulers. The process, whichever is chosen, always threatens to set inconvenient precedents. Since 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia created the principle that sovereign states, and therefore their sovereign heads, are both legally and morally absolute, there has been no legal basis for proceeding against such a person, however heinous the crimes he is known to have committed.
[Brief discussion of Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, various Axis dictators, which should not be missed.]
None of these precedents seems likely to spare Saddam. He may, de facto, have been head of state but, by fleeing his capital and office at the outset of the last Gulf War, he effectively abandoned whatever constitutional status he enjoyed. The power vacuum he left has been filled by the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council, which, very conveniently last week, announced the establishment of a tribunal empowered to try any Iraqi citizen – and that Saddam unquestionably is – for crimes under domestic law. Prima facie, Saddam has to answer for many crimes, including murders he has himself committed, large-scale episodes of murder and torture of his fellow citizens, and organised extermination of minorities, particularly Kurds and Marsh Arabs, inside his own country.
I back into being a supporter of sovereignity, on the theory that a multitude of sovereign states limits the damage that any one of them can do, and that liberty arises in part from competition among dispersed authorities and powers. Solving the sovereign immunity problem by placing sovereign states under the jurisdiction of an overarching power seems to me to be a cure worse than the disease, because it creates a qui custodiet ipsos custodes problem, and because the supranational authority would be largely immune to democratic accountability. However, I see no reason why government officials should be immune from judicial accountability to their own citizens, which is precisely the solution that seems to be in the offing in Iraq.
On a bit of a tangent, Mr. Keegan makes the astonishing assertion at the end of the column that “at present there is no death penalty in Iraq. . . .” I would not dream of questioning the eminent Mr. Keegan on a point of fact such as this, but how can it possibly be true? I cannot believe that Saddam did not have the death penalty on the books (could all of those hundreds of thousands of executions have been extrajudicial?), and I cannot imagine that the Iraqi death penalty has been revoked in the last 6 months. Input from the commentariat would be appreciated – I sense a fine bit of obscure knowledge here, just out of reach, begging to be retailed to impressionable young things at cocktail parties.
Some cynical commenter I cannot remember who or where said that this weekend our naughty Labour government would choose now to bury some bad news which it would like out there but ignored. Sunday is a bad day for such trickery, but maybe there was something along these lines today.
However, my inclination is to suspect that the real Story That Just Got Buried, at any rate in Britain (Instapundit was all over it from the start, just before the Saddam Captured story broke, i.e just after he was actually captured), so far, is this, in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. Okay, not buried exactly. The Sunday Telegraph is not buried. Shall we say: temporarily drowned out, by which I mean ignored, for the time being, by the British electronic media.
Anyway, buried or not, it is a huge story, if true:
A document discovered by Iraq’s interim government details a meeting between the man behind the September 11 attacks and Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, at his Baghdad training camp. Con Coughlin reports.
For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.
So, ergo, it cannot be true. Right? Too good.
But what if it is true? I know, politicians – Tony Blair even – telling the truth, whatever next? But suppose, just suppose, that the Powers That Be have known all along and for absolute sure that Saddam and Al Qaeda were totally in bed with each other, but that they could not reveal how they knew because had they revealed their evidence that would have jeopardised, you know, ongoing operations, i.e. their source(s) close to Saddam? But could it be that this has now changed, what with SH now being safely in the bag? That makes the most sense of everything to me, not least the curious behaviour of our Prime Minister, apparently so willing to hang himself out to dry over this war, but actually sucking his critics into what a spin doctoral friend of mine calls a “killing ground”? “I told you to trust me. You should have.” I can hear it now.
I do not have time to comment at any more length as I am now off to an impromptu Samizdata social, but Melanie Phillips, to whom my thanks for reminding me that I had read this story yesterday and like her been very struck by it, does comment some more. So go read her.
Written in a rush. So apologies for misprints and/or contorted prose, which I reserve the right to clean up later.
According to an account from Major Bryan Reed, an operations officer for the US army’s 4th infantry division, in an exchange before he was pulled from the hole in the ground he was sheltering in, the former dictator said to US troops in English:
“My name is Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate.” US special forces replied “regards from President Bush”.
Someone should check carefully.
 
One of these men is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Just so as to confirm that no mistake has been made the Americans should ask their captive whether terrorists can ever have ‘serious moral goals’.
I’ve spent nearly the entire evening watching the news. BBC1 and ITV4 in particular had a great deal of coverage of the event here. It is of course about politics according to the BBC Washington correspondents… as if Dean ever had a prayer of a snowflake chance in hell of winning next fall.
Ken Adelman gave two marvelous remote screen debate performances within an hour and on both channels. Jon Snow was at a loss for words when he said to Adelman: “Of course you will be for that (Saddam’s execution)” And Ken had him off balance simply by retorting, “Why do you assume that?”
But the biggest laughs I had this evening were the constant use of the Q word. On BBC1 there were two different reporters using it within minutes of each other.
Hey, the BBC lads in Iraq have to invent some silver lining in all this!
Times has an article up that contains notes from Saddam in custody. Many bloggers and their readers have been wondering what Saddam will reveal in interrogations. The first questioning has not produced much it seems, the transcript was full of “Saddam rhetoric type stuff,” according to the official who paraphrased Saddam’s answers to some of the questions.
When asked “How are you?” said the official, Saddam responded, “I am sad because my people are in bondage.” When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, “If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?”
More importantly, Saddam is denying everything and replying with really dumb answers to questions that might incriminate him.
Saddam was also asked whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. “No, of course not,” he replied, according to the official, “the U.S. dreamed them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us.” The interrogator continued along this line, said the official, asking: “if you had no weapons of mass destruction then why not let the U.N. inspectors into your facilities?” Saddam’s reply: “We didn’t want them to go into the presidential areas and intrude on our privacy.”
Hm, Saddam as a champion of privacy?
French reaction to Saddam’s capture is varied. The media call it a great victory for the US, the politicians are finding it harder to make up their minds what to say and public comment ranges from when will the US come and take Chirac? to No, they can’t have captured him, it’s impossible!.
Coming after the setback over the EU constitution – it will be harder to push through when the other countries join – this is a rotten weekend for Saddam’s pen-pal Jacques Chirac. If the Iraqis stick him on trial, will we hear all about the attempt to sell nuclear technology in the 1970s by a former French prime minister? Now what was his name?
It was wonderful to see the footage of Saddam after his capture as he was given a medical. It fulfilled at least two objectives – it put pictures to the words (an important message in this image driven times) and showed the captured dictator unkempt, disheveled and in an undignified situation. I imagine the contrast between the images of Saddam at the height of his power and those broadcast in the last 24 hours will go a long way in demolishing his personality cult.
This leads nicely to my reference to Stalin in the title of this post. Saddam Hussain is of the same breed as the monstrous Josef Dzhugashvili – a powerful, resilient, personally courageous, charismatic, megalomaniac and psychopathic dictator. It may be banal to compare Hussain to Stalin when there are still people who consider Stalin just a bit authoritarian but let’s face it, the man industrialised Russia and you can’t make an omelette without breaking…blah, blah, blah… I expect the familiar herds of barking moonbats to come out in droves with words ‘human rights, international law, due process and fair trial’ on their lips and the hate of all things American and Western in their hearts and minds. They have already learnt how to look over the mass graves of innocent Iraqis while protesting against the coalition’s war on the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, so it should not be too difficult to gloss over Saddam’s crimes yet again as they attack the coalitions efforts to “give Saddam the justice he denied to millions of Iraqis”.
It is an unfortunate historical fact that Stalin died a natural death. Since Nazism there has been no precedent about how to deal with murderous dictators and the international law, created by the impetus of the Nuremberg trial, has failed miserably to deliver what could be, even remotely, considered justice. The scores of African and Middle Eastern tyrants roam free and inflict untold suffering on their subjects under the benign gaze of the international and human rights community. Genocidal national leaders and their retinue are getting treatment and ‘fair trial’ that make their victims weep with despair as retribution for their crimes disappears in the maze of international law and its convoluted processes. Nowhere the gap between law and justice has been greater than in international law.
So when I hear the commentators calling on international and human rights experts hours after Saddam’s capture, the good news turns sour. I worry that in the coming months justice will be the next concept bandied about and stretched beyond recognition. Tony Blair has already talked about “putting the past behind” and has called for ‘reconciliation and unity’. (Judging from recent actions I fear this means sucking up to the French, Germans and Russian.)
It seems that the lesson from “purging of the fascist elements” in post-war Germany and Japan has been long forgotten. Many of the problems in Central and Eastern Europe originate from the photogenic pseudomoral posturing of the dissidents that rose to power after the communists vacated their seats. “Forgive and forget”, “draw the line behind the past”, “move on to a better future” and platitudes to that effect resonated across the former communist bloc and the West marvelled at the civilised and moral manner of the Velvet Revolution(s).
In my book, forgiveness comes after repentance. In post-communist societies, forgiveness was the only thing left that the battered populations felt had any control over. And so ex-communists, although no longer communists in the name but still embedded in the fabric of the society, unrepentant and powerful, could make sure that the future is to their advantage. Justice does not even get a foot in the door.
Nevertheless, let’s not be unduly pessimistic. For once. We will certainly be following with interest how and what justice will be dispensed to Saddam and his cronies and what the Big Media make of the whole affair. We live in interesting times and with blogosphere there is a way of making them even more interesting.
The estimable Austin Bay has a midstream assessment of the Iraq campaign and occupation. Grades are mixed. Given Mr. Bay’s knowledge of things military and strategic insight (he was a supporter of the Iraqi campaign for hardnosed geopolitical reasons), the mixed grades bear some pondering. Read the whole thing (its not long), but a few excerpts struck my eye:
The number of Free Iraqi police and paramilitary personnel in the field is a rough yardstick, but ultimately Iraqi security is their job. The major U.S. mistake prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was failing to create a functioning Iraqi constabulary. The United States had 3,000 exiles training in Hungary, but that simply didn’t cut it. Interim coalition grade: D.
The March-April military campaign was a huge success. Saddam’s regime collapsed quickly, with few civilian casualties. The strategic demonstration of American power was dramatic, and it put teeth in the U.N.’s 1991 resolutions. Some day, U.N. sanctions may mean something again. Final Grade: A (No attack from Turkey, so no A+. A northern attack would have swept Tikrit and the Sunni Triangle, conceivably diminishing the current opposition in these Baathist districts.)
International contributions to Iraqi reconstruction, both in number of contributors and total capital is a strategic political measure. Interim Grade: C-
One measure that he does not address is control of Iraq’s borders with neighboring sponsors of terror. Until this occurs, Iraq is not secure. I’m not sure how we are doing on this front, but I read Austin Bay to find out stuff like this!
Interesting, and to my mind somewhat pessimistic, overview of the current situation.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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